Helping Students Own the Learning

 Competence, Engaged Citizens, Formative Assessment, Motivation, Potency, Resiliency, Uncategorized  1 Response »
Jan 252013
 

There are some pervasive myths in teaching that research does not confirm.  One that teachers repeat very often is that self-assessment is a bad plan because student won’t assess themselves fairly and it doesn’t help the learning.  The opposite is actually true.  Students will self assess fairly unless there is a big incentive to do otherwise, and student who can self-assess well learn much more than students who cannot. As Saskatchewan Curricula have renewed, having student assess their own learning is embedded in outcomes through out all documents because it causes students to be more resilient, achieve more and be more engaged.

What is self-assessment?

Self-assessment is not the same as self-grading (although students can do that pretty accurately, too). It means that as a student,  I can think about my learning.  I know what I did well at, where I struggled and what I need to do next to improve. Strong self-assessors own their own learning.

How can I teach my students to own their own learning?

Teachers can teach students to own their own learning by encouraging students to be able to answer the following 5 questions:

  1. What am I learning?
  2. How am I doing?
  3. How do I know?
  4. What do I need to do next to improve?
  5. What help and supports should I get for myself?

In order to help students be able to reliably answer those questions, educators need to teach students 3 big traits: using metacognition regularly, having a growth mindset, and looking for opportunity to be intrinsically motivated.  Here is a quick summary of each of those traits and a description of what a teacher can do to growth that trait in students.

Concept

What it looks like

How to teach it
Metacognition The student knows about his or her own thinking processes and can reflect of them in relation to a goal.
  • Take every opportunity to transfer control from the teacher to the students
  • Teach students how to make effective goals and create assignments that will help them practice
  • Share learning goals and criteria for success in clear, student-friendly language
  • Help students discover how the small skills they are learning build to a big, new skills
  • Encourage the student to reflect on thinking verbally, in journals or through discussion
  • Model making your own thinking explicitly through instructional techniques like talk aloud
  • Have student draw outlines, concept maps and mindmaps to make mental connections explicit, then discuss the differences between what they created and why
  • Give powerful, descriptive feedback including examples and a recipe for future actions
Intrinsic Motivation The student wants to learn something of his or her own accord.  Mistakes are a learning opportunity and powerful descriptive feedback is welcome.
  • Take every opportunity to transfer control from the teacher to the students
  • Create assignments and activities that tap into areas of interest
  • Make it harder for students to compare their achievement to others by delaying grades and replacing them with powerful feedback
  • Allow students to choose how they show you what they know
  • Create challenging assignments just within what a student can learn to do (creates flow)
  • Give equal marks to getting it right, and to explaining why you failed and how to fix it
  • Get and give powerful, descriptive feedback about how to improve, including examples
Growth Mindset The student sees his or her success as directly related to effort.  The student tries new things for the opportunity to grow.
  • Take every opportunity to transfer control from the teacher to the students
  • Praise effort, not talent or ability
  • Make it harder for students to compare their achievement to others by delaying grades and replacing them with powerful feedback
  • Reward a student who reaches to the edge of his or her skills (and sometimes over) more than a student who just follows your lead
  • Give equal marks to getting it right, and to explaining why you failed and how to fix it
  • Model observing your own mistakes and thanking others for helping you learn more
  • As the teacher, say when you don’t know, but express confidence that  you can learn
  • Get and give powerful, descriptive feedback about how to improve, including examples

Want more information?

The “How To” of Formative Assessment

 Competence, Engaged Citizens, Formative Assessment, Life Long Learning, Potency, Relevance, Resiliency, Uncategorized  4 Responses »
Jan 252013
 

All good learning starts with what students know right now. That’s why formative assessment has the largest documented effect of anything a teacher can do in a classroom.  But knowing you should do it and knowing how to do it are not the same thing.  This series of posts addresses the basics of how to use the 5 types of formative assessment in your classroom.

  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

Wiliam, D. (2011) Embedded formative assessment.

Choosing a great instructional strategy based on the brain.

 Competence, Critical Thinking, Formative Assessment, Motivation, Responsive Instruction, Uncategorized  No Responses »
Jan 222013
 

As teachers, we pick instructional strategies everyday. Research shows that most of us use a few strategies based mostly on what we are most comfortable with, but it also shows we should be picking based on a variety of factors, not our personal preferences. In addition to the age of student, the curriculum, students’ learning needs and the context, we should actually be picking based on how our brains learn.  This is a problem, because most of  us don’t understand how brains work.

How a brain learns new things:

Scientific American has great issue on how the brain learns, and it explains some things that can really help teachers. One of the most critical is that “synapse’s performance changes when we learn something new, obeying the principle that cells that fire together, wire together.” When you learn something, your brain associates things to remember and use them.  When the thing you are learning is a concept, the brain has a series of ideas all grouped together that define that thing.

Why this is so important for teaching:

When we learn new things, we automatically group both true and untrue things into a bundle of “true” for later use.  To learn more about something, we regroup the things we have learned and make new sense.  When some of the material we have learned seems at odds with what we have already learned, it is much harder for the brain to learn it.  That means that teachers have a much harder job teaching when a student has understood something wrong, then practiced it to build a “wiring together” error.

What is the best thing we can do about it?

A great teacher can help the brain in two ways: by teaching the brain to constantly check for errors as a part of the thinking process, and by having his or her students constantly revise their own understanding to improve it.  In practical terms, this means a student learns more from doing a bit of practice and then finding and fixing errors, than by just practicing alone. 

Here are 4 things a teacher can build into a lesson:

  1. Encourage students to represent the connections in their understanding by diagramming, concept mapping, outlining or mind mapping. This allows you to see what a student understand about something and find errors. It is also a method of indirect instruction that helps students crystallize and summarize their understanding of a topic. At the start and near the end are the best places for this type of instruction.
  2. Use gradual release of responsibility to reduce the number of times a brain practices an error.
  3. Use formative assessment strategies that give you evidence of a student’s current understanding.
  4. Change your practice questions so that about half of them are for finding errors rather than just attempting the question.  Following each question, ask students to explain what is wrong, why it is wrong and what to do to fix it.  If you use this method, you can have student practice for a shorter time than you would have in the past.

Choosing how you teach something based on how we learn makes a lot of sense.  It helps more students get it right the first time and feel more powerful learning the same subject in the future.  In addition, when students are taught to think through making errors, they are more willing to ask for help and more likely to find their errors on their own.  Who wouldn’t want to teach in that classroom?

Activating Learners as Instructional Resources for one another

 Competence, Formative Assessment, Gifted, Life Long Learning, Responsive Instruction, Uncategorized  1 Response »
Jan 222013
 

Ever wish you had a clone because you had more students to help than you time to help them?  Since cloning technology for the average teacher is still a while away, and you are unlike to have a class size of 12, you need another way to put more instructional resources in your classroom.  The best way to do that is to activate your students as Instructional Resources for one another.

Why does Activating Students as Resources for one another work?

At its heart, activation of students as learning resources for other students is Cooperative Learning. Cooperative Learning is one of the greatest successes in the history of educational research (Slavin, Hurley and Chamberlain, 2003) for 4 main reasons according to Wiliam (2011):

  1. Motivation: The teacher structures the process so it is in a student’s interest to help others.
  2. Social Capital: Students help their peers because they care about them.  They also care about their perceived value to others.
  3. Personalizing the learning: Students learn more because their peers see the specific difficulty they are having and try to help.
  4. Better Understanding: When you want to teach others, you have to understand an idea clearly. The stronger students improve by having to teach and the less competent improve because they have a second teacher.

What is Cooperative Learning?

It is the opportunity to work with a variety of different people on a task or problem. Specific group skills (like setting goals or giving feedback) are directly taught by the teacher, and the group is accountable to each other for learning.  Assessment is individual so that there is individual accountability .The only exception is where the power of the group processes is being assessed or students are reflecting together.

What are the techniques?

There are many great techniques, but here is a sampling of some powerful ones:

  • Peer Feedback (not grading) based on co-constructed criteria, prior to students handing in to the teacher.  If how to give good feedback is taught, and the criteria are clear, students helping other students hand in much stronger products and learn more, according to Anne Davies. Read more about good feedback in this blog post.
  • Checking for understanding is best done in groups.  Instead of asking the class if there are any questions (a few people will ask and most will wait until you can come by their desks), ask groups to meet and quickly generate a question. The groups will answer most questions internally if anyone knows the answer and the hardest questions will surface for you.
  • Error analysis is the most powerful way to improve student understanding of a concept. Have your students work in groups to fix errors in a solution, piece of writing or any other final product. Because they are working together, they will find more of the errors and understand them better. Read this blog post to learn more about how finding errors helps the brain learn more effectively.
  • Get questions answered more quickly.  When a student doesn’t know something and waits for the teacher to have time to provide help, valuable learning time is lost and students start going off task.  Asking students to check with others (sometimes called 3 before me because they need to check with three other students) ensures questions are answered more quickly and that students feel safer admitting when they don’t know, because others are also asking questions. Read a post on Guided Reciproc0l Questions.
  • Assign specific roles.  Most good cooperative learning structures have different roles for different group members.  This helps to ensure each group member has an equal job and something specific they are responsible for.  In addition, it means all students don’t spend time on the same routine task, giving everyone time for new learning.
  • Set goals and identify issues.  In learning groups, students often complain about three things: the time it takes, when some people don’t do the work, and that everyone gets the same mark.  We have already discussed why everyone should not get the same mark.  Students goal setting and identifying issues address the other two. When students plan backwards from the deadline and set specific, measurable goals for each work period, they understand how much they need to get done each day.  If they report to the teacher about progress at the end of the day, the teacher has time to intervene if the group had lost direction or some members are not doing their share. When students are also rewarded for either outright success or finding and solving problems, the group also has the opportunity to learn from its mistakes.

Activating learners as instructional resources for each other clearly helps learning in the short terms because it resolves questions more quickly and provides more feedback, both of which help learning right now.  It also teaches a variety of soft skills for collaboration, goal setting and conflict resolution that employers are clamoring for. When a teacher builds good cooperative strategies into her classroom she helps herself and her students now, and better prepares students for post-secondary and the world of work.

Want to learn more?

Read related posts

  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 owners of their own learning

 

Good Feedback

 Formative Assessment, Potency, Uncategorized  1 Response »
Jan 212013
 

Feedback that moves the learning forward is one of the most critical element in improving learning. Research clearly tells us what we can do to ensure there is good feedback in our classrooms.

What is good feedback?

  • Focuses on specific, descriptive comments
  • Uses examples and non-examples to clarify
  • Everything is designed to grow learning – something like “good job” doesn’t do that, so it should be omitted
  • Designed to reinforce a growth mindset

When does feedback make the biggest difference?

  • During the learning, before a final product is attempted
  • When it is separate from marks
  • When it comes from multiple sources (self, other students, teachers, outside experts) that know how to give good feedback
  • Immediately, for easy task
  • After a time has passed and you have reflected, for hard tasks

What can teachers do to improve the quality of feedback in their classrooms?

  1. Seek feedback from students, both to model reflecting and learning, and to more closely meet the needs of the students in front of you.  John Hattie, a researcher’s research in education say that “one of the most significant mistakes teachers make is not seeking feedback from their students.” Great questions to ask things like “What is the most helpful think I did to help you understand?” You could also ask students what was the easiest thing to learn, when they got lost or use a signal system like cups so they can tell you when they are understanding and when something like the pace, explanation or level of depth is an issue.  As you get more comfortable, you can also start asking about choice, learning preferences and other things that will help you differentiate.
  2. Teach students how to give good feedback.  Nearly 80% of the feedback students get is from peers, and most of it is incorrect (Nuthall, 2007).  A teacher can help by providing good prompts to elicit actually helpful feedback. For example, a prompt like “An example of this is. . . ” encourages students to make a judgement call, then provide specifics that the peer can refer to and learn from.  A great book for information on this is Visible Learning for Teachers by John Hattie (pages 130-134) which helps categorize and define types of effective feedback. All good feedback tells me what specific steps to take to improve.

Learn more:

Videos to Support First Nations and Métis Content and Prespectives

 Cultural Responsiveness, First Nations, FNIM Content and Perspectives, Metis Content and Perspectives, Relevance, Uncategorized  1 Response »
Dec 212012
 

Many teachers would like to incorporate more First Nations and Métis content and perspectives in the classrooms, but don’t know where to find the resources or why to incorporate the content and perspectives.  You can find materials in your school library, in the CMC library, or even online, like with a Ministry of Education streamed video service, called ROVER.  If you go to ROVER from school, you are automatically logged in and can play any video on the list. You can search by grade, subject and language or even the video number (like N203) for videos that suit what you are teaching.

Here is a list of the ROVER videos that support FNIM content and perspectives: FNMI Learning Resources on Rover – Oct 2012.  A typically summary of a video looks like this:

N203 (the search number)

Aboriginality (the title)

Electric Juice Productions, 2007, 5:03 min (who made the video)

Aboriginality re-imagines the strength and spirit of First Nations culture through narrative mediums that connect urban First Nations youth to their rural ancestral histories. Dallas Arcand, a world champion hoop dancer and hip-hop artist, as he is inspired by both new and traditional elements of First Nations culture. He plays dual roles in being both a positive First Nations presence in mainstream urban media and a touchstone to traditional First Nations roots and culture. (a description of the content)

Suggested Use: Arts Education, Gr. K-9 – Dance, Drama, Music, Visual Art; English Language Arts, Grade 8 – Imaginative and Literary Context; Native Studies 10 – Community and Kinship; Native Studies 30 – Social Development

Teacher’s Guide (means one is available with the video)

Expiry: 31-Mar-2015 (when the video will be available until)

Need more information about where and when to integrate? This summary of Grade 9 and 10 outcomes and indicators (FNIM Content and Perspectives in Renewed Curricula) helps you see where it is included both inside and outside of outcomes.

 

Learning Intentions and Criteria

 Authentic Task, Formative Assessment, Motivation, Uncategorized  1 Response »
Dec 202012
 

Clarifying, sharing, and understanding learning intentions and criteria for success is the first step of formative assessment. Karen Hume explains 6 reasons why it is important, from helping the teacher know what success looks like, to basic traits of human nature, to making it more likely students can use what you teach them.  As a teachers, we want to make it is likely as possible that students will learn what we have to teach, and students can’t hit a target that they can see.  We set clear, explicit learning goals with our students because we want them to learn.

How do I set clear intentions and criteria?

In order to do that well, there a number of specific things you can do:

Because students are much more likely to hit a target they understand, ensuring the target is very clear is really important.

However, the fact that the target is worthy of the student’s time is equally critical. Students need to believe that the task teaches them skills that they will need right now, or that the world needs their help and input with. When they believe that, they become intrinsically motivated, and they do a much better job. A teacher can make this more likely by asking students to do authentic, real world tasks, and how a task is set up influences whether a student does the task to please the teacher or does the task because it is worth doing.  If you need to know more about the type of task, watch this video from Daniel Pink on motivation.

 

Want to learn more?

Read about

  1. Engineering effective classroom discussions, activities, and learning tasks that elicit evidence of learning
  2. Providing feedback that moves learning forward
  3. Activating learners as instructional resources for one another
  4. Activating learners as owners of their own learning
  5. Read Davies, Cameron and Gregory on Setting and Using Criteria

Wiliam, D. (2011) Embedded formative assessment.

 

Making Big Words

 Primary Perspective, Uncategorized  No Responses »
Dec 122012
 

Choose a word that you can use to study word properties. Give each student the strip with the letters in alphabetical order.

 

Have the students cut apart each letter and manipulate and sort the letters to form new words as well as looking at word endings, prefixes, suffixes, and many word properties and word families. You can fill out the chart below as a group or give pairs of students the chart to fill out. Tell students to keep the mystery word silent and not to “step on each other’s thinking” by yelling out the answer. The final word contains ALL the letters they were given on the strip.

 

 

Once students are comfortable with the activity ask students to bring in a “challenge word” to try.

 This activity differentiates instruction because there are so many ways to sort the letters. “By beginning with short easy words and building to larger words, it provides practice for your lowest level and a challenge for all”

 

Source:

Making Big Words


Patricia Cunningham

 

Great Tools for Teaching about Digital Skills

 Engaged Citizens, Technology, Uncategorized  No Responses »
Nov 232012
 

Problems with cyberbullying, students creating great projects that should be shared, and the practice of googling everything are part of a new reality that all teachers face as they try to prepare students for both the world we live in and the one they will graduate into.  Because things are changing so quickly, it can be hard to keep up with what you should do.  Here are some common questions teachers have and some quick solutions:

  1. How do I know what skills students should have? SPS has a list of those skills, called the digital backpack.  For each skill, there is a list of tools you can use, what to teach your students and how to get help.  Ask your Teacher-Librarian for more about these resources or contact Judy, Carlene, Jay, Jennifer or Jacqueline at Central Office.
  2. How can I find lessons and materials designed to teach about topics like cyberbullying or digital skills? One of the best resources out there is MediaSmarts. Resources are available in French and English, and they are aligned with the big ideas of curriculum and specific grades.  Check out the list of materials @ http://mediasmarts.ca/curricularoutcomechart/outcome-chart-saskatchewan-cross-curricular-comptencies-k-12. The list of topics has material related to all Saskatchewan outcomes that focus on media, using the web effectively and even cultural responsiveness.
  3. How can I find simple video to explain about media literacy or new technology? A great place to get materials is Common Craft, a company that posts short, easy to understand videos on new technologies and digital literacy.
  4. Where can I go for information on specific technical tools?  Techy Teacher is an SPS site with great information about a wide variety of tools, digital literacy and even copyright.  Click on any item on the right to learn more about it. Another great SPS site is hosted by the Online Learning Center teaches about web 2.0 tools and how to use them at different levels in the classroom.

 

What your Teacher-Librarian can do for you

 Competence, Critical Thinking, Technology, Uncategorized  No Responses »
Aug 282012
 

As teachers, we have lots of competing issues to attend to.  We need to deal constant changes like great diversity in the classroom, renewed curricula, changes to assessment and instruction, and new technology. We continue to have all the daily pressures of teaching life, from preparation, to marking, to classroom management, to extracurricular activities. When the new becomes hard in the face of all the things you already have to do, you should be thinking about what your teacher-librarian (TL) can do for you.

What is my TL responsible for:

  • Instruction/Assessment: Helping team teach and support teaching and learning.
  • Development: Thoughtfully stocking the library (and the virtual library) with resources that best meet the needs of your students and your curriculum and instruction.
  • Management: Looking after the daily life of the library including items like budgeting, networking, and circulation of materials.

What are the key ways a TL can help me?

  • Working  your  students  and  collaborating with you  to  build  media  literacy,  information  literacy,  and  critical  thinking  skills.  Your TL can help your students find things online and knowing if they are good.  TLs can also help teach higher order thinking skills, or help you make assignments that integrate them.
  • Understanding and using inquiry in the classroom.
  • Being sure the technology use in your classroom actively improves learning for kids and HEATs things up.
  • Collaborating with students and teachers to integrate activities that improve  literacy outcomes including modeling literacy strategies, supporting pleasure reading, and helping you build a great classroom library.
  • Develop  and  maintain  collections  of  current  and  relevant  resources  to  support  curriculum  outcomes. You TL can help you find great resources from your school library, online, in databases or from other libraries.
  • Helping plan, teach or assess units for a variety of types of learners.
  • Connecting you to other teachers, community members or Central Office support people as needed.
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