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.
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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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