Assessment for Learning - Part 2

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:

1. Before each concept it taught, use a resource teacher to pull these three students and pre-teach the concept.
2. Introduce the concept to the rest of the class with the three students present
3. 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.
4. Use the “Planned Intervention” strategy from Spendlove to specifically target questions to the three students we are focusing on during the lesson.
5. Have all students complete work at the basic level of the concept.
6. 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.
7. Repeat the same process with each concept.

It is hoped that this strategy will accomplish the following:

1. Increase the learning / decrease the frustration of the three struggling learners
2. Help these three learners develop some confidence in Math class (they know the answers to the questions)
3. 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:

1. A new (not from the book) explanation of each concept.
2. A new (not from the book) concrete example of each concept.
3. 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.