Category: Teaching and Learning
Teaching with Intention: 4 Ways for Improving Formative Assessment

Teaching with Intention: 4 Ways for Improving Formative Assessment

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I’ve been binge watching webinars by Dr. Dylan Williams, and if you don’t know who that is, well am I glad you came to my blog because I am going to share of some of his techniques for embedded formative assessment. His ideas have really made me take pause when it comes to assessment for learning in my classroom. There’s no way I could distil all his wisdom into this blog post but I will offer you 4 techniques that he has shared in one of his recent books on assessment.

  1. Plan your questions!  Questions should be clearly focused and link to the key concepts of the lesson. The questions should be worth asking and answering. Those questions should “hinge” on the direction that the learning needs to go next.
  2. No hands up, except to ask a question. This can be a powerful technique in improving student engagement. With this strategy, you ask the question first, then pick a student at random. Picking students at random can be as simple as using Popsicle sticks with student names on it (put the names BACK into the container though so they don’t think that their turn is over and they disengage), or using a tool like Class Dojo which can randomly select students (although awarding points for their answer is not necessarily encouraged).
  3.  Wait! And Wait AGAIN! After posing a question, give it a 3-5 second pause. Dr. Williams suggests that you let the students know that you are providing them more time to think so that students don’t rush and give more thoughtful answers. And then after a student answers, give wait time again so that students can reflect on the idea given. As teachers we shouldn’t be in a hurry to validate or correct answers. We should allow students the opportunity to respond to the idea shared.
  4. Avoid questions altogether. It has been suggested that asking questions shuts down discussion because there is a “right” and “wrong” answer. So, if you have reluctant learners, sometimes its best to provide a statement and have students evaluate the idea and give justifications for their response. For example: “Donald Trump claims that the election is rigged.”  Right now, especially if you are an American, you began to think whether you agree or disagree with that statement. You can imagine how discussion could ensue from this statement, right?!

So hopefully these ideas will elicit some inspired action in your classroom this week. And if you can’t do them all, then what can you do? What is one small step, one idea, that you can take to improve how your generate and use formative assessment in your classroom?

 
From Mind into Matter: 5 Ways to cultivate the Mindset of the MakerSpace

From Mind into Matter: 5 Ways to cultivate the Mindset of the MakerSpace

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There is a Zen saying, “to know and not do is to not yet know.”  This seems relevant in today’s shifting views about learning, and I recognize my own struggle as an educator in preparing students for the unknown of the future. One of the skills that seem most intangible for me is teaching students to be more discerning in their learning-how to get them to love the journey and not the destination, so they want to ask more questions and dig deeper.

Lately, I’ve been inspired by the book, Invent to Learn. I think it really speaks to this disposition of curiosity as the impetus for extended learning, in which the child’s mind becomes the essential “makerspace”; our classrooms merely become the concrete representation of this immaterial world of their ideas. Experimenting and creating something is an act of discovering that a thought can be made solid.

It acknowledges that the power of making something comes from a question or impulse that the learner has, and is not imposed from the outside. Questions like “How can my car go faster?” or “I like the way this looks, can I make it prettier?” are treated as valid, and in fact, potentially more valid than criteria imposed by anyone else, including a teacher. Learners are empowered to connect with everything they know, feel, and wonder to stretch themselves into learning new things. We seek to liberate learners from their dependency on being taught.

Sylvia Libow Martinez, Invent to Learn.

As I reflect on the quote above, I think about how important it is to catch students in the act of curiosity so that I can implore them to engage in their ideas. In this way, I am no longer the guide but their champion. I wonder if this encouragement can compensate for the attitudes in our societies, in which quick fixes are highly valued. I believe it’s important to have students develop their stamina and see failure as an important element for their inevitable success.

Making things has changed the way they look at the world around them, opening new doors and presenting new opportunities to get deeply involved in processes that require knowledge, skill building, creativity, critical thinking, decision making, risk taking, social interaction, and resourcefulness. They understand that when you do something yourself, the thing that changes most profoundly is you. (Frauenfelder, 2011)

There are several units in our POI (programme of inquiry) that could incorporate many of ideals of the makers mindset. I know in the Early Years, this is easiest to do because students at this age have the permission to play. This seems a bit unfair when you think of it. “Play is called recreation because it makes us new again, it re-creates us and our world.” (Brown & Vaughan, 2010). I think this process of re-creation is ongoing and the foundation of life-long learner. Implanting design-processthis mindset into classrooms could not only empower students, but also teachers. Moving out of our instructional comfort-zones then becomes an act of faith, because we have to be trust that students can learn on their own. As soon as I write that sentence, it seems self-evident–of course students can learn on their own–that is their natural inclination!! But how can we nudge them to taking their discoveries from thoughts into doings? How can we translate the ideas of the minds into real learning.

Here are 5 strategies that might help teachers render the MindSpace of the Learner into a reality:

  1. Be curious about what students are curious about. Not all students will present their curiosities as questions–in fact many young students present their ideas as statements. Write and track them, even if anecdotally.
  2. Use self-evaluation for students to reflect and assess their attitudes towards the design mindset. This could be as formal or informal as you like, such as a discussion with a 1-3 finger self-assessment or a journal entry.
  3. Advertise problems and promote solutions, even if they are silly.
  4. Set up a classroom “creation station” with some”junk” to be repurposed.
  5. Share inspirational stories as exemplars. You can connect with other classrooms either in your school or virtually through a resource like ePals.

I know that I will take my own advice as I strive to make my classroom more engaging and student-centered. I wonder what suggestions others might have about shifting our classrooms into laboratories of the mind. Perhaps you can share below what other ideas or strategies you might have.

Until then, stay in Joy!

 
How to Spell Transdisciplanary Learning in the Early Years

How to Spell Transdisciplanary Learning in the Early Years

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Seriously, how long will I have to write transdisciplanary before my spell check program acknowledges that it’s a real word. No matter how many times I ask it to “add it to the dictionary”, it still gives me the red line.  Doesn’t my computer know I am a PYP teacher. What nerve, I tell you! lol

As any Early Years teacher knows, there can be a fine line between topic and concept.

Look at my next unit:

People can help our communities by working in different ways.

  • People play different roles in a community. (responsibility)
  • How helpers impact a community. (connection)
  • How tools help people to do their jobs. (function)

What comes to your mind?–Community Helpers, right? –A bunch of lovely centers/corners. We can have police, fire fighters, nurses, doctors, construction workers, etc…..Lots of role play- Fun Early Years unit, right?

Not to me. I find this unit a challenge because now I am asking myself how can I steer this inquiry away from being a topic to developing those concepts of our roles and responsibilities in a community. I’m thinking about what approaches  I can use to embed multiple disciplines so that students can explore and create in contexts that are authentic for them. Preschool STEAM– Of course!

STEAM, in case you don’t know is an acronym that stands for:

S. cience

T. echnology

E.ngineering

A.rt

M. ath

Aha, I can hear you say how can ” doing nifty projects” make it transdisciplanary? Fair retort. Point taken. So I’ve decided to up the ante and instead of centers or corners during this unit, we will have PROBLEMS.  In the beginning, I will have to provide them through literature links and set up these provocations with my main teacher question: HOW COULD SOMEONE IN THE COMMUNITY HELP HIM/HER? Later, however, I expect students to generate them.

As I am in the planning stages of this unit, I will have to report back with our progress, but my head is spinning with so many ideas. I can’t wait to see what the students come up with!

 

 
Supporting Inquiry with Apps

Supporting Inquiry with Apps

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Our school does a BYOD  iPad program for grades 3-5, and then we have sets of iPads that are shared with EY-P2. Using iPads for learning has been really beneficial but it’s not all rainbows and flowers. It takes experience and thoughtfulness when using apps because sometimes you spend more time on learning the technology vs. actually doing the project you intended. This happened twice last year for me while using Padlet to do a collaborative mindmap as a part of a formative assessment and then keeping a digital journal using Microsoft’s OneNote.  It was a love-hate relationship, and I learned a lot from the experience.

So now as I support teachers with using apps in their classroom I have to think about how long it might take to teach a new application and if the benefits of the learning outweigh this loss of instruction. Here are some apps that I like that I think can support some of our upcoming Units of Inquiry:

EY 4: People can help our communities by working in different ways.

  • Inventioneers and Busy Water. I love these apps because they have a great STEM link for little ones as they learn how to design and build structures in order to solve problems. Busy water is less challenging, in my opinion, but both games are engaging.inventioneers

KG:  Living things have specific needs in order to grow and stay healthy.

  • Virry: This is a great interactive game with “live” animals (I presume in a zoo setting), in which you get to feed animals like lions or meerkats. The free version just lets the kids do limited basic things whereas if you get a subscription, you have more engagement and learn more about the animals. I don’t mind paying for subscriptions when more content is added, but I haven’t seen that yet. However, it is a very unique game and it is worth the .99 USD for a month of its use.

virry

P1: Personal histories help us to reflect on who we are and where we’ve come from.

  • Aging Booth or Old Fart Booth: The kids LOVE these! This apps give them the impression of what they could look like as an elderly person. And the apps are FREE–my favorite word!

aging-booth

P2: Maps can be used to help people locate places.

 Google Maps and Google Earth are the most obvious choices. And although there are other great apps out there , after reading this website, I think that Google Maps is so rich, there is no reason why other apps are really needed. Quality over quantity! However, teachers could recommend other apps like National Girrafic and Tiny Countries for home learning.

smarty-pins

P3: Understanding movement enhances our creativity.

We have had a lot of conversation about which way this inquiry could go. The Arts teachers will obviously focus on dance and expressing movement visually. The last unit was about covered content like body systems and nutrition so I thought Grade 3 could consider movement in terms of exercise and think about apps like Charity Miles to link creative ways to encourage movement. But if you consider movement with a perspective as a scientist or engineer, then that opens up a variety of other applications. Here are some ideas:

  • Scratch Jr, Hopscotch , or Logotacular: coding comes to mind as a neat way to think about programming movement. However, it really depends upon the teacher and their skill level in order to guide students, but there are a myriad of coding apps (more than I listed here), so it would be easy to differentiate for learners.
  • Simple Machines: I am a fan of the Tinybop developer apps. This one is quite nice but I do think Inventioneers could more engaging for this age group; although the Amazing Alex app would be my first choice–if only it was offered for iPads. Sigh..

charity-miles

I’ve already blogged about using technology in the upcoming P4 unit: Getting Modern about Ancient Times. And P5’s next unit (Humans express their ideas and use persuasion to influence others.) focusing on using surveys, which they use Excel for their results; so their technology concentration is on using spreadsheets and converting data into graphical representations with that program.

But hopefully sharing these ideas will help inspire you about what and how you can use apps in your classroom. I really interested in others’ ideas if any other apps come to mind when looking at our Central Ideas for our inquiries. Please share in the comments below!

Happy Apping!

 

 

 
Stranger in a Strange Land: Research in the Digital Age

Stranger in a Strange Land: Research in the Digital Age

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During one of our collaborative planning meetings,  we were discussing how students are keen to grab their iPads rather than a book when they are doing research. Some of us remarked how we have to make students aware of the books in our classrooms as a primary source of information, rather than going down the rabbit hole of internet research. It became clear that integrating technology with research skills really brings up our “digital divide” with our students. And perhaps one of the greatest challenges is to teach what we, ourselves, have limited experience or expertise in. How can teachers move from being digital voyeurs (people who recognize the shift to digital, but reluctant to embrace it)  to digital immigrants (people who have crossed the chasm to the digital world, and learned how to engage with it)?

digitial-landscape

So the teacher becomes the student!  How can we help students conduct online research whilst developing our own understanding of the blindspots involved in internet research?

becomebetteronlineresearchers

Because I teach in the Early Years, I could not really rely on my own experience and had to do my own digging around on how to research online in order to support fellow teachers.  I started on Edutopia and was relieved to read about the approaches to teaching research skills  by Mary Beth Hertz that provided a good starting place when arming students with tools and strategies. Also, I found these lessons that support online research for students and felt like it could be a good place to begin for direct instruction during our technology time. And then the ideas in this website could be used for a more inquiry-based approach to teaching these skills.

I learned a lot actually in this query into how to teach research skills and I am excited to hear the reflections of our teachers as they negotiate digital learning in their classrooms.
Shifting the Classroom

Shifting the Classroom

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The Creature in the Classroom

BY JACK PRELUTSKY

It appeared inside our classroom

at a quarter after ten,

it gobbled up the blackboard,

three erasers and a pen.

It gobbled teacher’s apple

and it bopped her with the core.

“How dare you!” she responded.

“You must leave us . . . there’s the door.”

The Creature didn’t listen but described an arabesque as it gobbled all her pencils, seven notebooks and her desk.

Teacher stated very calmly, “Sir! You simply cannot stay,

I’ll report you to the principal

unless you go away!”

But the thing continued eating,

it ate paper, swallowed ink,

as it gobbled up our homework

I believe I saw it wink.

Teacher finally lost her temper.

“OUT!” she shouted at the creature.

The creature hopped beside her

and GLOPP . . . it gobbled teacher.

When I think about how much education has been transformed in the last decade,  I find this poem a bit ironic and have to wonder if the poet knew what was in store for  today’s classroom when he wrote that. Did he know how technology would “gobble” up paper and ink–even to some extent the teacher?
 However, there’s no doubt that our classrooms have become more student-orientated rather than teacher-centered. And I was reminded lately  during an IB webinar, Creating Inspiring Places, that our classrooms need to be designed for learning rather than merely being decorated. With that in mind, I loved this infographic that I snagged from the presentation.

todays-classroom

While looking at this, I asked myself what do I do well and what do I need to work on more this year in my own classroom? I’m feeling lucky that I have a long holiday week nearing the corner so I can sit down and take this all in more so. And what can I share with teachers? What would inspire their learning spaces?-What needs to be “gobbled up” in our school so that our “creatures” get the best education that they deserve? Hmm…

What about you?–What do you think needs to be “gobbled up” in your classroom?

Life is Play

Life is Play

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It really wasn’t until I had my own child that I deeply understood the quote from Fred Rogers, “Play is often talked about as if it was a relief from serious learning. But for children, play is serious learning. Play is really the work of childhood.”

 As I have watched not only my own child grow, but also the immense amount of growth that goes on with my students, it becomes more obvious to me the need to honor that Life is Play for the young.

Students construct such deep meaning of their world by finding ways to relate to it through enriching their understanding of:

  • Relationships: through shared experience and connection with others.
  • Environment: awareness of beauty and the ability to create their own private world of imagination and thinking.
  • Systems: understanding how the world works in their lives and in the lives of others.
  • Decision making: determining what is important to them and for others; making choices that develop their self-esteem.

As I step back into the Early Years this year, I wonder how as a teacher I may guide play better through provocations, asking questions and expanding their thinking. Not only do I wish for them to practice foundational numeracy and literacy skills, but I want to engage and challenge them so that they can create and build deeper conceptual understandings and open up their view of the world.

 

I look forward to the year ahead, and the wonderful complexity of how young children develop their ideas through imagination and creative action. This is the joy of my “work”-to be the observer and provocateur of children involved in play, as play is now my life’s work as well.

 

 

Collaborative Learning Teams

Collaborative Learning Teams

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I love the beginning of the year–there’s so much possibility, a lot of blank space on this white sheet of paper which I have titled 2016-2017 School Year.  I’ve decided that something that I really want to work on improving at our school is the quality of in-house professional development. I’ve decided to start a mind-map of what would be the essential qualities of PD

pd journal note

One of the challenges I’ve faced in the past with in-house professional development  is that we’ve lacked vision and purpose for it, so when we decided to do PLC’s (Professional Learning Communities), it lacked the interest and enthusiasm for self-directed and collective learning; many of our staff believe that the only way to learn is to attend a workshop or have a presenter “teach” us, as if learning is something that happens to us and not as a result of our own engagement. Coupled with the fact that there was a lack of understanding in admin of how to structure a PLC and manage it, it was not surprising that staff rebuffed at the idea of it. Bad PD is almost worse than no PD, because if negative expectations become the norm then the openness to collaborative learning is highly diminished.
The fact that I was beginning to see these attitudes emerging meant that I needed to roll up my sleeves and get to learning more about professional development so I could influence our leadership team in ways in which we could improve it.
Although I love blogs, I turned to several books to get more in-depth understanding of how to improve professional development : Models of Professional Development, Leading Professional Learning: Tools to Connect and Empower Teachers , Better Conversations, and Learning By Doing.  (A lot of summer reading, I know.)
Something that I loved from the work on PLCs from Richard Dufour and Robert Eaker was this idea of cultivating a culture in  “educators [creating] an environment that fosters mutual cooperation, emotional support, and personal growth as they work together to achieve what they cannot accomplish alone”. The goal of PLCs  is to take an interest in learning and turn it into a commitment to improvement in that area. So, the professional learning community that Dufour and Eaker envision has six characteristics:
• Shared mission, vision, and values
• Collective inquiry
• Collaborative teams
• Action orientation and experimentation
• Continuous improvement
• Results orientation
IMG_0322
I also appreciate Sharon Hord’s elaboration on PLCs to include an emphasis on reflective dialogue as a vehicle for collective learning. When I was reading about this, it seemed to mirror some of the power of peer-coaching data that is shown to improve implementation. I thought about Jim Knight’s coaching conversations and how asking better questions can develop those dialogues. It seemed to me that I could connect some dots and come up with a dynamic approach to in-house professional development, which includes a lot of the elements of a PLC, peer-coaching and expanding our notion of best practice.
Since we’ve been reviewing our data on writing, I thought it would be easier for us to rally around a common goal: improving student writing.  Also, I wanted to provide better resources since my staff’s professional research skills were weak; thus I am introducing a book study. Furthermore, I want to differentiate upper and lower primary school’s objectives and put them into collaborative learning teams (my re-branding of the PLC). The lower grades (Early Years to Grade 1) are developing attitudes to writing and an awareness of the writing life. I found some amazing books from Matt Glover and Katie Wood that help teachers modify the elements of the writer’s workshop for younger ones and shape their perception of themselves as authors through a deep dive into illustrative study. In the grades in which writing skills are being consolidated (Grades 2-5), they can look at the 6 Traits +1 of Writing as a model to develop habits of student self-reflection of their work and look to mentor texts as a means to develop their craft.
In order to combine some of the elements of effective professional development for our small school, I want to include these elements in the learning teams:
  1. Create a mission statement for their learning teams.
  2. Create a personal goal that is linked to their appraisal.
  3. Regular discussion of their reading.
  4. Share student work samples, rubrics and other assessments.
  5. Non-critical dialogue from a learning partner (peer-coach)
  6. Demonstrations of their teaching by learning partner (monthly observation)
  7. Planning and reflection of those plans.
  8. Mid-year checkpoint, in which the learning team shares what has been working and not working for them.
  9. End of year presentation, which includes looking at MAP data and reflection on our goals.
  10. Celebration for the work and effort that they made.

I know that this is my first time that I will be given autonomy for PD and I’m excited by the trust and freedom of my new principal. We have an early release day on Wednesdays which is allocated time for this effort. Of course since I am trying to combine several aspects of effective professional development, I am a bit anxious with this experimentation but I know that overall I have staff who will be open and willing to try something different. I will definitely update later about our progress.

 

Trandisciplanary Learning

Trandisciplanary Learning

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Transdiciplanary -that sure is a mouthful to say and I think it might take me a lifetime to master but I love the process. I think of it as trying to link as many subject perspectives into a single learning context. A bottle neck of connections. In this case, it was the Central Idea: Humans have values and belief systems that can impact their actions.

As we embarked upon this inquiry, I wanted the students to ponder:

  • How do we know what people believe in? (key concept: form)
  • How do we know if the opinions we have about things are truly accurate (key concept: perspective)

So we began with our literacy link, investigating facts vs. opinions in the books that we had pulled from the library for this unit.  I asked them to do some close reading (and yes, I used the magnifying glasses to illustrate this point), thinking of themselves as “data detectives”digging for clues. Students had to record this information in their journals. Later on we discussed what kind of data was commonly found, and if this was fact or opinion–how can we tell the difference in books, which they recognized as numbers, figures and dates.

After tuning in, I posed them how we might find out what our school community believes in.So now enters the math link, looking at the data management strand of our standards.The students agreed on a survey, in which we spent a couple of lessons developing their understanding of the mathematical principles of collecting and organizing data. We talked about 3 important elements to accuracy in our survey results:

  1. Good survey questions yield accurate data.
  2. We can’t assume answers, we must ask for clarification if we are unsure of their answers.
  3. The larger the survey sample, the more reliable our results.

The students then designed simple, yes/no/maybe questions about various beliefs, which mostly focused on supernatural elements like Do you believe in God?  Do you believe in ghosts?

Students all agreed on a sample size of 30 respondents for their surveys, and started roving the corridors to ask their questions. Afterwards, we analyzed our data, and the students reflected on their results, which then circled back to literacy, in which they had to write these reflections. The students had no idea that they were doing “math” or “literacy” of course. They just knew it was “unit” time, and I think this is the key to what it means to this crazy word that I can hardly spell: TRANSDISCIPLANARY.

 

So now we segue way to how we can communicate our findings to our school community. Many ideas were suggested but we decided to use graphs. I toyed with teaching them the Excel program, but I determined that they really needed to focus more concretely on the math vs the technology–at least for now. So then began a couple serious math lessons on creating pie charts, in which we reviewed fractions and angles before we even began making the pie charts. When we made the pie charts, discussion arose about whether or not we should color them, and if we should use the same colors or different colors. Also, whether certain colors represented certain ideas; for example Yes should be green or yellow.  At the end, the students agreed to let students represent their findings individually, and be open-minded to displaying their results in the way they wanted. I thought this was an interesting discussion, and it was a natural link to what they not only knew about each other socially and culturally but their beliefs about artistry. img_0397

What I loved about this project, which grew out of a couple of questions, was that the students were highly engaged and involved–not in math, not in literacy, not in art–but in LEARNING!  And although this unit is still underway, the thinking hasn’t ended because the project did; it continues on.

My Challenge with Inquiry-Based Learning

My Challenge with Inquiry-Based Learning

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The longer I teach in the PYP, the more I recognize how much learning I have to do, especially since I am coming from an American educational background, in which my own student learning experiences did not include inquiry-based learning, let alone my professional teaching training. I’ve had little framework in my personal life experience. So I often find that I have to step away from national standards and think about how I can best construct meaning of the central idea. Most of the time it feels exciting, but sometimes it feels overwhelming–there’s so much unknown as I am a guide on my student’s learning journey. And I’m often wondering to myself: Am I doing this right?

I’ve decided that my that the only way I know I am moving in the right direction is if I see that student action is taking place. Are students taking personal responsibility in their learning? Are they inspired into action?–do they need a nudge or a push to get them moving?

student-action-motivator
Taken from Jessica O’Hanley’s webpage

Granted not all action will be a project or consist of a product. I love how Sonya Terborg’s blog lays out 6 ways in which action can be demonstrated by:

  1. Having-more knowledge, more care, more determination and more respect.
  2. Thinking differently-wondering and/or changing your opinion.
  3. Feeling differently-empathizing, loving, admiring, worrying or feeling inspired to make a change.
  4. Doing something or NOT doing something like giving time, money and effort to a cause or stoping a behavior.
  5. Saying-explaining, discussing, debating, asking or thanking.
  6. Being-changing one’s behavior as to be more patient and respectful

I think when I use these ideas as guideposts, I can reflect better on the inquiry and determine what worked and what didn’t work. And, like all things, I need to remain patient with my learning journey, staying open to the process of discovery and growth in this professional area of mine.

I wonder how other educators determine if they are successful in their practice of inquiry based learning. Please share what you consider as your markers of success!

 

 

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