Once you have your
standards figured out you need to back up. In the power standards books you
learn how to write essential questions that once answered will show whether or
not your students understand the standard but first you need a plan to help
students learn what is needed to understand the standard. The plan is called a
Learning Progression (I won’t use an acronym, thank goodness, right?). “A Learning
Progression is a sequenced set of subskills and
enabling knowledge that, it is believed, students must master en route to
mastering a more remote curricular aim.” (Popham 2008) Learning progressions
are great ways to plan what you are going to do with students and the best part
is that in a learning progression you actually plan out what formative
assessments you will use and when and where! So the idea is that you
communicate the standard to the students as well as the learning targets that
they will need to reach along the way to learn the standard. To learn more
about learning progressions read Transformative Assessment by W. James Popham.
This is a sample Science learning progressions for
the learning of insects. If you click on the image you can view it larger or you can download a Word
document of the learning progression here so that you can
actually read it. The big, red oval is the standard students will be learning
about. The blue rectangular boxes are the learning targets that students need
to learn, in the order students could learn them, to understand what they need
to know for the standard. The green rectangular boxes are the formative
assessments given along the way to see if students are learning the targets. By
giving formative assessments between learning targets teachers can decide if
they should move on or review before going on to the next learning target
activity. Here is another graphic organizer for creating learning progressions. Here is a Learning Progression Tool document to help you make your own learning progressions
for any subject. The tool is helpful and goes well with the graphic organizer.
I was able to create a learning progression for an Earth Science unit I was
teaching with another teacher who was teaching the same topic and here’s what
we came up with. A warning we got in our PD, “Keep a learning
progression sufficiently lean so that it is likely to be used. The only
building blocks to include are those for which you plan to collect assessment
evidence.” –Popham To
make learning targets it helps to know the difference between enabling
knowledge and subskills needed. Enabling knowledge is what students will need
to know to achieve the learning target and the subskills are what students will
need to do to achieve the learning target. It helps to know the difference when
choosing an assessment. We were given examples of learning targets that were
too big, too small, and just right. Here are some Science examples:
Too
BIG– “Students know that: Earth is a system that contains a fixed amount
of each stable chemical element existing in different chemical forms. Each
element on Earth moves among reservoirs in the solid Earth, ocean, and
atmosphere as part of biogeochemical cycles driven by energy from the Earth’s
interior and from the Sun.”
Yeah!
No duh, right? That should be the standard.
Too
small– “Students know that energy can be transferred from one place to
another.”
What makes this too small
for a learning target is the fact that it’s too low on bloom’s taxonomy that
students know energy can be transferred. A better target would be for students
to demonstrate how energy can be transferred.
Just right- “Students are
expected to sort plants and animals according to their structures (e.g.
presence of hair, feathers, or scales on their skin) and behaviors (e.g. grazing,
hunting or diving for food).”
This works as a learning
target that can be assessed before moving on to the next target. Assessing
before moving on to the next learning target is called assessing at critical
junctures (the green rectangular boxes on your learning progression). For a
critical juncture assessment to be effective it needs to be, “diagnostic of
student understanding,” “quick,” and it needs to “inform the next step.”
Informing the next step seems crucial to me because that is where we move from
hit and miss educating to deliberate educating.
At our OMSP AfL training we
were shown four ways to consider collecting evidence from students:
•Personal Communication
(responding to individual journals or logs, 1:1 interview, asking questions in
class)
•Performance Assessment
(teacher observation of presentation or lab)
•Extended Written Response
(writing that shows higher level thinking)
•Selected Responses (forced
choice where students choose from a list then explain their thinking)
For eliciting student
thinking we want to have our “Students choose from a likely set of student
responses which should be developed to reveal their level of thinking. The
options should include best answer and other answers representing incorrect or
incomplete student understanding.” And unless you are using a tool like a chat
room or twitter to have a back channeled class discussion, direct questioning
of students isn’t the most effective because, “Questioning typically involves a
three-turn exchange in which the teacher asks a question, a student answers and
a teacher evaluates the answer. In too many classrooms, teachers try to get
students to accept the ‘right’ answer, instead of engaging them in a
conversation that elicits their ideas and uses those ideas as a starting point.”
Before OMSP I was part of
another Science partnership, the North Cascades and Olympic Science Partnership (NCOSP, from which OMSP started) and one of the best
lessons about questioning I learned was at one of our content courses. In those
courses the instructors tried something, which drove me crazy. They worked
their darndest to NOT answer any of our questions. Think about that for a
moment. Here you are a teacher, a professional, and you ask a question only to
get another question in return. When we were students they treated us like
students and not teachers learning pedagogy. We were students learning Science.
From that simple experience I learned that by answering questions the curiosity
stops, the mind actually stops thinking about the topic because it’s satisfied.
It was quite shocking. To think that by answering my students’ questions in
class I was curtailing their curiosity! I learned then to practice the skill of
answering my students’ questions either by just plain NOT answering, or by
using guiding questions. In Science it’s more beneficial for my students if I
ask them questions and have them figure things out for themselves. It’s all
about thinking. With guiding questions I can lead them in the right direction
without answering their questions for them and without doing the thinking for
them. Ever since then I have practiced not answering questions in class.
When questioning students
the questions should
-cause thinking,
and
-provide data
that informs teaching.
We were given the following
examples to improve teacher questioning:
–generating questions
with colleagues
–closed vs open
–low-order vs
high-order
–appropriate
wait-time
–basketball rather
than serial table-tennis (I like this one, easy to visualize)
–‘No hands up’
(except to ask a question)
–class polls to
review current attitudes towards an issue
–‘Hot Seat’
questioning
The part that I also find
very important is to allow all students the opportunity to think about the
questions and to be able to answer. To get all students to participate teachers
can use ABCD cards that all students have so they can hold up a card to show
their understanding, mini white-boards, exit passes, qwizdom, chatrooms or
Twitter. These are preferable to the usual class discussions where only the
outgoing students participate. Even if you draw names out of a bag only one
student is engaged at any time. Makes it easy for the others to tune out and
miss a chance to show you if they are learning or not. The idea of a hinge
question was brought up where hinge questions must, “make students choose from a likely set of
student responses which should be developed to reveal their level of thinking.
The options should include best answer and other answers representing incorrect or
incomplete student understanding.”
Here is an example of a
Science hinge question where the incorrect responses show typical student
misconceptions:
The ball sitting on the
table is not moving. It is not moving because:
A. no forces are pushing or
pulling on the ball.
B. gravity is pulling down,
but the table is in the way.
C. the table pushes up with
the same force that gravity pulls down
D. gravity is holding it
onto the table.
E. there is a force inside
the ball keeping it from rolling off the table
Students can choose the
best answer using tech like qwizdom or Google Forms, or with ABCDE cards. That
way all students can answer quickly and the teacher can quickly see who got it
or not and of those who didn’t quite get it their misconceptions will be
revealed.
So in your learning
progression you have the standard you are addressing and your learning targets
to help students achieve the standard. In order to assess for learning you will
begin writing essential questions and hinge questions that are diagnostic and
quick to help you determine the next steps to take for your students.
Now that you have a
learning progression and you’ve planned regular, diagnostic, quick assessments
for learning it’s time to use the data gathered from students to inform your
next steps. Besides informing your next steps you also need to give your
students feedback. Feedback to help them determine what their next steps should
be in their learning. We need to give feedback that will empower our students.
Before we create a culture
in our classroom of feedback it’s helpful to surface our own preconceptions
about how people learn. Do you believe that we have a set amount of
intelligence and that we can’t change it? Do you believe we each have our own
talents and that we can’t change those? Check out this video on the difference
between fixed vs growth mindsets:
Here’s a website on Fixed
vs Growth Mindsets from Ramp up for Readiness with materials to see what your students believe. We
need to be careful what we say to our students whose views of self are based on
being intelligent or smart. Those are the students who struggled the most with
not getting graded in my Science classes. They rely on getting their A’s and
B’s and without those carrots they are at a loss as to how to proceed. They’ve
lost some curiosity and plain love of learning.
To watch what you say you
have to read Carol S. Dweck’s The Perils and Promises of Praise. In short we do students a
disservice when we praise their intelligence or seem to praise their
intelligence by they way we praise them. Praising intelligence may give
students a short burst of pride but in the long run leads to negative
consequences.
This graphic from OMSP shows how having a fixed mindset leads to fear of failure, which happens when
we praise students for their intelligence. The goal is to praise students for
their effort. Effort sends the message that achievement comes from hard work
and not from having or lacking smarts. It sends the message that anyone and
everyone can succeed if they put forth the effort. I like that.
This book is a good read
for learning about giving feedback, Feedback as Part of Formative Assessment from How to Give Effective Feedback to Your Students by Susan
M. Brookhart
and together with this book How to Grade for Learning, K-12 by Ken O’Konnor
will help you figure out ways to assess students without giving grades. Even if
you grade assignments you really need to think what it means to grade formative
assessments. How can you punish a student with a low grade for not quite
knowing something yet? Failure is important to learning and we don’t want to
make our students fear failure! And if you will give A’s to all who complete a
formative assessment what’s the use of the A? Feedback makes more sense than
letter or number marks or grades and way more sense than a percentage.
Feedback is more complicated
than I ever thought. Turns out you can have seven content attributes and four
strategies for giving feedback. Who knew?
Seven content attributes
◦Focus (avoid
personal comments, focus on learning targets, focus on learner)
◦Comparison
(used when comparing work to criteria or rubrics)
◦Function
(point out strengths & weaknesses in work without evaluating or judging)
◦Valence
(being positive & constructive while giving suggestions for improvement)
◦Clarity (be
clear to make sure student understands your feedback)
◦Specificity
(be descriptive but don’t do the work for the student)
◦Tone &
Word Choice (to communicate respect for the student as an active learner)
Four strategies
◦Timing (don’t
take too long to give feedback)
◦Amount (don’t
correct everything or write too much, focus on learning targets)
◦Audience (individual
vs whole group or small group)
This document, Assessing_Feedback_Strategies_Content.doc, is fantastic as it lays out all seven content
attributes and all four strategies and explains them all with examples of good
and bad feedback!
The best part of the
session on feedback was that as we practiced writing feedback for sample
student responses we were then supposed to read each other’s work and give each
other feedback on our feedback! The more we can peer review each other’s work
the better we get! Deprivatization is the way to go.
Here’s a sample question
with rubric that we used.
They gave us three sample student responses where one student achieved the
learning target, one student surpassed the learning target and one student who
fell short of the learning target (achieved the simpler content). I purposely
removed the number column because the written feedback is more powerful than
numbers anyway and if we include the numbers wit the written feedback students
will focus on the numbers and not on the information. One important point I
remembered is to give students who achieve the learning target feedback too and
not just the ones who haven’t achieved it yet. This stuck out to me from
Brookhart’s How to Give Effective Feedback to Your Students, “It is not fair to
students to present them with feedback and opportunities to use it. It is not
fair to students to present them with what seems like constructive criticism
and them use it against them in a grade or final evaluation.”
We also used some reproducibles
off of Marzano’s site from
his Formative
Assessment & Standards-Based Grading book to practice
writing learning goals. We were learning how to determine an appropriate learning
goal with a more complex goal and a simpler goal to go with it. Our discussion
got me thinking about the way I assessed my students this past spring. I think
Marzano makes a good point about assessing students on achievement based on
what they know and what they’ve learned. Things like effort, organization and
behavior should be separate from that but also important. I created a
behavior/work ethic standard so that parents can get information on how well
their children are working and behaving in Science. It would be great if more
colleges and universities would accept information about students’ content
achievements and skills as well as their work skills. Grades alone from typical
high school transcripts don’t tell the whole story. What would colleges prefer
to remediate the content or the work skills? If you have the work skills
wouldn’t content be all that much easier to make up?
The last two AfL strategies
are important because students are too dependent on adult feedback. Last year I
had 150 students and I told them that waiting for me to give them all feedback
would take too long, they needed to help each other out. This was especially
true when they blogged. I used to read over and approve each blog one at a time.
If it got published it got my stamp of approval and if it didn’t get published
then they had to check it for my feedback to read what was needed to get their
post published. With 150 students that wasn’t going to work so I took a risk. I
told students that I’d publish all their blog posts as soon as they came to my
inbox and that it was up to them to read each other’s work and give each other
feedback. I was reading a blog recommended by someone on my PLN, can’t remember
whose blog, sorry, but I liked the way this teacher had his students write
feedback comments on blogs so I’m going to try it:
1. Quote something that stands out from the blog.
2. Say why this stands out or make a personal
connection to the post from your own experience.
3. At the end make a compliment and be nice.
If somebody knows where I got that from please tell
me!
—Some techniques we were showed for student
self-assessment and peer assessment are:
