Archive of ‘Professional Development’ category

Formative Assessment

Teaching and Learning
Two extremes-
Teacher working harder than the students
Teacher as ‘facilitator’
Ideal teaching- the engineering of the learning environment
Sometimes a teacher does her best work before students come into the class.

The teacher’s job is not to transmit knowledge, nor to facilitate learning. It is to engineer effective learning environments for the students.the key features of effective learning environments are that they create student engagement and allow teachers, learns, and their peers to ensure that the learning is proceeding in the intended direction. That is why assessment is, indeed, the bridge between teaching and learning.

Teaching is a contingent activity. We cannot predict what students will learn as a result of any particular sequence of instruction. Formative assessment involves getting the best possible evidence about what students have learned and then using this information to decide what to do next.

Strategy 1
Clarifying, Shaeing, and Understanding Learning Intentions and Success Criteria

Royce Sadler (1989) wrote:
The indispensable conditions for improvement are that the student comes to hold a concept of quality roughly similar to that held by the teacher, is continuously able to monitor the quality of what is being produced during the act of production itself, and has a repertoire of alternative moves or strategies from which to draw at any given point.

Rubrics cab be useful in this process.
“It is often valuable to develop the learning intentions jointly with the students – a process that is sometimes called “co-construction”. It is important to note that developing learning intentions or success criteria with students is most definitely not a democratic process. The teacher is in a privileged position with respect to the subject being taught and knows more about the subject than the students do, and it would be an abdication of the teacher’s responsibilities to let whatever the students feel should be valued be adopted as the learning intentions. The advantage of developing the learning intentions with the students is that doing so creates a mechanism whereby students can discuss and come to own the learning intentions and success criteria, making it more likely that they will be able to apply the learning intentions and success criteria in the context of their own work.”

As teachers, we are not interested in our students’ ability to do what we have taught them to do. We are only interested in their ability to apply their newly acquired knowledge to a similar but different context.

…good teaching is extraordinarily difficult. It is relatively easy to think up cool stuff for students to do in the classrooms, but the problem with such an activity-based approach is that too often, it is not clear what the students are going to learn. It is also relatively easy, on the other hand, to approach students directly about what you want them to learn, but this often results in unimaginative teaching.
Teaching is hard, because as Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe (2000) have pointed out, it has. To be designed backwards.

In designing rubrics consider:
1. Task-specific versus generic scoring rubrics
2. Product-focused versus process-focused criteria
3. Official versus student-friendly language

Using students work from previous years
Getting students to design questions for tests
Marking student work and then providing students with a copy of 3 works at a good standard, and asking them to identify what makes them good
Teacher highlighting some good examples in the class and getting students to identify what features make it good
Choose-swap-choose
Student chooses examples of. Their best work eg the best handwritten ‘d’s, then swaps and neighbours also chooses, justifying differences.

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Embedded Formative Assessment by Dylan Wiliam

Powerful quotes:

Curriculum v Pedagogy
“A bad curriculum well taught is invariably a better experience for students than a good curriculum badly taught: pedagogy trumps curriculum.”

Textbooks
“Textbooks play an important role in mediating between the intended and the achieved curriculum, and as a result, there has been great interest in finding out whether some textbook programs are more effective than others. Reviews of random-allocation trials of programs for reading in the early grades and for programs in elementary, middle and high school math concluded that there was little evidence that changes in textbooks alone had much impact on student achievement. It was only when the programs changed teaching practices and student interactions that a significant impact on achievement was found.”

SSOs
“As a final example of an effort to produce substantial improvement in student achievement at scale, it is instructive to consider the impact of teachers’ aide in England. One Large-scale evaluation of the impact of support staff on student achievement found that teachers’ aides actually lowered the performance of the students they were assigned to help. Of course, this does not mean that the use of teachers’ aides cannot increase student achievement – merely that they have not.”

Teacher quality – Performance pay doesn’t work
“The desire of teacher unions to treat all teachers as equally good is understandable, because it generates solidarity among their members, but more importantly because performance-related pay is in principle impossible to determine fairly. Consider a district that tests its students every year from third through eighth grade and then uses the test score data to work out which teachers have added the most value each year. This looks straightforward, but there is a fatal flaw: no test can capture all that is important for future progress. A fourth-grade teacher who spends a great deal of time developing skills of independent and collaborative learning, who ensures that her students become adept at solving problems, and who develops her students’ abilities at speaking, listening, and writing in addition to teaching reading may find that her students’ scores on the fourth-grade maths and reading tests are not as high as those of other teachers in her school who have been emphasizing only what is on the test. And yet, the teacher who inherits this class in fifth grade will look very good when the results of the fifth-grade tests are in, not because of what the fifth-grade teacher has done, but because of the firm foundations that were laid by the fourth-grade teacher.”

“The fact that teaching is so complex is what makes it such a great job.”

“The only teachers who think they are successful are those who have low expectations of their students.”

Formative assessment:
“the process used by teachers and students to recognise and respond to student learning in order to enhance that learning, during the learning.”
“assessment carried out during the instructional process for the purpose of improving teaching or learning”
“frequent, interactive assessments of students’ progress and understanding to identify learning needs and adjust teaching appropriately”

A process – not a tool!
Requires 5 elements to be in place:

  1. The provision of effective feedback to students
  2. The active involvement of students in their own learning
  3. The adjustment of teaching to take into account the results of assessment
  4. The recognition of the profound influence assessment has on the motivation and self-esteem of students, both of which are crucial influences on learning
  5. The need for students to be able to assess themselves and understand how to improve

An example of formative assessment

 

An English teacher has been working of figurative language:

Each student has 6 cards with the letters A, B, C, D, E, F

On the board she displays the following

A. Alliteration

B. Onomatopoeia

C. Hyperbole

D. Personification

E. Simile

F. Metaphor

She then reads a series of statements:

  • This backpack weighs a ton.
  • He was as tall as a house.
  • The sweetly smiling sunshine melted all the snow.
  • He honked his horn at the cyclist.
  • He was a bull in a china shop.

After the teacher reads each statement, she asks the class to hold up a letter card or cards to indicate which kind(s) of figurative language features in the statement.

 

5 Key Strategies of Formative Assessment

  1. Clarifying, sharing, and understanding learning intentions and criteria for success
  2. Engineering effective classroom discussions, activities, and learning tasks that elicit evidence of learning
  3. Activating learners as instructional resources for one another
  4. Activating learners as the owners of their own learning
  5. Where the learning is going Where the learner is right now How to get there
    Teacher Clarifying and sharing learningintentions and criteria for successUnderstanding and sharing learning intentions and criteria for successUnderstanding learning intentions and criteria for success Engineering effective classroom discussions, activities and tasks that elicit evidence of learning Providing feedback that moves learning forward
    Peer Activating learners as instructional resources for one another
    Learner Activating learners as the owners of their own learning
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Adobe Generation Homework

Although this doesn’t look much like it is supposed to – I am feeling rather relieved to have completed it to this stage. The colours are wrong! The line pattern went missing. I couldn’t work out how to do the border, and in the end I didn’t follow the instructions from the video, as I was having no success. In the end I do have a bit better understanding of how to use Photoshop, although I wouldn’t be confident enough to use it with my students. I will need much more time to mess around with the program – and probably need some more expert advice.

This was only one part of the homework for Week 1. Now I have week 2 and 3 to catch up on!!

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SOLO Taxonomy

http://lisajaneashes.edublogs.org/2012/11/27/solo-autonomy-for-beginners/
http://www.pedagoo.org/2013/01/solo-part-01/

SOLO – Structure of Observed Learning Outcomes
I would like to use this structure with students more so that they can begin to take more control of their learning.

Pre-structural – I don’t know about…
Uni-structural – Knows a thing about topic
Multi-Structural – Knows some things about topic
Relational – Cab relate the parts to each other
Extended Abstract – Can apply learning in a new situation/ to solve a problem

First three stages involve gathering information and the last two involve using information.

Good idea about using hexagons with some of the multi-structural attributes written on them. Get students to fit these together and explain to get them to the relational stage.

Verbs Associated with Stages
Uni – define, identify, name, draw, find, label, follow a simple procedure
Multi- describe, list, outline, complete, continue, combine, enumerate
Relational – sequence, classify, compare and contrast,(cause and effect), anaylse, form an analogy, organise, distinguish, apply, explain, causes, criticise
Extended Abstract – generalise, predict, reflect, evaluate, hypothesise, theorise, create, prove, justify, argue, prioritise, design, construct, perform, formulate, generate

Introduction to SOLO taxonomy from David Didau

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