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Text Dependent Questions

The phases of close reading
What does the text say?
How does the text work?
What does the text mean?
What does the text inspire you to do?

The distributed scaffolds of close reading
1. Multiple readings
2. Collaborative conversations
3. Annotations
4. Thoughtfully planned Text-Dependent Questions

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TfEL

Teaching for Effective Learning
The TfEL document is a description of an exemplary classroom, which all of us should aim to emulate. The National Standards for Teachers is a rubric which breaks down the skills of a teacher into different hierarchical stages – not necessarily aligned with experience.

Indicators of success/ effective learning:
Growth in student learning
Engaged students
Self sufficient students – familiar with processes and expectations, willing to take on responsibility for themselves as learners, because they have a clear vision of what they are working towards
Students able to verbalise learning, goals and describe achievements – meta-language used
Student feedback to the teacher indicates their positive perception of impact of teaching, and allows for open questioning to further enable personalised learning and connection

Important starting points:
Assessment to determine where students are on the learning continuum in different areas
A clear picture of the learning continuum, including evidence: what students do, make, write and say at different stages.
Observations of what students currently do, make, say and write – targeted/ specific/ systematic
Differentiated strategies to take into account needs of students (NB: not differentiated curriculum. Students at a particular year level have the right to access the curriculum of that year level. Strategies to accommodate learning needs are the focus here. Grouping structures, exploration, explicit teaching, models, think, pair, share, reference materials, videos to review teaching points, ICT to enhance opportunities, etc.)

Developmental continua such as:
PAT-R
PAT-M
Words Their Way – Spelling continua
Booker Numeracy tests
EALD-Language and Literacy Levels
SPAT
Abcdarian assessment
One minute maths tests

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ATC21S – Empirical progressions

Teachers need to become systematic observers.

Developmental Progressions
Teachers a an use developmental progressions to:
Monitor the development of student skills
Identify the point of intervention
Identify learning strategies
Look ahead to plan goals

Social skills for successful collaborative problem solving
Participation skills
-Action
-Interaction
-Task completion skills
Perspective-taking skills
-Responsiveness
-Audience awareness skills
Social regulation skills
-Metamemory skills
-Transactive memory skills
-Negotiation skills
-Initiative skills

Cognitive processing skills for successful collaborative problem solving
Planning, exploring and collating skills
-Problem analysis
-Goal setting
-Resource management
-Planning complexity
Executing and monitoring skills
-Forward search
-Breadth-first search
-Depth-first search
-Backward search
-A means-ends-analysis
-Systematicity
-Information acquisition skills
Flexibility skills

Learning skills

Perspective-taking skills

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Chapter 3: A Knowledge Base for Teaching

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Design questions:
1. What will I do to establish and communicate learning goals, track student progress, and celebrate success?
2. What will I do to help students effectively interact with new knowledge?
3. What will I do to help students practice and deepen their understanding of new knowledge?
4. What will I do to help students generate and test hypotheses about new knowledge?
5. What will I do to engage students?
6. What will I do to establish or maintain classroom rules and procedures?
7. What will I do to recognise and acknowledge adherence and lack of adherence to classroom rules and procedures?
8. What will I do to establish and maintain effective relationships with students?
9. What will I do to communicate high expectations for all students?
10. What will I do to develop effective lessons organised into a cohesive unit?

Procedural knowledge is practiced, whereas declarative knowledge is deepened.

Increasing Student Engagement
Effective teachers continually scan their classrooms to determine if students are engaged and take steps to re engage students if they are not.

* noticing and reacting when students are not engaged
* using academic games
* managing response rates during questioning
* using physical movement
* maintaining a lively pace
* demonstrating intensity and enthusiasm
* using friendly controversy
* providing opportunities for students to talk about themselves
* presenting unusual or intriguing information

Recognising and acknowledging adherence or lack of adherence to classroom rules and procedures
* demonstrating “withitness”
* applying consequences
* acknowledges adherence to rules and procedures consistently and fairly

Establishing and maintaining effective relationships with students
* understanding student interests and backgrounds
* using behaviours that indicate affection for students
* displaying objectivity and control (eg the teacher behaves in a way that show she she does not take infractions personally

Communicating high expectations for students
* demonstrating valueand respect girlie-expectancy students
* asking questions of lie expectancy students
* probing incorrect answers with low-expectancy students

Planning and preparing
– for lessons and units
* planning and preparing for effective scaffolding of information within lessons
* planning and preparing for lessons within a unit that progress towards a deep understanding and transfer if content
* planning and preparing for appropriate attention to established content standards

-for use of materials and technology
* planning and preparing for the use if available materials for upcoming units and lessons
* planning and preparing for the use if available technologies such as interactive whiteboards, response systems, and computers

-for special needs of students
*planning and preparing for the needs of English language learners
* planning and preparing for the needs if special education students
* planning and preparing for the needs of students who come from home environments that offer little support for schooling

Reflecting on teaching
Evuating personal performance
* identifying specific areas of pedagogical strength and weakness within Domain 1
* evaluating effectiveness of individual lessons and units
* evaluating the effectiveness of specific pedagogical strategies and behaviour across different categories of students

Developing and implementing a professional growth plan
* developing a written growth and development plan
* monitoring progress relative to the professional growth plan

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Embedded Formative Assessment

Eliciting Evidence of Learner Achievement
High-engagement classroom environments appear to have a significant impact on student achievement.

… When teachers allow students to choose whether to participate or not- for example, by allowing them to raise their hands to show they have an answer – they are actually making achievement gap worse, because those who are participating are getting smarter, while those avoiding engagement are forgoing the opportunities to increase their ability.

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Activating Students as Owners of Their Own Learning – Notes from Embedded Formative Assessment

“We know that students are more motivated to reach goals that are specific, are within reach, and offer some degree of challenge…”
“… students provided with positive constructive feedback by their teachers were more likely to focus on learning rather than performance.”

Integrating Motivational and Cognitive perspectives
When students are invited to participate in a learning activity, they use three sources of information to decide what they are going to do:
1 Their perceptions of the task and its context (for example, school, class, and so on)
2 Their knowledge about the task and what it will take to be successful
3 Their motivational beliefs, including their interest and whether they think they know enough to succeed

Things that can be done to get students to choose a growth mindset:
1 Share learning goals with students so that they are able to monitor their own progress toward them
2 Promote the belief that ability is incremental rather than fixed; when students think they can’t get smarter, they are likely to devote their energy to avoiding failure
3 Make it more difficult for students to compare themselves with others in terms of achievement
4 Provide feedback that contains a recipe for future action rather than a review of past failures (a medical rather than a post mortem)
5 Use every opportunity to transfer executive control of the learning from the teacher to the students to support their development as autonomous learners

Practical Techniques
Traffic lights
Red/Green Disks
Coloured Cups
Learning Portfolios
Learning Logs

Five Key strategies of classroom 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 Providing feedback that moves learning forward
4 Activating learners as instructional resources for one another
5 Activating learners as owners of their own learning

“We know that the teacher is the most powerful influence on how much a student learns and that teachers can continue to make significant improvements in their practice throughout their careers. If all teachers accept the need to improve practice, not be ause ey are not good enough, but because they can be even better, and focus on the things that make the biggest difference to their students, according to the research, we will be able to prepare our students, according to the research, we will be able to prepare our students to thrive in the impossibly complex, unpredictable world of the 21st century.”

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Formative Assessment, Dylan Wiliam : Eliciting Evidence ofLearners’ Achievement

Every teacher has had the experience of writing the same thing on fifteen or twenty students’ notebooks because the students were allowed to leave the classroom before the teacher discovered that the students hasfailedtounderstand some crucial point.

…teachers work in groups to devise questions to find out whether their teaching has been successful. …questions that give us this window into students’ thinking are hardto generate, and teacher collaboration will help to build a stock of good questions.

Questions
Mainly managerial
A third required only recall
Only 8% required students to analyse, make inferences or to generalise
Less than 10% of questions caused any new learning
Addressing this seems like an obvious way to improve student learning.

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