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It has been way too long since I last planned a formal lesson, however my Assessment Project has got me back into the classroom, and thus planning lessons. The fun part is that I am trying to integrate the assessment and differentiation practices that I am learning with the teachers in our school. Here is my basic plan for tomorrow. I will let you know how it goes, and would love input with insights in the following areas:
- Is there evidence of authentic “assessment for learning?”
- Are the questioning techniques uses safe and do they maximize student think time? (Are all students preparing to answer each question?)
- Are there any other strategies (Cooperative Learning, Concept Attainment or other) that may have been useful / may be useful next time?
**You must know this before reading the lesson**
- There are three students who are currently being pulled out of the class to receive intensive resource support with basic Math skills. As the support is available right now, we decided that it is best for them to receive the help and miss part of the fractions unit. The resource teacher will cover an adapted version of this content.
- There are four students who are working on an independent Wiki project about our fractions unit (I am sure I will blog about it soon). They are in the class but are using laptops.
- This is the second lesson on adding fractions with like denominators. The core teacher taught the first lesson and I am teaching the second “going deeper lesson”. While I teach this lesson the core teacher will pull out 4-5 student who she believes will struggle with the next concept (subtracting fractions with like denominators) and will pre-teach this concept. The following day she will teach this concept to the whole group.
- Therefore I am teaching about 16 average students in this class.
(These are my rough notes, not really a classic lesson format, just ideas of what I will be doing during the lesson)
Objective:
My objective is to have the students connect with the previous lesson and then extend their thinking by figuring out how to explain why we add the numerators when adding fractions and don’t add the denominators. By developing this level of understanding and the ability to explain it, they will be more likely to understand that they need to find like denominators before adding / subtracting fractions with different denominators.
Intro:
I will start by explaining to the students why I am teaching today as I have not taught them before. I will probably allow them to come up with one question about me as a teacher per pair and ask it, just to let them know a little about me as a teacher.
Learning Intentions:
“At the end of this lesson, you are going to put your books away and answer this question, on this piece of paper: “Please explain why you add the numerators when adding fractions and don’t add the denominators?”
Link to previous lesson:
“In your partners decide who is the numerator and who is the denominator”
“I am going to give you 30 seconds to discuss what your teacher taught you last class with a partner. Then I will randomly pick a few people to give me an answer.”
Get answers. Asking for the “numerator from this group to answer” and the “denominator from that group”
Instruction
“Ok, here are three questions to do with your partner, answer them, and come up with an explanation for me as to why I chose these questions, in this order, when most pairs are done, I will choose one numerator and one denominator to answer each question and then one of each to explain why you think I asked the questions in this order.”
(questions on overhead) 2/8 + 3/8; 3/4 + 1/4; and 5/16 + 15/16
Choose students to answer questions.
More Instruction / Cooperative Learning:
“Numerators choose your favourite consonant, write it down, Denominators choose your favourite vowel, and write it after the consonant, Numerators choose another consonant, write it down, denominators choose another vowel, write it down. This is your team name…write it on the top of both of your pages” (Example. “HIRA”, “NOHA”, “JARY” etc)
When I say go I want everyone to take 2 full minutes to try to write out the answer to your end of class quiz on this piece of paper. No talking, laughing, no smiling, no breathing…ok, fine, breathing is allowed – but that’s it!”
“Start”…”What are you doing, I didn’t say go”…”Go”
After 2 minutes…”Ok, now denominators you have 30 seconds to explain your answer to the numerators…numerators you must listen, no talking at all” 30 seconds pass “numerators you now have 30 seconds to talk” 30 seconds pass
Discuss your ideas with your partner and make any changes you would like to your answer.
Ok, everyone put your sheet on this table.
Anonymous Peer Assessment
I hand the sheets out at random…”Take 2 minutes with your partner and grade the two papers you have with a 0, 1, 2, 3 or 4 based on these criteria”
0 – No response (blank)
1 – Attempt, but lacks understanding of concepts (adding fractions)
2 – Understands adding fractions but poor reasoning
3 – Clear reasoning, sensible and straightforward
4 – Clear, concise, easy to follow, well explained
Hand them in, and I call out team names to get them back. Give each pair a minute to look them over…ask students to put everything away, give out quiz.
Assessment
Collect “quiz” before end of block.
It seems like every year I am faced with a teacher who wants to keep a grade 8 student in Middle School for another year. Usually these requests are for one of two reasons:
- The student is not working hard, and thus is not meeting learning outcomes.
- The teacher believes that the students is not socially or emotionally ready for high school. (And they aren’t meeting learning outcomes) (1)
 Our province has a pretty hard and fast rule that students are kept ‘age appropriate’, meaning that we don’t ‘fail’ students and instead move them forward with their peer group and attempt to remediate their programs in the higher grade. This usually continues until about grade 9 or 10 when the student actually starts failing individual courses and either drops out or is moved to a ‘non-academic’ stream and works towards a leaving certificate instead of a grade 12 diploma.
Usually the motivation for failing students that fall into the first category is in one form or another revenge. These teachers are so frustrated with these students that they want to keep them back to ‘make them do the work’. “How can we possibly move them to grade 9 when they haven’t done the work I assigned them?” I completely disagree with this line of thought and believe that it is in the best interest of the student to move them forward. I believe that the social stigma involved with failing them will most likely not lead to a turn around in their work and will lead to disengagement from school and ultimately dropping out. When moved forward many of these students repeat their same behaviour in high school and either don’t finish high school or have a long and arduous experience. Others however do figure it out, they don’t necessarily become straight A students, but they manage to get by, and with support can easily catch up enough to get through.
Category two is much more challenging for me than category one. Often the teacher asking about this type of student will ask “how can we send this student off to grade 9 when we know they will not be able to establish any social connections, will lose all of their supplies and work, will not take care of any of their responsibilities, and will ultimately fall flat on their face?” – Good Question! These teachers are asking the question from the heart, worrying about how their student will survive the coming year. Although the local high schools are much larger than our middle school I do know they are full of caring and dedicated educators who will help to prevent these students from falling flat on their faces and if they do fall, will help to pick them back up and get them on track.
The important question to ask about this type of student is “what will the benefit of keeping them in middle school for another year be?” Will this student who has been socially inept or an organizational disaster or who has the maturity of a grade 3 suddenly transform into a well adjusted grade 8 student on their second attempt? Will they finally get it, and realize that they need to grow up and become normal, like the rest of the students in the class? Or will they just keep on being themselves, ignoring the lessons going on in the class, ostracizing themselves from their new classmates and putting off the inevitable for one more year?
I think that the right answer to this question is that there is no right answer. The student should move on with their peers, although we know they will likely struggle during the transition, and their chance of failing in grade nine is high. The student should also be kept back in a safer environment, although we know the risks of further social isolation and the chances of a miracle turn around are minimal. Luckily there is no decision to make – the student moves on and stays age-appropriate. But is this truly in the best interest of every child?
Unfortunately the research appears to verify this conundrum. According to “Critical Issues: Beyond Social Promotion and Retention – Five Strategies to help students succeed” retention (Failing) “negatively impacts students’ behavior, attitude, and attendance”, while “social promotion undermines students’ futures when they fail to develop critical study and job-related skills.” The authors go on to articulate how recent research “indicates that that alternative strategies, which strike at the root causes of poor performance, offer genuine hope for helping all students succeed. These strategies are: intensify learning, provide professional development to assure skilled teachers, expand learning options, assess students in a manner to assist teachers, and intervene in time to arrest poor performance.”
My issue now become what do you do after putting in these supports and interventions in place and the student still doesn’t meet the learning outcomes? What are our options? Where can we turn to support this student?
Notes
(1) Students who are not capable of meeting the learning outcomes are not included here as they would either have adaptations to help them meet the outcomes (L.D. students) or would be working on modified outcomes based on their abilities (intellectual deficiencies).
This is part two in my Assessment series. Please see part 1 here.
The original project I spoke of in my first post has been partially placed on hold (until the beginning of April). The students in the class have become very interested in their current project which involves each of them teaching a lesson on a different event in a history timeline the class has created. What I love about what the classroom teacher has done though is that she is teaching them how to teach a lesson and not assessing them just on the lesson, but on how well they implement the demonstrated teaching strategies to ‘teach’ their classmates. As part of this project I am going into the classroom to teach the class a lesson on Blooms’ Taxonomy and teach them how to understand where they have their ’students’ working on the taxonomy. The classroom teacher put it really well already when she told her students that if their I-Touch could do it – then it was probably near the bottom of the taxonomy. I think it has been about 4 years since I have actually planned and taught a lesson, so it should be an interesting time. What I love most about this project is that while the teacher is helping the students to understand the relevance of different historical events she is also furthering their own understanding of how they learn.
I have also started work on a second project, with another teacher in the school. This particular teacher was wanting to explore how to differentiate her instruction in Math while covering the topic of fractions and decimals. Specifically she wants to find a way to get three students who really struggle in Math some sense of accomplishment while working in the classroom setting (rather than having them work on a completely different Math program). She also wanted to find a way to provide meaningful activities for 3 students who were very advanced in Math (one does Calculus with his mom on the weekends) without just giving them work from higher grades.
We are working on adapting one of David Spendlove’s strategies from the book “Putting Assessment for Learning into Practice” to help build the confidence of our three struggling learners. Our basic strategy will be this:
- Before each concept it taught, use a resource teacher to pull these three students and pre-teach the concept.
- Introduce the concept to the rest of the class with the three students present
- Create safety in the class by using a cooperative learning / questioning strategy that always allows for think time (and hopefully talk time) before questions are posed.
- Use the “Planned Intervention” strategy from Spendlove to specifically target questions to the three students we are focusing on during the lesson.
- Have all students complete work at the basic level of the concept.
- The following class have the three targeted students work with the resource teacher on the next concept while the rest of the class ’goes deeper’ with the original concept.
- Repeat the same process with each concept.
It is hoped that this strategy will accomplish the following:
- Increase the learning / decrease the frustration of the three struggling learners
- Help these three learners develop some confidence in Math class (they know the answers to the questions)
- Allow the rest of the class to learn the basic concepts and apply them at a slightly higher level
To help meet the needs of our high achieving students we have set them up a Wiki library on the class webpage. During the concept introduction lessons these students will be working on developing the wiki library to contain each of the following:
- A new (not from the book) explanation of each concept.
- A new (not from the book) concrete example of each concept.
- A link to a website or web-resource that can be used to practice this concept.
Our hope in this task is that it will force these students to look at concepts that are relatively simple to them and really understand the mathematical processes that are present, analyze these processes and come up with their own explainations for them. These students will also participate in the second half (Going Deeper) portion of each topic and will have an opportunity to share the progress of the wiki with the rest of the class to use as a study aid.
More updates to follow I am sure…Questions, comments, suggestions are always welcome and encouraged.
As I organize myself for the upcoming week I am interested to see what effect the end of the Olympics has on the 700+ students at my school. Since we held a 6:45 AM celebration on Feb 11th to watch the Olympic Torch pass our school our students have been completely ’olympicized’. I didn’t truly understand how into it they were until I was setting up my laptop/projector in the cafeteria the morning after Virtue and Moir won gold in Ice Dance.
I asked a group of grade 8 boys what they wanted to see from the night before and the first thing I heard was, “Do you have those figure skaters that won gold last night Mr. Pearse?”
We threw a school Olympics and had each class completely engrossed in supporting their adopted country, and after mentioning that we wanted everyone to wear red and white on the Thursday afternoon announcements had about 90% of the kids do it on Friday (ok, this was only about 10 more kids than would have worn it without the announcement, but it was pretty cool!).
So what happens now? Sure tomorrow will be about hockey. “Did you see that game” “What a play by Crosby” “Looooouuuuu!”…and as per A reponser to ‘A Question on Teacher Attire’ I will appropriately be wearing my Team Canada jersey tomorrow.
But what about the next day? Our student are only 11-13, they have never been so close to something this big before. This afternoon my entire city (a Vancouver suburb) was in party mode, there were people dancing with Canadian Flags on major streets, fire trucks with horns and sirens going just for fun, it was awesome.
So what now?
Recently Larry Ferlazzo authored a post called “A question about teacher attire”. While reading this post and the comments that followed I found myself reflecting not only on my own attire at work but also on that of the teachers in my school.
When I started teaching, at the age of 22, I found dressing for work very tough. I felt the need to be dressed professionally however had such a diverse job that it was practically impossible. I started most of my days coaching basketball, then worked as a librarian for part of the morning before teaching a P.E. class, followed by some more time in the library and then taught a drama class. I often found myself teaching a class in my library wearing a sweatsuit, or attempting to teach P.E. while wearing a shirt and tie.
I understand the difficulty for teachers to consistently dress professionally, and applaud those who try to keep it up despite diverse schedules, but what I don’t understand is the teachers who either don’t care, or just give up. Too many times we [teachers] hide behind being professionals. Well, if we are professionals, we need to act it. We need to be role models for our students in all ways, yes, we need to DRESS IT! No I don’t believe that we all need to wear suits every day, but we need to dress appropriately for what we are teaching. We need to show our students what it means to be an adult, and act appropriately in different situations.
So to answer the question “What do kids get out of us dressing professionally?:
- I agree that it gives us an elevated level of respect in our classrooms and schools, this in turn has a positive effect on classroom management and ultimately student learning (This may sound over-stated, I know that there is a lot more to it, and also know many teachers who I believe could dress more professionally, who have fantastic classrooms with amazing things happening in them).
- I believe it helps establish a professional teacher-student relationship which is very important for new (young) teachers and helps them establish the difference between “Teacher” and ‘Friend”.
- I believe it helps us gain the respect of parents as well, which goes a long way with our students.
No, it’s not everything, and yes, you can be an inspirational and gifted educator while dressing like a slob. However, if we are professionals, and truly care our professional image, we must dress appropriately for each learning environment we are a part of.
Recently, as part of my new professional growth plan, I have begun focussing on trying to improve assessment practices in my school. I have put out an open invitation for any teacher at our school who would like me to work on any project with them. I have offered them time, collaboration, research (I will sort through the research for ideas for them), and a temporary teaching partner in exchange for them trying something new and pushing their practice a little.
The first project is focussing on using visual literacy (Graphic Novels, Film, Video, Websites, Art, etc.) to represent student understanding of the The Universal Declaration of Human Rights. We are focussing on using self / peer assessment combined with group developed rubrics to evaluate the projects. We are playing with the idea of having the students (Gr. 8’s) develop their projects to present to the elementary students to give them a focus for their work.
 We are also working with a slightly modified idea from the book Putting Assessment into Practice by David Spendlove (great book by the way) by having the students develop 1 question for us (the teachers) to ask them from each level of Maslow’s Heirarchy. Each question would, of course need an answer, and would then be evaluated by another student. The evaluating student would need to assess what level (of the heirarchy) that question represented and state why each answer did (or did not) adequately answer the question.
The other ideas we have been exploring in relation to Assessment is the use of classroom question/discussion time as an assessment tool. Spendlove speaks of “targeted interventions” in his book and the strategic use of questions to assess the understanding of specific students (or groups of students). One possibile way this could look is to pose a question to the students and tell them that they have 15 seconds to discuss with their parner then we will randomly choose someone to answer (This has Barrie Bennett written all over it). Each class we will specifically target the questions towards specific students whose understanding we are assessing. Through this process we will be able to gather the ‘assessment’ that we need, but will also have the entire class on task and thinking during the process. We will see how it goes.
We are still working on creating this project and any ideas you have would be appreciated. Thanks.
I must admit that I am more than a little upset as I compose the inaugural post of my ‘new’ blog. The development of my new blog was unintentional, however I will take it as a valuable learning experience.
Recently I decided to change the host for my blog (as yahoo was just too expensive) and have now learned that the content of my blog was contained in the online database and not in the files that I transferred using FTP. Therefore I have the basic format of my old blog with no content.
Thus my journey begins again, which may not be a bad thing. This will allow me to redefine the purpose of my blog, which is a good idea as my educational interests have been changing. The old POTM defined itself around technology and the use of technology in purposful ways in teaching. Although I do believe that this will still be a part of my blog, I have recently found myself spending more time reflecting on what is ‘good teaching’ and trying to promote better learning experiences for the students I work with. I am also cognisant of the many posts about my life as an administrator that just didn’t fit with the original purpose of POTM.
Thus an unintentional end…has brought me to a new beginning…
Grade 8 girls are an interesting animal; some more than others.
Some time ago there were two grade 8 girls who had a lunch time consequence of cleaning up the grouds at lunchtime. It was an unusually cold Spring day and was actually sleeting outside. The girls met me outside without any sweaters or jackets on and I quickly stated,
“Girls you don’t really look prepared for the weather outside, will you be warm enough?”
They reassured me that they would be fine, and I quickly told them that I would make sure they stayed under cover so they wouldn’t get wet; they seemed unusually pleased with this statement and happily headed off to perform their duties.
Once outside I noticed that they looked a little bit concernd when I told them that they would need to walk around the perimeter of the school stepping out to grab garbage when they saw it.
“But, Mr. Pearse, our socks will get wet?!”
Glancing down I instantly noticed that they were shoeless!
“Girls,” I said, “Where are your shoes?”
“Oh, in our lockers”
… pause … don’t know why, but I had expected a little more without further prompting, finally I stopped waiting and asked,
“Why are they in your locker?”
“Oh, they are damp from P.E., and we don’t want to get our socks wet!”
Logical!
“But girls, do you think your socks would get wetter from your wet shoes, or from walking through the water/snow combination currently falling from the sky?”
Another pause, they were actually contemplating the question!
“Can we go get out shoes Mr. Pearse”
Great ideas! I nodded and they returned about 7 minutes later, with shoes!
Our PAC (Parent Advisory Council) has decided to promote April as Walk to School Month for our school, which I think is awesome. I often wonder why are our kids driven to school? When they only live a few blocks away, and are very capable of walking, rollerblading, or riding their bikes.
In preparation for this month I decided to gather a little bit of data and found that between 8:20 and 9:00 we have, on average, 255 cars through our parking lot. The numbers did vary from day to day, with there being a high number of cars towards the end of the week, and when the weather was cold or wet; I decided not to count on the day it snowed as our parking lot was practically impassable and more time was spent pushing cars out of the lot than counting them! It is probably also worth noting that many parents do drive their kids to school but know better than to come anywhere near our ‘parking’ lot in the morning or afternoon, thus I would imagine that the true number of drivers is probably significantly higher.
Thus far during ‘Walk to School Month’ I have found that we have an average of 240 cars through our lot each morning! However this morning, 2/3 of the way through the month, we had 275 cars through our lot, on a cloudy, but dry, morning! It has really got me wondering if our efforts are making a difference and has lead me to ask (or more correctly) has lead to me screaming in a question like manner:
“What do we need to do to change this behaviour?”
As the goal was to change student behaviour we originally started by targeting the students. We offered prizes for those who walked to school, and promoted it through our homeroom classes. Although many students were walking and getting entered in the prize draws for it, it doesn’t seem like anyone who used to be driven to school had started walking!
Thus we have changed our methods and are starting to target the parents. We now have students in our parking lot each morning with banners stating the cause in three different languages! And starting tomorrow we will be handing out flyers to every car that leaves our parking lot, also in three languages! Our theory is that if the parents don’t offer to drive their kids, or don’t let themselves be persuaded to drive, we may be able to decrease the number of students who are driven to school each morning – or at least shame the parents into dropping them off a block away!
Always looking for ideas if anyone is willing to offer them up!
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