This was a welcome changeup from the hardship we learned about in other classes this week. This article was about a group of students practicing to being scientist and the techniques they used to understand scientific papers. A lot of the students found the material boring and hard to read until some of the students decided to start making the material into stories and interacting with the narrators that they had created. This allowed the teachers to see that their students learn differently then they had originally thought and allowed them to challenge them in different ways. I liked this article for a couple different reasons first off there was a student named Brandon which was nice but he also had a thought process similar to mines in that I tend to see the story from only my point of view rather than holistically as it should be shared. This leads to obvious gaps in some stories and led me to a little bit of self reflection, I know I love to tell stories and I often do turn the materials I am reading into a relatable story but often that story only makes senses to me. It is something that I will be mindful of working on through this process because I still would like to keep my storytelling going as a grow as a teacher but I need to find ways to engage everyone and take the spotlight off of myself. The teacher’s ability to adapt was also refreshing to read about because it was very uncommon growing up. They taught one specific way and that is the way we were doing it didn’t matter if it was beneficial for only a small majority of the class. Now a day teachers need to be more like coaches and ill tell you why. The best coaches at their respective sports are not the one with the best pre game plans; the best coaches are the ones with the best in game adjustments. All coaches game plan on “air” I call it meaning that they all game plan for a perfect scenario and that’s a lot of what we are earning right now as student teachers, but to be successful you have to be able to adapt on the fly and be able to change lanes at a drop of a hat without missing a beat. Adversity as an educator or a coach is inevitable, we wont be able to avoid it but we can train ourselves to adapt in a positive way, come up with a solution, and make a potentially negative situation a positive one. We have also been very lucky that our profs have been diverse and allow us to make mistakes and learn in different ways. there is not one set rule we need to follow and its a fluid situation where things will change based on the needs on the class and it has allowed us to be challenged without being to stressed out for some of us and I truly appreciate it Survive and Advance
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Damian Cooper’s “Talk about assessment” was a very interesting read. The text introduced us to a need to change the way we think about assessment and the difference between assessment of learning and assessment for learning and the importance of the latter. With all the big ideas and the suggestions on how to make these changes in ourselves as educators there was never much speak on how to implement it on a wide-scale basis. This had me thinking that unless you have a supportive administration staff that want to help change and make a difference, as educators we will have a hard time making changes. So I decided to go out and do a little research and by research I just had small conversations with people that I know that are teachers as well as friends that I trust that are pretty plugged into education. The majority of the people that I talked to seemed to be leaning towards this being a fad more than something that would be able to stick. So I asked them what needs to change about education something that they experienced or saw and the same people responded with the fact that too often students don’t know what expectations are and teachers are not sure what ways to effectively show students what they are expecting from them and ways to show them what good quality work looks like. These are all things that I wondered myself before reading the text and I am hoping to be able to use it when I return home to start my teaching career. In Chapter 10 Cooper gives strategies for implementing change on a system-wide level as well as at the school level. First off everyone involved must agree on a basic level that is a need for change and if that is achieved Cooper outlines four conditions to effect sustainable assessment reform at both levels. The first is Focus, when attempting to implement change we need to be able to identify the most pressing need and focus on that rather than being bogged down trying to fix everything at once. When implementing change you are adding more to teachers that are already busy or don’t feel like their methods need changing and this is where the second step Support and Accountability comes in. teachers need to be held accountable in a respectful and professional manner that applies to everyone taking part in this reform. If they are help accountable and feel supported this will enable teachers to grow as professionals and will cause an increase of pride in their work. Collaboration is step 3 in the process and it calls for teachers within a school and within a school board to pool their resources and rather than working on identical tasks separately, come together and complete these tasks together or divide up the task and combine the finished product. Step 4 is most important step and where I believe the most problems with implementing new systems arise. Staying the Course is important because all the members of a school community have put time and effort into this reform and even when times are bumpy and the expected results are not there immediately it is very easy to go back to your old habits. Ill finish with an example from my coaching experience, one of my favourite movies is Coach Carter and I enjoy having my athletes work harder than anyone else has ever pushed them. We do an exhausting amount of conditioning after every practice and it takes a while for new players to buy into all this conditioning because it is very hard. I tell them after every practice “ I work you hard in practice so that the games are easy”. During our 4th game of the season we had to travel from Toronto to Sault St. Marie and it was a hard fought game and we were down by 6 points going into the 4th quarter. The amazing part was that the other team was exhausted and we were very fresh so I asked the guys how they were feeling and one responded we’re good coach this is easy and they all started to realize why I had pushed them so hard from day one. We ended up winning the game and at our next practice on Tuesday not one player complained about running because they realized the benefits of it after seeing it in action. The moral of the story is if there was a focus on being in better shape, along with support and accountability with the athletes especially when it was hard. I helped them understand why it was so hard and let them give feedback and ideas for a way to make us more successful and I stayed the course even though they fought back against it until the desired results were present. Not every situation will work out but you will always fail if you don’t try. For me grading and reporting seemed like pretty simple process as long as you were very clear with what you are looking for from your students and if you could eliminate the guesswork as much as possible. I believe in school students and parents should have a good handle on exactly what coming to them when it come to report cards. In school I was one of the lucky few that always felt like I knew what was coming to me because I knew exactly how much work I had put in that term and had a good handle of what I felt like I deserved and it would always surprise me the reactions of some of my classmates when they would see their reports especially the ones that were visibly upset. Cooper goes in depth with ways that these instances can be avoided, first students need to be introduced to the rubrics that will be used to grade culminating activities and also checklists that will help students understand if they are doing good work quality worthy of achieving a level 4 before the hand that work in. A problem I ran into in school was too often there were never examples of what good work looks like for us to reference to make sure we are on the right track, this is where anchors are very helpful for students success. Anchors are examples of what high level work looks like for students to reference, Cooper believes it is essential for students to be given at least 2 anchors to work from to make sure that single anchor isn’t used as a piece of work that the students believe they must copy exactly to achieve a good grade. Another problem that students and parents had was the belief that grades were a symbol of a students skills in a certain subject and the emotions were brought on when a student feels they are good at a certain subject and their grade doesn’t reflect that at all. In the growing success document it is explained how and when report cards are meant to be administered this give me some insight into how I can set up my assessment for learning to be able to accurately explain to parents and students what it is that the student is lacking so that are no surprises when it comes to their reports
This week we have been focusing teaching and assessing students with needs as well as assessment tools and strategies including the good bad and ugly of rubrics. To me and for anyone who has ever done it I believe working with students with special needs is the most rewarding part of teaching if done correctly. Teaching students with special needs certainly can be frustrating but Cooper gives some ideas on how to make sure it is a rewarding experience for everyone involved. For the last 2 years before I started teacher's college I worked at a company called Junglesport. We would set up a rock/rope climbing structure for the students to use for a week in place of their regular Phys. Ed. class and every school had special education classes either mixed in with other classes or separately on their own for more 1 on 1 instruction. Both situations provided a unique experience for us during the integrated classes I would take the special education class and get them in their harnesses and get them started before the rest of the class would get started. This allowed me to be able to get all of them in the air even if it was only a few feet off the ground. The majority of the students who were terrified of leave the ground until I got them up and their favorite word became higher and higher. There were also the students who would surprise you some of the greatest climbers we have ever seen came from special needs classes. We also had students surprise their own teachers and parents who were unsure or unaware of these student's true capabilities. These students definitely erased some of the myths that the teachers and parents had of them. In my experience 5 of the 6 myths that Cooper laid out were broken by the students I have encountered. I hope that everyone in their teaching career has a chance to work with special education students at least once it is a thrill.
I get very encouraged when the things that I learn whether that is in class or just life in general is directly applicable to what I am currently doing with my life especially when it is something that I love. During my CSL at Henry Munro I have been able to see differentiated learning done to a high level and they reminded me of specific situations that helped me during school, not realizing what was happening at the time it was great to read about it In Coopers chapters 5 and 6. For me differentiating learning takes many forms and I have experienced a few that I would like to share, first would have been in my gr.7 English class where we assigned to one of three reading groups for our final report based on the strength or weakness displayed over the school year. The three different groups all had separate books to read based on these skills but still all wrote the same report. I was in the middle group and our group was assigned The Giver, which to this day is still one of my favorite books and at the time it was challenging but not to the point where I got frustrated. Cooper talks about the need for teachers to plan ahead with the approach that some students are going to struggle with the readings and if you plan with this in mind you will save yourself and the students a lot of frustration. He also states that it important for teachers to understand that in order to improve students current skill levels you may have to use below grade level texts, and just because the texts might be different doesn’t mean your rubric has to change. What changes is the difficulty level of the reading material that the students are assed on. I am thankful that my gr.7 English teacher was able to use some of these principles with me.
As some of you might know growing up I had a learning disability that went undiagnosed till high school. The problem was that if I was speaking from memory I was strong but if I was reading from a sheet in a pressure situation the words all looked like a jumbled mess. Dr. Kitchen helped me throughout gr. 9 and 10 with different ways to make the word more clear when I had to read aloud. I transferred high schools in gr.11 and I was nervous about starting at a new school with teachers that did not know about my difficulty reading out loud. My gr. 11 English teacher Mr. Wallace thankfully was very understanding, we were going to be reading Hamlet in his class and so he got two different copies of the text ones with regular sized font and ones with bigger font and he allowed students to pick what book they wanted so I didn’t feel singled out for needing a book with a bigger font. He would also let the class know ahead of time when we would be reading to the class and who specifically would be reading and what parts this gave me time to go home and practice my lines so I was a lot more comfortable with them this way. These are just a few ways that teachers can differentiate learning for students to feel included in the class while keeping everyone equally engaged. In chapter 6 Cooper talk about assessment for learning and the difference between assessment of and assessment for learning. Early on in the chapter we are given a list of what assessment for learning looks like and I got me thinking about my gr. 12 Geography teacher Mrs. Anderson. Now hopefully by now you can tell I am a very positive person and I enjoy reflecting on the positive things that have shaped me but unfortunately not all my experiences in school were positive. Now Mrs. Anderson was an old school educator, the type that has been referenced in the text before. The ones who believe a high school teachers job is to prepares her students for university. Now while her heart undoubtedly was in the right place the class lacked a clear direction and I am sure if Mrs. Anderson was able to access this resource chapter 6 would help her students become more successful. The 6 strategies outlined in chapter 6 would have been extremely helpful for me and my classmates back then.
We were never communicated what we were supposed to be learning and that often lead to a lot of confusion and below average work. There were a lot of guess work going on between students and we often would go to classmates who scored highly on an assignment to figure out what was expected of us to try to improve upon our work for the next assignment. A lot of the class struggled and some students asked for make up assignments unfortunately she did not believe in them. While eventually we all survived Mrs. Andersons class we could have been a lot better prepared for the world ahead if the class was structured differently. The opportunity to read and write about things that speak to us and that we can relate to has been very freeing since i was worried I would have to stay in the same box as everyone else. What struck me as interesting from my reading of Coopers chapters 3 and 4 was the section in chapter 3 about enduring understanding and essential skills. The whole chapter was interesting because it is evident that Cooper has gotten into the minds of students and is looking for ways to bring that to teachers because I can’t even count how many times in high school I asked out loud or too myself why in the world do I need to know this. In the enduring understandings and essential skills section Cooper talks about the experience I had in Gr 11 calculus class I focused so much on learning the formulas rather than understanding the concepts that were being taught. The problem that I ran into was that if I forgot how to do a specific equation I would totally blank and sit there and twirl my pen since I had no understanding of the concepts. This left me frustrated and disengaged because I knew personally that I could of done a lot better in the class if I had acquired a better understanding of the unit that was taught.
The other section that spoke to me was the section on connecting assessment design and curriculum targets. In this section Cooper told us the story Joseph Stafford and his 1920s Nightclub activity where he got his students to engage organizing and entire day with a complete meal, vaudeville acts, music and a dance show. This was also accompanied by a research project. This was similar to my Gr 12 politics and world issues class. Our teacher Mrs. Oxley would set up a model U.N. for the class and the assignment started at the beginning of the year. We were assigned a country at random and given a question to study during the year. We were asked if we support the ability for certain countries to possess nuclear weapons. You needed to gather information during the semester to support your argument and you needed to figure out who your allies where in the UN and make sure you were aligned with their position as well. Armed with the information we had acquired we participated in a UN debate at the end of the semester where I can honestly say every student was engaged because they had taken pride in their specific countries position. I ended up getting China and I was For countries being allowed to possess nuclear weapons on the basis that I as a superpower possessed my own nuclear weapons and wanted to keep them. I also developed a distrust for the U.S. who where my rival superpower and I supported my allies who were looking to keep their nuclear weapons or acquire weapons of their own. I would use this activity in my own classroom because it opens up the ability for me to asses during the semester in order to see how the students are understanding their sections and what work needs to be improved upon for the final assessment which the model UN sit down where everyone was able to prevent their findings and understandings of what was learned about politics and world issues. The last section that really spoke to was the initial (diagnostic) assessment section because I actually got to experience it in my first day of CSL. I am placed at Henry Munro Middle School with some great teachers in the Phys. Ed. department that are very progressive almost as if they read the Cooper text as well. This section became interesting after viewing and getting a better understanding on the school take on zone of proximal development of ZPD. The students at Henry Munro are doing a cross-country circuit and the assessment for this unit is setup very similar to what Cooper describes. The ZPD has to answer four questions, what do the students currently know and what can students currently do? Where do I want them to get to? How big is the gap? How do I ensure the gap is just right to challenge students in a way that maximizes learning? The first day of the unit the students and staff walked the course and timed how long it took everyone to walk it at a decent pace this presented the baseline for all students you were not allowed to finish a lap running slower than they were able to walk it. The next class students ran two laps of the course and this set their personal bests for them to understand where they are and what number they are looking to beat. This also allows the teacher to assess where the student is physically and see how much they improve during the unit. The teachers set up different clubs the 4,5,6,7, and 8 minute clubs where the time you got gained you access to that club the hope is that at the end of the unit is that every student was able to at least move up one club from where they started. this creates competition between students in the same classes as well as with friends in other classes who all hopefully want to do better than each other keeping a larger number of students engaged who have different motivations. It was great to be able to see what we are learning about in class and reading being applied so early in my CSL and it provides extra excitement knowing that the teachers are progressive and open to new ideas and willing to allow me to apply what we learned to their school as well. Entering teachers college I had a bunch of questions about what I would be learning and how are we going to acquire all the skills necessary to be successful. Thankfully texts like Talk about assessment exist since Cooper answered some of the questions and curiosities about being a successful teacher that I had. The section on inquiry-based learning was very interesting because I have used this method before but didn’t know what it was called. I have always been more successful in situations where I was able to find out the why on my own rather being told what the answer is and I have used this method while coaching football back home. I find if the players understand why we are doing things and they can come to these conclusions on their own they will be able to play and think at a higher level as well a play instinctively since they have a deeper understanding of why things are done the way they are.
The big ideas will be interesting to study more in depth as we go along as well seeing how many teachers that I come in contact have used this resource and what they think about these big ideas. Especially the shift from norm-referenced assessment towards criterion-referenced models. These changes excite me knowing that everyone learns at a different level and speed, through coaching I learned this the hard way the first time I was in charge of coaching an entire defense I had a vision and I expected everyone to understand what I was implementing and I thought we were going to hit the ground running, it was a disaster. I got extremely frustrated because my plan and expectation failed miserably but it forced me to readjust and helped me remember that I have to treat each player individually and hopefully get them all up to a level 4 as the season progressed because if one failed we all failed. Growing up I was a part of the generation that cellphones became readily accessible and teachers we unsure how to deal with the new technology generally banning cellphones from class. Nowadays nearly every student has a cellphone or tablet that they travel with daily and teachers have had to adapt to this. The Mishra and Koehler article speaks to these challenges and innovative ways to use the technology to our advantage as educators. |
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