Shawnna+Fields

Reflection on Hot Topics May 5, 2011

- What are the best forms of assessment and how can we implement them? I believe that both formative and summative assessments are important in the classroom. One of the best ways to implements these assessments is to frontload with students how these assessments work. Help them understand how a formative assessment helps both the teacher and student be aware of what they know and what they need to do for further understanding. Use journals, muddy/marvy moments, and peer collaboration to facilitate helpful formative assessment. For Summative assessment, make the final project actually matter to the student. ensure that it is connected to every activity they have participated in throughout the unit. Provide opportunities and choice in their culminating project and give students the skills to effectively convey their deep understanding. Students should understand that what they are doing in class matters. Formative and summative assessments are vital in showing students how relevant the material they are studying is to their lives.

- What is our role in preparing students to be competent in the 21st century?

- How can we make our voices active in these and other important educational topics?

__Reflection on Discussion March 28th:__

**What is the teacher’s role in discussion?**
I think that the teachers role in the discussion really changes throughout the year. At the beginning of my lesson unit, I'm planning on taking a more active role in facilitating discussion. Many students have never experienced true discussion in their classroom and need to see this process modeled. Providing the students with framed topics to discuss, giving each of them roles in the discussion, and keeping the time relatively short is, I think, a good starting point for teaching students how to be active participants in discussion. Whenever I'm thinking of incorporating group or whole class discussion into my unit, I put myself in the place of the student. I step back and think of questions and comments I would make if I were in the discussion and what problems I may run up against. This helps me figure out if I, as the teacher, will need to take a more active role during the discussion, or give students a little more freedom. In the videos we watched I liked how even the veteran teachers talked about the difficulties in facilitating discussion. It's hard to just let students go sometimes and hope that they are getting what they need to out of the discussion. I'm starting the realize that when we plan our lessons, we really need to pinpoint what we want students to get out of the discussion and perhaps ways we can get groups to talk about these topics without seeming like we are controlling the conversation. One idea I came up with was having these topics written down in a hat. After students have discussed for awhile, one person can go up to the hat, pick out a topic they haven't discussed yet and bring this back to the group. This way, they feel more in control of what they are discussing, yet as the teacher, I can see that they are getting at the things I want them to.

**How can we use questioning schemes and deliberate arrangement (see Wilhelm) to facilitate discussion?**

I liked the prompts that Wilhelm talks about on page 77 and 78. Give students various prompts to answer in their journals. Make the questions about personal opinions so that students are having to draw from their personal experiences in order to answer the question. This will help them feel more connected to the issues in the text. This is something that I am incorporating into my "Conflict" unit. We are going to be studying //The Outsiders//, but before we even read the text, I am asking students to think about their own conflicts to help get them in the mindset of the characters in the story. I think it's important to FIRST make the topics important to the students and then explore them in the text. I'm not really that into the whole radio show example that WIlhelm talked about, but I did like the topics and questions he came up with to go along with the show. It's really interesting and makes perfect sense that the first question is a text to text, followed by a text to self question. The students are constantly getting a mix of the two so that the topics are always about themselves and the text not just the text. Students have to make personal connections and reflections. Page 80 addresses one of the major issues I have had with the types of questions I am seeing in many of the classrooms I have observed this semester. "Understanding the facts of a story or a content area is of undisputed importance. But for these facts to come to life, they need to be connected to larger patterns of meaning." I'm frustrated with seeing the same "factual" questions on quizzes. The questions get at the facts, but they are never "functional and applicable to the world beyond the text." I like how Wilhelm states that we need to change the "What" questions to "So what" and "Now what" questions. I liked the "Silent Thread" idea that Wilhelm discusses on page 92. This is a great way for students to quietly reflect on the questions individually, as a group, and then as a class. I also like how you can ask up to five really deep questions and get the opinions of each student. This may be a good intro activity for the beginning of the unit when students are becoming more comfortable in a group setting. This activity reminds me a little of the one Justin used as his frontloading activity for Mysteries. We each got a prompt for a mystery, wrote for about three minutes and then passed it to the next person. It was awesome! Hopefully next fall, I will be able to have my classroom set up in groups of four. Wilhelm talks about the fact that after you add five or more students to a group, everyone tends to do less work and are more likely to get off task. He only hold large group discussion after small groups have met so that everyone in the entire room has had a chance to participate. I think this is awesome and definitely something I agree with. During the first week of class, I will use the guidelines Wilhelm has set up for small group discussion. 1. Have a preset procedure for forming small groups. 2. Identify group meeting sites. 3. Always ask students to prepare something prior to group work. 4. Start with small groups before moving to large groups. 5. Set a clear task and accountability procedure. 6. Set a time limit. 7. Be fully present. 8. Have small groups report out. 9. Provide for closure.

= **How can we assess student understanding through discussion?** =

Assessing small groups is where I think a lot of teachers become nervous. I want the discussion to be comfortable for the students but I also want them to have some accountability with it. I think you have to have grading criteria set up ahead of time and shared with each group before the discussions. Individual journals are one way in which I will be grading students. I like the idea of having them write in their journals first and then discuss with their group. That way, I can see that the individual is understanding the material. If the group grades one another then I can see if the group is understanding the material. Observation and constantly moving around the classroom is how the bulk of group work assessment will happen. That's why teachers need to have all their planning done ahead of time, so that when it comes time for discussion, that's what they are focusing on and nothing else. As I stated earlier, students need to be taught how to have engaging discussion groups. Spending a couple of days focusing on this will really make all the difference for the rest of the year. I also think that providing opportunities for feedback on how discussions are going would be beneficial. For example, once a week, I might send out a questionnaire asking students how they feel their groups are working together. What are the strengths and weaknesses of their group or themselves individually? What can they do to make discussion better? I plan to utilize discussion three to four times a week. I LOVE group discussion, and I think it makes the whole text so much more enjoyable to discover. I just need more help with finding questions for these discussions and practicing them in a real classroom setting.

Note to self: Come up with questions for conflict. Look at page 77-78! "So What" questioning page 80. Use prompt questions to encourage topical un-coverage and critical inquiry page 85! So this is what I have so far. I am still trying to get more interesting activities to include in the instruction. Does it seem like there is too much/too little here? I haven’t connected the activities to my goals yet. I was hoping to get some feed back on that as well.

Thanks! Shawnna



February 25, 2011 Reflection On Engagement

I think one of the most important things we can do to engage students is to make sure that the tasks we are asking them to complete are in some way relevant to their lives. I think you can connect almost any curriculum with some aspect of a student's life. Thinking back to when I was in middle and high school, I remember that the assignments I loathed the most were the ones that help little to no importance to me. I didn't see why we were doing an assignment. There was no connection between the curriculum and my experiences. If a teacher can't articulate to students why he or she is teaching a certain topic, why should the students respect and want to learn that topic? I see it as a two way street. Our job isn't just to teach them, but to show them WHY we are teaching them. I think when students see the reasoning behind a curriculum, they start to respect what they are learning, making personal connections to the text instead of feeling like they are preached to.

Last summer, I took a class that utilized flip books. Teachers made one that outlined the essential questions, front-loading activities, and the main exercises that would be covered throughout the unit. Teachers were then told to hang the flip book on a hook somewhere accessible to their students. This way, students could walk up and flip through the book at any time. It showed a map of where the class was and where it would be going throughout the unit. I think this is a great idea because it lets students see just how each activity is connected to the next. Students can feel like they are engaging in an environment that wants them to know what and why an activity is being utilized. We can ensure that the activities are purposeful by always making sure they connect in some way to the essential question or it's sub-questions. I think if we are ever questioning whether or not an activity is worthwhile, we have to answer these questions: Does it connect to my essential question? Does it act as a step in answering my essential question? Will the knowledge learned from this activity held students better understand the topic? Does this activity have relevance to the students?

Frontloading is so important when it comes to unit planning. I think it is crucial that teachers set aside a certain number of activities to lead into the new unit. Students spend a great deal of time just trying to catch up or figure out why a topic is being covered. This takes their attention away from the actual topic and leads to more confusion. I think our main goal is to create an environment where students are connecting the current topic with the frontloading activities as they are learning them. Too often, I have observed classrooms where students are struggling to understand the relevance of something. Teachers have used the novel or story to explain the activity, when they should have used prior activities to help students understand the novel.

My mentor teacher recently provided a good example of this. Her seventh grade class was starting Farewell to Manzanar, a non-fiction story about the Japanese internment camps during WWII. She started the class discussion off with asking if anyone knew about concentration camps, WWII, internment camps, ect... This was great because it got the students interested in the topic. Some were excited to start reading the book when they walked out of class. Unfortunately, I could tell that some of the students had spaced out during the class discussion and showed little to no interest in the new novel. I think in this situation, I would have grouped students and had them discuss together and then as a class, to ensure everyone was paying attention.

For this novel, I agree that historical context is vital to understanding the story and empathizing with it's characters. However, I felt like the discussion came off as just a little too dry. I think I wanted to see more collaboration and less lecture. The next day, students did a scavenger hunt online. This was actually really cool and I liked the questions that students answered. The only thing I thought could have been added to the assignment was to have students reflect on what they had learned. I wanted to see how their learning shifted when they went from working with a computer and a worksheet, to connecting the experience with something they themselves had felt or felt had changed as a result of the assignment.

February 13, 2011 post #2

__**Unit Plan**__

__Resources:__ "The Outsiders" book and movie. Instead of watching the movie at the end of the unit, I would like to integrate it throughout our readings. I still need to watch it and see how closely it follows the events in the book. I'm not sure there will be time, but I would also like to use some short stories that follow this subject.

__Learning Goals/Standards:__ This unit is centered around personal growth through exploration of choices, actions, and consequences. Some of the nouns, adjectives, and verbs for this unit are: absolute freedom, absolute responsibility, choices, responding, outside factors, external interactions, internal changes, conflict, resolution, change, personal growth, motivation, accountability. Standard 1 Goal 1.2: Acquire concepts about text. Goal 1.6: Acquire decoding skills using context. - 7.LA.1.6.1: Use context clues to aid in decoding of new words. Goal 1.8: Vocabulary and concept development. - 7.LA.1.8.3: Use prior knowledge, the text, context clues, and graphic features of text to predict, clarify, and/or expand word meanings and concepts. Standard 2 Goal 2.1: Acquire strategies and skills for comprehending text. - Evaluate purpose and use of various texts. - Make inferences, draw conclusions, and form opinions based on information gathered from text and cite evidence to support. Goal 2.3: Acquire skills to comprehend literary text. (Characterization, plot, pov, ect...) - 7.LA.2.3.1-7.

__Essential Questions:__ 1. What are the costs and benefits of conformity and non conformity? (//Engaging Readers and Writers//, Wilhelm) 2. How are choices, actions, change, and responsibility related? 3. How does conflict/change motivate personal growth? (I think I like this one the most). 4. How do consequences influence our actions? 5. Why does change cause personal growth? (Meridian Curriculum) 6. How can external interactions cause internal change? (Meridian Curriculum)

__Culminating Assignment__: I'm having a little bit of trouble with what to have students do as their culminating project. I want to involve an individual writing assignment that will display their understanding of the key concepts of this unit. Conflict, actions, responsibility, personal growth are the main aim for the project. Although, I want them to be learning about key elements of literature (character, plot, ect...) I think that I want them to demonstrate their understanding of personal growth through exploration of choices, actions and consequences. 1. Write an advice column. Students will write an advice column to new six graders about what they can do (choices) that will make their middle school experience a success. 0r Students will write an advice column to a fictional character who has a conflict, (finding a gun, stealing, lying, cheating, ect...) and tell them what they think they should do. Included in the article, will be pos./neg/ choices and pos./neg. outcomes for the character. This will most likely be a one page response that will be workshopped with their peers in class. After they have turned in their final drafts, we will display them on a class newspaper (poster board). What do you think?

January 30, 2011 Post #1:

I think learning means that you have gained something. A bunch of us talked about the fact that you can learn something but not really have the need or want to use it or need it. Also, we learn stuff everyday without even realizing it. Either way, we are __gaining__ something when learn. We are experiencing or realizing something that we previously may not have known or known much about.

For me, I know that learning is happening when I reflect on what I have just learned. I think if you recall the information you are learning or can apply it in some way, learning is definitely taking place. As a teacher, learning is judged by formative (happening) and summative (happened) assessments. Learning progression is observed through activities such as ticket out the doors and discussion. I really like these types of assessments because they are learning opportunities for both the student and teacher.

Knowing when learning has happened is a bit more difficult. On one hand, we can test a student's knowledge through summative assessments and judge where he or she may be performing. However, I know from personal experience that I can "learn" something for just enough time to get the answer right on a test. I think it's hard to say whether I actually learned the material or just memorized it. I still feel like it should count as learning but if you don't follow up the material learned and apply it, you usually forget about it. No matter how hard the teacher tries to test students on what they have learned, I think that the student is really the only person who can fully judge whether or not learning took place.

One of the concepts I thought was really interesting was the framework of the essential questions and what students will understand after exploring those questions. On page 24 of our UBD book, Wiggens and McTighe give a nutrition unit example. They start with exploring the actual standards and using them as a guideline. What I liked most about this example is the fact that nutrition is such a common thing in our daily lives. That's why it can be so boring to learn about. However, when students can apply what they are learning to themselves, it provides the lesson with more dimensions. Instead of learning about calories, carbs, and the food pyramid, students are able to observe first hand how nutrition impacts their lives. Nutrition is very individualized so students need to be able to learn about in a way that will be meaningful to them. Hooking the students with interesting questions and individualized activities also helps set the stage for discussion of broader topics outside the scope of the individual. "Why are there so many health problems in the United States caused by poor nutrition despite all the available information?"