Term 1 Week 5: effective feedback & improving listening

Never Work Harder Than Your Students & Other Principles of Great Teaching

Jackson, Robyn R. (2009). Never Work Harder Than Your Students & Other Principles of Great Teaching. Alexandria, VA: ASCD.

Principle 1: Start where your students are

Principle 2: Know where your students are going 

Principle 3: Expect your students to get there

Principle 4: Support your students

Principle 5: Use Effective Feedback

(Chapter 5 – pp. 125-151)

·                Assessing students is not nearly as important as how we use the assessment data. Assessments should provide feedback to students that facilitates the learning process and helps students master the material.

·                Marzano (2003) and Hattie (2009) report that giving effective feedback is one of the most powerful ways to improve student learning.

·                Effective feedback shows where students are in relationship to the objectives and what they need to do to get there. It also helps us to revise our instructional approach in order to better meet students’ needs.

·                We need to help students collect and analyse their own data and understand what their grades really mean.

·                Collect feedback from a variety of sources not just tests: student – student interactions, discussions, student questions, quizzes, worksheets, experiments …

·                Formative assessments such as these occur during the learning process and provide students with feedback which will help them to improve their process or product before the final assessment.

·                Formative assessments may also reveal that your students have already mastered the material and you can move on in your unit.

·                Coaching students towards better performance involves:

1. Focusing your feedback on the essential elements of the assignment only. 
2. Directly relating your feedback to the learning goal. 
3. Ensuring that your feedback is specific to the learning goal but don’t do the work for them.
4. Using language that the students can understand. 
5. Giving students the opportunity to act on the feedback that you give them.

·                When students fail it is important to give them honest feedback about why they failed and how they can do better next time.

Try these ideas:               

1.       Try to balance your use of formal tests, performance tasks and informal or formative assessments so that you can collect a variety of data.

2.       Encourage students to collect and reflect on their own learning through use of things like journals or portfolios.

3.        Use pre-assessments to determine how you will differentiate the teaching and learning in your lessons. Help students to use this pre-test to set their own goals for learning.

4.       Give students opportunities to give peer feedback to each other. Make sure that students are clear about the performance criteria before they give the feedback.

5.       Give some assignments just for practice and do not grade them. That way you can help students focus on learning rather than earning a grade.

·                If possible, provide students with opportunities to retake assessments or resubmit unsuccessful assignments.

Try these ideas:               

1.       To cut down on the number of retakes, tell the students clearly what will be in the assessment and how they will be graded.

2.       Refuse to allow students to take a failing grade rather than retake a test/ redo an assignment. In this way they will have to re-engage with the material.

3.       Require students to engage in some sort of corrective action before they retake the test.

4.       Set deadlines and communicate them clearly. You shouldn’t have to spend all of your spare time re-assessing students.

·                In order for feedback to be useful it needs to be done quickly. How can we do this? Focus on quality over quantity which will mean less marking overall. Also by giving feedback that is targeted to specific learning goals we don’t need to mark the whole piece of work that the student has completed.

 Professional Readings

• Do you have students who have bad listening skills? TED talk: Julian Treasure - "5 ways to listen better."

• Shame is not the solution. An opinion piece by Bill Gates (and sent to me by Renee) focusing on the likelihood that in the USA teachers’ individual performance assessments will be made public and what a mistake this is.

Educational Leadership - two recent volumes are now in the library. As well as feature articles, these journals also have monthly columns, including "Research says" by Bryan Goodwin, "Art and Science of Teaching" by Robert J. Marzano and "One to Grow On" by Carol Ann Tomlinson.

Effective Grading Practices

November 2011 | Volume 69 | Number 3

Feature Articles

• Perspectives / What We Learn from Grades - Marge Scherer
• Starting the Conversation About Grading - Susan M. Brookhart. At the heart of the matter: What are the purposes of grading? 
• Five Obstacles to Grading Reform - Thomas R. Guskey. How to surmount the tyranny of tradition and bring thoughtful change to an established practice. 
• Redos and Retakes Done Right - Rick Wormeli. Why allowing retakes is worth the trouble and practical tips for managing them. 
• The Case Against Grades - Alfie Kohn. We should abolish all grades as antithetical to learning, the author argues. 
• Grades That Show What Students Know - Robert J. Marzano and Tammy Heflebower. Four best practices for schools that want to implement a standards-based grading system.
•  Reporting Student Learning - Ken O'Connor and Rick Wormeli. Problems with—and practices for—making grading accurate, consistent, and meaningful. 
• No Penalties for Practice - Douglas Fisher, Nancy Frey and Ian Pumpian. An urban secondary school refines its intervention efforts by focusing on competencies. 
• Creating Student-Friendly Tests - Spencer J. Salend. How to improve teacher-made tests—from writing clearer directions to organizing test items. 
• Making Homework Central to Learning - Cathy Vatterott. Well-designed homework can help students master content and do well on assessments. 
• How Grading Reform Changed Our School - Jeffrey A. Erickson. A faculty decides that protocols for late work, retests, and evaluating nonacademic factors should be the same for all. 
• How I Broke My Rule and Learned to Give Retests - Myron Dueck. A history teacher recounts how he helped his students answer the familiar question, "How am I doing?"

 

The Resourceful School

December 2011/January 2012 | Volume 69 | Number 4

Feature Articles

• Four Takes on Tough Times - Michael A. Rebell, Allan Odden, Anthony Rolle and James W. Guthrie. What priorities should schools set when facing serious cutbacks? 
• Turning Crisis into Opportunity - Naomi Calvo and Karen Hawley Miles. Two schools rethink staff, schedule, and student needs. 
• Time—It's Not Always Money - Chris Gabrieli. How schools afford—and benefit from—expanded learning time. 
• Stretching Your Technology Dollar - Doug Johnson. A director of media's top 10 strategies for knowing how and what to buy, support, or discard. 
• Academic ROI: What Does the Most Good? - Nathan Levenson. To wisely reduce costs, evaluate all programs with multiple measures. 
• Commentary: Searching for Solutions / Teacher Quality: What's Wrong with U.S. Strategy? - Marc Tucker. It's time to take some lessons from countries whose policies have led to an abundant supply of highly capable teachers.  
• Commentary: Searching for Solutions / Privatization: A Drain on Public Schools - James Harvey. The diversion of funds to charter schools and vouchers redirects public funds for private aims. 
• Commentary: Searching for Solutions / Changing the Poisonous Narrative: A Conversation with Diane Ravitch - Arnold Dodge. What the corporate reform movement gets wrong, and why it is time for educators to speak up. 
• Slowing the Summer Slide - Lorna Smith. Summer learning programs run by private/public partnerships show promise for narrowing the achievement gap. 
• A New Vision for Summer School - Jeff Smink. Unfortunately in danger of being eliminated, summer school deserves sustainable and stable funding. 
• Coaching Without a Coach - Christina Steinbacher-Reed and Elizabeth A. Powers. When budgets tighten, districts can still keep instructional coaching alive. 
• A 21st Century Library in a 20th Century Space - Alanna S. Graboyes. A minor renovation sparks a major improvement. 
• The Resilient Leader - Elle Allison. Bouncing back from loss requires practice, practice, practice.

  

Term 1 Week 4: Supporting our students & making ideas come alive

Never Work Harder Than Your Students & Other Principles of Great Teaching

Jackson, Robyn R. (2009). Never Work Harder Than Your Students & Other Principles of Great Teaching. Alexandria, VA: ASCD.

Principle 1: Start where your students are

Principle 2: Know where your students are going 

Principle 3: Expect your students to get there  

Principle 4: Support Your Students

(Chapter 4 – pp. 102-124)

• We need to be proactive about developing interventions for students before they fail. 
• Teaching is a matter of specifying what students must know, subtracting what it is they already know, and teaching them the rest. 
• The most successful intervention plans have four components:

1. The plan is developed before the students begin to fail. 
2. The plan has a red flag mechanism that triggers action. The red flag must be concrete and objective (e.g. a student is unable to plan an essay that shows understanding of the topic). 
3. Once the red flag has been triggered there is a concrete procedure for what happens next which is designed to get students back on track as quickly as possible. 
4. Shared accountability.

• Intervention plans do not necessarily mean that you need to meet one-on-one with the students. The intervention may be a computer programme, online tutorial, workbook, extra handout or even tutoring by another student. There is a tool on page 238 of the book to help you develop an intervention plan. 
• Anticipate where students might be confused about what we are teaching and make sure that we clarify points before the students make their mistakes – this makes for much more productive teaching. 
• Make the learning process as transparent as possible by explaining all the steps in the process clearly. 

1. Explain the purpose of the task. 
2. Show how the new task fits with what they have done in the past. 
3. Explain to the students how the skills that they are learning can be used in other contexts. 
4. Provide all the steps in written directions so that students know exactly how you want the task completed.

• Gradually remove supports as students improve otherwise we never help them learn things on their own.

Try these ideas:                                         

1. When students make mistakes in an assessment, ask the following error analysis questions to figure out exactly why they went wrong:

o   What is the key error?

o   What is the probable reason that the student made the error?

o   How can I help the student avoid this error in the future?

2.      Stop every so often in your lesson and ask the students to summarise what they have learnt so far. Listen to their summaries and identify where the students are still confused.

3.       Don’t just ask students for their answers; have them explain their thinking, show their working …

4.       Share with the students the learning processes that you use yourself. What steps do you follow to solve a problem, or study, or learn a new concept? What strategies and tools do you use?

Support the Learning of Students Who Have Already Mastered the Learning Goals

These students also need an intervention plan for when they have exceeded mastery.

Try this idea:                                              

1.       Give students opportunities to represent complex concepts or problems visually without using words. This will help them think about material in a different way.

Applying the Principle

The writer (Robyn Jackson) used this process on an assessment to support students before they failed.

http://www.csun.edu/~sb4310/Supporting_the_Whole_Child pp. 312-313

Professional Reading 

Make ideas come alive with visual tools

Term 1 Week 3: Teacher Expectations & Student Engagement

 

Never Work Harder Than Your Students & Other Principles of Great Teaching

Jackson, Robyn R. (2009). Never Work Harder Than Your Students & Other Principles of Great Teaching. Alexandria, VA: ASCD.

Principle 1: Start where your students are

Principle 2: Know where your students are going 

Principle 3: Expect your students to get there

(Chapter 3 – pp. 77-101)

• It is important to have high expectations for our students. Expectations are different from standards. The standard is the bar and the expectation is our belief about whether students will ever reach the bar. 
• Expectations are based on our beliefs and values. We can only have high expectations of our students if we believe it is possible to help our students and if we believe that it is important to do so. 
• We also need to examine our expectations of ourselves. If we believe that we can reach a student we do everything that we can to ensure that the student is successful. However, if we tell ourselves that there is no way to help a student, we stop trying. If we are not confident in our ability to help students, we lower our expectations to goals that we feel we can comfortably achieve. 
• It can be disheartening when students arrive in our classes without the basic skills that they need to succeed but instead of focusing on what the students can’t do, develop ways that you can teach them the skills they need as well as get through the curriculum.

 Try this idea:                                              

1. Use these three questions (Dufour, Eaker & Dufour, 2005) to develop a plan you can use to be successful with your students. 1. What is it I want students to learn? 2. How will I know when they have learned it? 3. How will I respond when a student experiences difficulty learning?

 Adopt faith in yourself and the importance of your work

• We need to give ourselves time to periodically reflect on our practice and remind ourselves why we went into teaching and what we see as our fundamental role in our students’ lives. We must also be alert for times when our practice contradicts our values (Are we modelling the behaviour that we expect from students? Do we plan lessons that we know won’t challenge our students enough because challenging then more will take more work? …)

Try this idea:                                                  

1. Insist that students complete every assignment. If you really believe that the assignment was worth setting then it is worth completing. The consequence for not completing work or not completing it well should be that students have to spend more time getting it right. Do not offer the students the reprieve of a poor grade. Build time into the school day(during lunch, interval etc.) to work with students who do not complete their work and do not let students get away with sloppy or shoddy work. 

 Confront the Facts of Your Reality 

• Teachers do not and cannot have all the answers. We need to be reflective about our own strengths and limitations as a teacher; talk to our students and try to understand their perspectives; examine student data to look for patterns and trends and be open to more than one interpretation without placing blame on our students or ourselves. 
• There are four important questions to ask:

1. What are my current skills and teaching strategies? 
2. What are the requirements and the constraints on the teaching task at hand?
3. Are my current skills and strategies sufficient for the teaching task at hand?
4. If not, what can I do about it?  

Remember that expectations have more to do with us than with our students.

Professional Readings

Asking for help isn't easy for some students Chicago Tribune

Research from the University of Pennsylvania suggests that students' ability to speak up for themselves and seek help from a teacher often varies by socioeconomic status. Researchers tracked 60 students from 3^rd through 5^th grade beginning in 2008. Jessica McCrory Calarco, lead researcher, visited students' homes, interviewed their parents, and grouped them as middle class (at least one parent had a college degree and a professional career) and working class (most parents graduated high school and worked in service jobs). While observing students in class every week, she discovered that middle-class students already knew how to ask questions and therefore spent less time waiting for help, while many working-class students had to learn those skills from their teachers and peers. Calarco believes this insight has implications beyond one assignment. "We tend to assume that once you put kids in school, what they get there will help them overcome any differences they bring with them. But what this shows is...children have a meaningful impact on the way schooling is happening and what they are able to get out of it," she said.  

Empathy, Personalization, and High Standards

High school social studies teacher Rich McKinney left instructional spoon-feeding behind after he learned how students could use empathy to more deeply connect with and understand the lives of those they read about.

Make Standards Engaging Bryan Goodwin

Bryan Goodwin's article addresses student motivation and what teachers and schools can do to improve it. One study that Goodwin cites shows that extrinsic rewards like money have no positive effect on student motivation and can even diminish their intrinsic motivation, making activities less enjoyable. In another study, for example, researchers rewarded young children for drawing pictures, but then the children became less likely to spend their free time drawing. Another study found that students develop their talents over the long haul when they are both intrinsically and extrinsically motivated----combining enjoyment of their studies with "serious goal-directness." Goodwin concludes that to achieve that combination, teachers can create lessons that are balanced between structure and autonomy but still communicate clear expectations for their students. Teachers can also model passion by showing students that their subject (e.g., mathematics, English, art) is worthy of a long-term pursuit.

Helping Children with Learning Disabilities Understand What They Read

Read more for information about how to use visual organizers, hooks such as hand gestures, and mnemonics to help your students with homework.

Term 1 Week 2: How to manage stress and ideas for Teaching & Learning

Never Work Harder Than Your Students & Other Principles of Great Teaching

by Robyn R. Jackson

Principle 2: Know where your students are going 

(Chapter 2 – pp. 54-76) 

The importance of Learning Objectives

• At St Mary’s we use the Lorraine Munro whiteboard configuration (Do Now, Learning Objectives, Homework) so that the students are prepared for each lesson and know what to expect. When creating Learning Objectives for our lessons we need to make sure that we distinguish between learning goals and the activities that we plan. Often our objectives are really learning activities that outline what we plan to teach/ what students will do in the lesson, not what we want the students to learn. 
• Learning Objectives need to focus on what students will be learning.
• To create effective Learning Objectives for each lesson, think about what the students need to achieve by the end of a unit of work. Then break this end goal into smaller objectives which will guide each lesson as they work through the unit.
• Clear learning goals should drive everything you and your students do in the classroom.
• Effective Learning Objectives will emphasise content (what students need to know or understand - e.g. Students will know the meaning of irony) and/ or process (ways of learning and skill development – e.g. Students will be able to explain how an author uses irony to strengthen his/ her argument).
• Unpacking standards/ final learning goals focuses lesson planning. It helps us to determine exactly what students should learn, select learning activities that are well-matched to learning goals and to students’ individual needs.
• State goals in terms of minimal rather than maximum acceptable performance. 
• Learning Objectives must be concrete and measurable (e.g. instead of students will write for a variety of purposes try students will write to persuade and to explain which is able to be assessed more easily and clearly).
•  Communicate goals to students and parents and hold students accountable for achieving them.
• Learning activities must match the Learning Objectives of the lesson.

Designing Appropriate Assessments 

• There are two things to consider when you are creating an assessment – will it give you an accurate picture of whether the students have met the learning goal and will it allow you to give students the feedback necessary in order to improve?

Try these ideas:

1. Break your learning goals down into the steps that students will take. Present these steps to the students visually so that they can track their own progress. 
2. Look at each learning activity that you use with your classes and determine what the ultimate learning goal is for each. Does this align with the Learning Objectives of the lesson or unit that you are teaching? Is the activity teaching a need-to-know 
3. Ask students to explain in their own words why they are completing particular tasks/ assignments/ experiments … Make sure that they can connect the activity to the Learning Objective 
4. Do more than just put the Learning Objectives on the board. Discuss with students what the objectives mean and ask for their opinions about the best way to help them reach the objectives. 
5. Explain to students how they will use what they are learning before you start something new 
6. Make connections between what they are currently learning and what they have already learned. 
7. Once the Learning Objectives for a unit/ Achievement Standard have been shared with students, ask them to set their own goal (in their own words) for the end of the unit. Get them to explain what they will need to do to be able to get there. Students can reflect on their progress towards their goal after formative assessments.

Managing Stress this year

These two articles have some good strategies to put in place so that you have less stress in your life:

• How to Manage Your Stress
• Stress Test

High Needs Students

• What are the most efficient methods for teaching students with learning disabilities?

ASCD's Five Most Popular Posts in 2011:

Myth of Bell-to-Bell Instruction Vs. "Golden Rule of 15 Minutes"
In this post, math teacher Kadhir Rajagopal describes his instructional style, in which he's never up at the board doing traditional direct instruction for more than 15 minutes per class period. Hear how he uses mini-lessons and "interactive teach-back" to keep his students engaged and putting their new knowledge to instant use.

Seven Ways to Go From On-Task to Engaged
We see examples of on-task but disengaged behavior every day: students mindlessly copying notes from a screen, listening to a lecture but daydreaming about what to do after school, robotically completing a worksheet. So, how do we ramp up both on-task behavior and real, meaningful engagement for our students? This post by motivation expert Bryan Harris shares seven easy ways to increase the likelihood that students are both engaged and on-task.

Should We Allow Students to Use Cell Phones in School?
Several education leaders share perspectives and experiences with varying policies toward student cell phone in schools. Most think cell phones can be responsibly used as part of classroom instruction. What do you think? Are cell phones welcome in your school?

Cure for the Cameron Diaz
While the movie Bad Teacher was welcome comic relief for some, this post provides an alternative, profiling several education-related documentaries released this summer: American Teacher, The Bully Project, Our School, and The Learning. Look for them available on DVD or view instant.

How Negative Social Proof Can Undermine Classroom Management
Negative social proof works in a similar way as positive social proof. Because most of us look to others to help us decide our own behavior, the practice of stressing the poor behavior of a few students may actually encourage and increase that behavior. This post by Bryan Harris says educators are better served to point out and discuss the positive behaviors of the majority of our students.