Professional Learning Team
1 identifies the student’s Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD) and describes the evidence on which this is based
2 records on the log the specific skill or concept being targeted. This is described as the learning intention(s). Depending on the developmental level being targeted, there may be one or more of these.
3 considers what the student will be able to do, say, make or write to demonstrate that the learning goal has been achieved
4 makes a clear distinction between intervention strategy and learning activity. The emphasis here is on teacher action: what the teacher will do, say, make or write to facilitate teaching.
5 considers the nature of the learning activity to ensure that it aligns with the learning intention and selected strategies
6 identifies resources, asking what support the teacher needs and whether any resources need to be sourced from elsewhere. If materials have been developed, a sample of each should be attached to the log for later reference by the PLT
7 checks whether or not the intervention resulted in improvement in the student’s ZPD, reviewing the intervention strategies and their impact. The review is at the heart of the PLT Inquiry and learning cycle.
When we place the learner at the heart of everything we do, our focus as teachers shifts in a most fundamental way.
* from the delivery of information to fostering students’ engagement with ideas
Instead of covering the curriculum and judging our success by how much content we get through, we must learn to identify the key ideas and concepts with which we want our students to engage, struggle, question, explore, and ultimately build understanding. Our goal must be to make the big ideas of the curriculum accessible and engaging while honoring their complexity, beauty, and power in the process. When there is something important and worthwhile to think about and a reason to think deeply, our students experience the kind of learning that has a lasting impact and powerful influence not only in the short term but also in the long haul. They not only learn; they learn how to learn.
We have two chief goals:
* creating opportunities for thinking
* making students’ thinking visible
David Perkins “learning is a consequence of thinking. Retention, understanding, and the active use of knowledge can be brought about only by learning experiences in which learners think about and think with what they are learning…Far from thinking coming after knowledge, knowledge comes on the coat tails of thinking. As we think about and with the content that we are learning, we truly learn it.”
When we reduce the amount of thinking eg ask of our students, we reduce the amount of learning as well. We need to remember that thinking may still be invisible to us. To make sure thinking isn’t left to chance and to provide us with the information we needin order to respond to students’ learning needs, we must also make their thinking invisible.
Enabling students to show thinking gives the teacher insight into understanding and misconceptions.
Good “essential questions”:
What’s the story?
What’s the other story?
How do you know the story?
Why know/ tell the story?
Where’s the power in the story?
Students’ questions all the more important: “I judge my students not by the answers they give, but by the questions they ask” Paul Cripps Wyoming
“What makes you say that?” – a non-threatening way of eliciting thinking process.
We make students’ thinking visible through our questioning, listening and documenting so that we can build on and extend that thinking on the way to deeper and richer understanding.
The section ‘As patterns of behaviour’ gets to the crux of an idea that has been milling around in my head recently. The notion that it is the routine, daily things that teachers set up in their classroom that create habits and effect learning powerfully. That is why I have been developing a Daily Planning tool, which tries to highlight and synthesise the key aspects that we are focusing on as a school, and place them front and centre in all of our teachers’ minds. I realise though that the aspects I have highlighted so far are the ‘what’ of the curriculum, and the routines set out in this book address the ‘how’. I will need to come back to explore this section in more detail.
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.