Reflective Practice

Maureen M. Cohen, Ed.D. student reflection

How often do you have students pause to reflect on their own learning?  Please check out the following two articles from this past month related to student reflection.  Both of them focus on the power of having students reflect on their own learning. ASCD:  http://www.ascd.org/ascd-express/vol6/625-murphy.aspx




Harvard Education http://www.hepg.org/hel/article/507#.TnAEjsHN0wE.email


Discussion Question:  Based on either of the above articles, what do you see as the benefits of student reflection and self-assessment?

When Students Don’t Answer

Maureen M. Cohen, Ed.D. Questioning

What do you do when students don’t answer a question in class?

Consider the following excerpt that refers to a study working with inner-city children:  
“If they fail the initial question, the follow-up question should be a simpler one that they can handle.  In general, questions that require them to explain something in detail will be the most difficult.  Progressively simpler demands include factual questions requiring short answers, choice questions requiring them to choose among presented alternatives, and questions that require only a yes or no response.  If the students do not respond to any level of questioning, they can be asked to repeat things or to imitate actions.  Once they begin to respond correctly, the teacher can move to more demanding levels as confidence grows.  Inhibited students need careful treatment when they are not responding.  As long as they appear to be trying to answer the question, the teacher should wait them out.  If they begin to look anxious, as if worrying about being in the spotlight instead of thinking about the question, the teacher should intervene by repeating the question or giving a clue.  He or she should not call on another student or allow others to call out the answer.”  (Good and Brophy 1978, as cited in the Skillfull Teacher, p. 315).

We need to adhere to the “no opt-out” concept where we do not allow students opportunities to “opt-out” of participation. Instead, we should provide the continuum of responses and supports to help them to reach the answer.

Four Questions

Maureen M. Cohen, Ed.D. 21st Century Learning

From the Trilling and Fadel (2009) book 21st Century Skills, the authors start off in the introduction with what they call the “Four Question Exercise.”

They ask you to imagine if you have a child who is just starting preschoool or kindergarten this year to consider the following questions:

Question #1:  What will the world be like twenty or so years from now when your child has left school and is out in the world?

Question #2:  What skills will your child need to be successful in this world you have imagined twenty years from now?

Question #3:  Now think about your own life and the times when you were really learning, so much and so deeply, that you would call these the “peak learning experiences” of your life.  What were the conditions that made your high-performance learning experiences so powerful?

Question #4:  What would learning be like if it were designed around your answers to the first three questions?

Discussion Question:  Please share your thoughts on any of the above questions.

Level of Technology Integration

Maureen M. Cohen, Ed.D. Technology Integration

The Following is an assessment of your level of technology implementation (LoTi).  Where do you think you fall?  Where would you like to be?

Table 1. Levels of Technology Implementation (LoTi) (after Moesrch, 2010)

Leve l Category Description
0 Non-use
Instructional focus ranges from a direct instruction approach to a collaborative, student-centred learning environment. The use of research- based best practices may or may not be evident, but those practices do not involve the use of digital tools and resources.
1 Awareness
Instructional focus emphasizes information dissemination to students using lectures or teacher-created multimedia presentations. Teacher questioning and student learning typically focus on lower cognitive skill development. Digital tools and resources are used for curriculum management tasks, to enhance lectures, or as a reward for students who complete class work.
2 Exploration
Instructional focus emphasizes content understanding and supports mastery learning and direct instruction. Teacher questioning and student learning focus on lower levels of student cognitive processing. Students use digital tools for extension activities, enrichment exercises, or information-gathering assignments that generally reinforce lower cognitive skill development. Students create multimedia products to demonstrate content understanding in a digital format that may or may not reach beyond the classroom.
3 Infusion
Instructional focus emphasizes higher-order thinking (application, analysis, synthesis, evaluation) and engaged learning. Teacher-centered strategies include concept attainment, inductive thinking, and scientific inquiry models and guide the types of products the students generated. Students use digital tools and resources to carry out teacher-directed tasks that emphasize higher levels of student cognitive processing.
4A Integration (Mechanica l)
Students are engaged in exploring real-world issues and solving authentic problems using digital tools and resources, but the teacher may experience classroom management or school climate issues, such as lack of support from colleagues, that restrict full-scale integration. Teachers rely on prepackaged materials, assistance from other colleagues, or professional development workshops. Emphasis is on applied learning and the constructivist, problem-based models of teaching that require higher levels of student cognitive processing and in-depth examination of the content. Students use digital tools and resources to investigate student-generated questions that dictate the content, process, and products embedded in the learning experience.
4B Integration (routine)
Students are fully engaged in exploring real-world issues and solving authentic problems using digital tools and resources. Teachers are within their comfort levels promoting inquiry-based models of teaching that involve students applying their learning to the real world. Emphasis is on learner- centered strategies that promote personal goal setting and self-monitoring, student action, and issues resolution that require higher levels of student cognitive processing and in-depth examination of the content. Students use digital tools and resources to investigate student-generated questions that dictate the content, process, and products embedded in the learning experience.
5 Expansion
Students collaborate beyond the classroom to solve problems and resolve issues. Emphasis is on learner-centered strategies that promote personal goal setting and self-monitoring, student action, and collaborations with other diverse groups, such as people from another school, another culture, a business, or a governmental agency. Students use digital tools and resources to answer student-generated questions that dictate the content, process, and products embedded in the learning experience. The complexity and sophistication of the digital resources and collaboration tools used in the learning environment are now commensurate with the diversity, inventiveness, and spontaneity of the teacher’s experiential-based approach to teaching and learning and the students’ level of complex thinking (analysis, synthesis, evaluation) and in-depth understanding of the content experienced in the classroom.
6 Refinement
Students regularly collaborate beyond the classroom to solve problems and resolve issues. The instructional curriculum is entirely learner based. The content emerges based on the needs of the learners according to their interests, needs, and aspirations and is supported by unlimited access to the most current digital applications and infrastructure available. There is no longer a division between instruction and digital tools and resources. The pervasive use of, and access to, advanced digital tools and resources provides a seamless medium for information queries, creative problem solving, student reflection, and product development. Students have ready access to, and a complete understanding of, an array of collaboration tools and related resources.

SMART Goals

Maureen M. Cohen, Ed.D. PLC, SMART Goals

3  Big Ideas that Drive the Professional Learning Community Process

BIG IDEA #!:  The purpose of the school is to ensure that all students learn at high levels.  So educators working in a professional learning community need to clarify the following questions:
1.  What is it that we want our students to know?
2.  How do we know if our students are learning?
3.  How will we respond when students do not learn?
4.  How will we enrich and extend the learning for students who are proficient?

BIG IDEA #2:  To help all student learn requires teachers to work collaboratively in teams.  Time for collaboration is embedded in the routine practices of school.  Educators are clear on the priorities during collaboration.

BIG IDEA #3:  Educators must be “hungry for evidence of student learning and use that evidence to drive continuous improvement of the PLC process”  Every member must work together to achive SMART goals that are:
1.  strategically aligned with school and district goals
2.  measurable
3.  attainable
4.  results-oriented
5.  time-bound

Dufour, R., and Marzano, R.J.  2011.  Leaders of Learning:  How District, School and Classroom Leaders Improve Student Achievement, Solution Tree Press.

One area in schools that is ideal for building professional learning communities is within departments.  What SMART goals is your department working on this year?  Curriculum revision?  Common Core alignment?  Technology integration?  Differentiated instructional practices?

Old or Bold?

Maureen M. Cohen, Ed.D. Innovation

 Will Richardson offers an interesting question in his blog:  Are you an old school or a bold school?  I loved his description of how bold schools are steeped in a culture where everyone is seen as learners first.  Additionally, he states that bold schools “are places of questions, not answers.”

What do we need to do in our school to be bold?
www.districtadministration.com/article/are-you-old-school-or-bold-school

Quality Assessments

Maureen M. Cohen, Ed.D. Assessments, Grading

 
Ultimately, assessments help us know if students have learned.  Formative assessment is a planned process in which evidence of students’ understanding of key concepts is used by teachers to adjust their ongoing instructional procedures or by students to adjust their current learning tactics.  (Popham, Transformative Assessment).

Assessments should be thought of as a collection of evidence over time instead of an event. (Fisher and Frey, Checking for Understanding).

Quality Assessments Are:
Clear and unambiguous.
Directions: easy to understand
Expectations: clearly laid out
Layout: clear and not distracting
Graphics:  clear and with a purpose
Rigorous:  No give away answers.
Comprehensive without being cumbersome.  Focus on the most important information.
Valid and reliable.
“Less is more”  Quality vs. quantitty.
Require students to demonstrate that they have learned the material, not just memorized it.

Discussion Question:  What do you view as a quality assessment?  What do you do to use these midterms to help inform you about student learning?  What happens when they showed that they did not learn?

21st Century Skills-Ch. 3

Maureen M. Cohen, Ed.D. 21st Century Learning

 In Trilling and Fadel’s book 21st Century Skills,  they identify and describe many of the 21st century skills needed by our students.  In chapter 3 they focused on learning and innovation skills.

In thinking about our 21st century learning expectations, we align closely in this area when it comes to critical thinking, problem-solving, and communication, but in our learning expectations we do not include creativity and innovation.

“Given the 21st century demands to continously innovate new services, better processes, and improved products for the world’s global economy, and for the creative knowledge work required in more and more of the world’s better-paying jobs, it should come as no surprise that creativity and innovation are very high on the list of 21st century skills.

In fact, many believe that our current Knowledge Age is quickly giving way to an Innovation Age, where the ability to solve problems in new ways (like the greening of energy use), to invent new technologies (liek bio- and nanotechnology) or create the next killer application of existing technologies (like efficient and affordable electric cars and solar panels), or even to discover new branches of knowledge and invent entirely new industries, will all be highly prized

Creativity and innovation can be nurtured by learning enviornments that foster questioning, patience, openness to fresh ideas, high levels of trust, and learning from mistakes and failures.  They can be developed, like many other skills, through practice over time.  Though there is no accepted universal test for creativey and innovation skills, hundreds of instruments and assessment tools exist, each one measuring different aspects of creativity in a specific field, from math and music to writing and robotics.

One of the most effective ways to develop creative skill is through design challenge projects in which students must invent solutions to real-world problems, ”  (pp. 56-58).

Discussion Questions:  Please share with your colleauges ways that you integrate both creativity and innovation into your lessons.  Also, should these skills be included in our school 21st century learning skills?

Response to Intervention

Maureen M. Cohen, Ed.D. RTI

At the beginning of the year, everyone received a flipchart that shows the various tiers in a response to intervention model. It is time to take out that chart and turn to the tier 1 strategies for a review.

Tier 1 strategies are instructional strategies that take place in a general classroom.

Under Tier 1–when you have a concern about a student, you begin working with the student in the area of concrn as you normally would and keep a record of what you are doing with the student.  Then you use classroom measures of student progress to guide you in how the student is doing.  

Some examples of interventions include:

  • Targeted assistance based on progress monitoring
  • Provide additional instruction (individual, small group, technology assisted)
  • Modify modes of task presentation
  • Self-correct mistakes
  • Increase task structure (directions, rationale, checks for understanding, feeback)
  • Decrease group size
  • Increase cues and prompts
  • Teaching additional learning strategies–organizational/work habits
  • Adjusting curriculum
  • Adding intensive one to one or small group instruction
  • Increase guided and independent practice
  • Change types and method of corrective feedback

What is important with response to intervention is that you have what is called as “progress monitoring.”  This is when you take the time to step back and analyze the data and assessment results.  
1.  First you need baseline data of the student’s ability so you can compare them to the class
2.  In taking data of a class–are the majority below where mastery level is. If so, then the problem is instructional or curricular.
3.  If it is a small group of students who are not performing relative to the class then you develop a plan by defining the problem  “What are we going to do about it?”  The plan must be specific:
1.  what are we going to do differently
2.  who is going to do it
3.  when
4.  where
5. how long
6.  how will we measure progress

Discussion Question:  As we approach progress reports, what do you do when you see that students are struggling?  What RTI interventions do you find effective?  How do you monitor progress of those individual students?  Do you look at your class averages and student grades and analyze them for trends and weak areas?  Then what do you do?

Challenge yourself to look at the specific data to figure out the specific problem area each struggling student is having.  Then look to the RTI tier 1 interventions to implement.  Our goal is for all students to reach mastery of the learning standards and we may have to put into place new strategies to make that happen.

Innovative Ideas from Twitter

Maureen M. Cohen, Ed.D. Twitter

The following are a number of resources to share on new and innovative concepts.  All of these were found in about 15 minutes by reviewing tweets from people or organizations I follow on Twitter.  I encourage you to get a Twitter account for the sole purpose of receiving the most up-to-date resources available.  Please see me if you want assistance in setting up a Twitter Account.  Enjoy!

Check out these fun Pi Day song videos!  (Do you think our math department can create a new Pi Song?)


Ted Ed Videos for Schools  (Do you think you could integrate one of these short videos into your lesson?)


Why My Six-Year Old Students Have Digital Porfolios  (Have you considered having students create electronic portfolios?)

Five Web 2.0 Sticky Notes Sites  (Need a new way to get organized?)

Transform Students into Curators with MuseumBox  (Looking to bring history to life in a different way?)
ChronoZoom:  Visualizing Big History  (Want students to contribute to an open source project?)

For the discussion board, please share one innovative idea you have found!