SED 407 Reading Response: Understanding by Design

As I was reading the UbD chapters, I found myself reflecting on my experience designing lesson plans in SED 406 (my first experience ever with designing lesson plans). Though I think I was doing some of what the UbD model outlines when I was designing my lesson plans, I think I would have been more successful if I had had the UbD framework to guide me. I like the way the UbD model organizes the design process into three stages and the specific questions posed in each stage that help the designer clarify the big ideas and essential questions of a lesson and determine instructional strategies and assessment methods. I know there is much more to the UbD model than the simple graphic below outlines, but I find this summary helpful and plan to use it next time I design a lesson plan.

Click for source.

When so clearly laid out, as it is in the UbD model, the idea that a curriculum is a means to an end – and therefore the design of a curriculum should begin with identifying what that end is – does seem like common sense. Yet, as the authors point out, this is not the typical approach to education – most teachers take an approach that focuses on superficial coverage of lots of content as specified by standards or outlined in textbooks. When I look at the content standards for science, I can understand how this might happen – the amount of content to cover feels overwhelming, I can see how it would be easy to focus on covering it all without stopping to prioritize or think about what is really important for the students to learn. I like this idea of prioritizing content – of identifying and teaching to the enduring and transferable ideas, the linchpin ideas – but I wonder how much freedom I will have as a teacher to do such prioritization. Will I not be accountable for delivering all of the content standards? Regardless of the answer to that question, I think the UbD model offers some excellent guiding questions to help teachers turn content standards into big ideas or understandings: Here is the content I have to deliver – what would use of this content look like? Here are the facts my students must learn, but what do they mean? What kind of changes do I want to see in my students as a result of this instruction? What are the best ways to guide and assess those changes?

I also find it helpful to think about essential questions as questions that foster ongoing inquiry – the goal is not necessarily to answer the essential questions, but to keep them alive. As the authors write, “Serious learning always involves inquiry in the face of uncertainty.” I love this idea of presenting students with uncertainty (as opposed to certainties that they must memorize and regurgitate) and teaching them the skills and strategies they need to be comfortable with uncertainty, to let it guide their learning experience instead of shutting it down. Unfortunately, I think that many students have become so used to just being given the answers that uncertainty terrifies them and turns them off from the learning process. I love the quote from a teacher that the authors share, that we want our students “to know what to do when they don’t know what to do.” This gets at what the authors are saying when they say that transfer of learning is a primary goal of education – I think this is an important tenet for teachers to keep in mind. It shapes the design of instruction in that it demands authentic learning experiences that present students with genuine problems that “shift a student from the role of a passive knowledge receiver into a more active role as a constructor of meaning.”

What I find interesting about this inquiry approach is that it frames understandings (or big ideas) as inferences that students are guided towards, even if the statement of the understanding sounds like a fact. This relates to what the authors say about the purpose of an essential question being more important than its format. Just because the big idea sounds like a fact, just because the essential question may appear to have a simple answer, this doesn’t mean that instruction should be simple delivery of that fact – that is lazy teaching. A teacher’s role is to frame essential questions and understandings within learning experiences that help students come to their own understanding – only in this way will the knowledge be enduring and transferable. And this idea extends to assessment as well – as this UbD tenet states, “Understanding is revealed when students autonomously make sense of and transfer their learning through authentic performance.”

This idea that understandings appear to teachers (content experts) as facts but can be framed for learners as inquiry got me thinking back to Wilhelm and Vygotsky. As the UbD authors point out, understandings eventually become facts – as content experts, we take it for granted that the knowledge we have is the result of a process we once went through. What just seem like facts to us now are actually the product of active knowledge construction. To be better teachers, we need to take a step back and acknowledge this process – as Wilhelm does with literacy. We need to provide our students with essential questions that begin as teacher prompts but eventually become internalized as self-prompts. In this way, essential questions are scaffolding, supporting students as they work through the zones of development.

SED 407 Reading Response: Daniels & Zemelman ‘Subjects Matter’ Chapters 1 & 2

I’m excited by the outline that D&Z present for their book in the first chapter – looks like we are going to be getting into some concrete practical strategies for teaching literacy. These first chapters are a great basis for the strategies to come, addressing the importance of creating engaging reading experiences for students (getting them “fired-up”) and the fundamentals of what it means to be a good reader.

The fast-food project that D&Z describe is a great example of engaged real-world learning, where students are passionate about a subject and take ownership of the learning experience. What I appreciate most about D&Z’s description of the project is how it was tied into the curriculum. For example, alongside reading Fast Food Nation, the students were meeting the requirements of their biology curriculum by learning about nutrition, etc. I think this is very important – while I think the value of real-world student-driven learning is huge, I worry that often such experiences lack depth when it comes to learning content-area knowledge. (I am thinking here about my experience at the MET high school – the real-world learning I saw happening there did not seem to be meeting learning goals in terms of both knowledge acquisition and skill development – I did not see students being challenged to go deeper with their projects.) Not that depth of knowledge is the most important thing in learning – development of critical thinking, practice in self-expression, and engagement in the real world are important as well – but these things are not enough on their own. I’m curious to know more about how the students involved in the fast-food project were assessed over all – I imagine they must have had more traditional assessments in their courses. The project outcomes (such as the children’s book) did seem naïve to me, as D&Z themselves point out. And that’s ok I think – they are kids after all – as long as there is deeper learning being assessed elsewhere. I do not mean to belittle the value of getting kids fired-up – I share with D&Z that dream of my future students  “catching my fever of ideas” – I love my content-area and I want to share that love with my students in the hopes that they will love it too. Love of learning is the foundation of the development of life-long learners, which is what I want to help my students become. And certainly to focus only on knowledge acquisition without value placed on the process would be worse – like the example of Mr. Cosgrove’s class, where there was essentially no learning happening at all.

I’m glad D&Z presented their ideas alongside the Common Core. I know so little about the Common Core standards, yet they have this looming presence in my future. It was good to see some analysis of their strengths and weaknesses and to understand that while I need to meet the CC standards, this doesn’t mean that I can’t go beyond them – and D&Z offer guidance on how to do that.

At the risk of bringing up a topic that I could go on and on about and making this post too long, I do want to say something about the issues raised by D&Z’s discussion of what we learn about the American educational system when PISA scores are disaggregated by family income. As D&Z say, “We do not have a “mediocre” school system in this country; we have many centers of true excellence, and we also have some shockingly underserved students and communities.” In FNED 346, we read David Berliner’s ‘Effects of Inequality and Poverty vs. Teachers and Schooling on America’s Youth’ in which Berliner addresses these same statistics. Berliner points out that when variance in test scores is examined along with the many factors that contribute to those test scores, what happens inside the school accounts for only 20% of the variation – and teachers themselves are just one of many parts of that 20%. Good teaching matters, but it is not enough on it’s own to overcome the enormous influence of factors beyond the walls of the school – namely income inequality. These all makes me feel a little hopeless – especially when, as D&Z say, “The significance of these numbers is effectively moot, since school reformers have already sold the narrative of a sudden, precipitous decline.” As a nation we’re not even recognizing the real problem and all the time, energy, and money we are spending on “reform” is really just spinning wheels because it’s addressing only a myth about what’s going on in education. Yes, reform is needed, but it needs to fit the problem. One way of not giving in to the seeming hopelessness of this situation is to recognize that as educators, we must be actively involved outside of the classroom in addressing income inequality. But D&Z also offer hope in the form of literacy strategies that educators can use within the classroom.

Reading about the importance of helping students to activate prior knowledge (turn on the appropriate schema) before encountering new information in texts made me think of a recent photo I saw on an Instagram account I follow, Humans of New York. There has been some interesting education-related stuff happening with Humans of New York recently, which I won’t get into, but you can read more about it here if you want. The photo I thought of while reading D&Z is the one below, due to what the teacher pictured says about her students and gaps in prior knowledge. I worry that activating prior knowledge is not just about instructional strategies – often students enter a classroom with a lack of the prior knowledge they need for success and as teachers we must catch them up before we can even begin teaching them what we are supposed to be teaching. As this teacher says, you don’t even know where to start – there’s that hopeless feeling again… but we believe and keep going.

“Sometimes the gaps are so large, you don’t even know where to start. The lesson plan says that you’re supposed to be teaching about tectonic plates. But if they’re going to understand tectonic plates, they need to understand density. And if they’re going to understand density, they need to understand mass and volume. And if they’re going to understand mass and volume, they need to know how to multiply. And some of the scholars don’t know how to multiply. The gaps can be so large you don’t even know where to start. How do you fill the gaps created by years of miseducation? Sometimes it feels so hopeless you want to give up."

And finally, just a few notes that I want to record here about other things I want to remember about these D&Z chapters … readers actively construct meaning from text, it’s not just decoding (a student can get a 100 on a reading comprehension test and still not really understand anything they read) … the importance of teaching students to recognize the structure and kind of thinking required when encountering texts in different content areas … that teaching literacy the way D&Z propose is a “two-fer” – you can teach content while teaching reading strategies, plus the students get a deeper understanding of the content if they are using good reading strategies.

SED 407 Literacy Profile: My Knitting Literacy

I started knitting after college, during a significant period of transition in my life. I had just left New York City where I had been in school and where all my friends remained. I was living with my parents, had an internship, and was trying to figure out what I wanted to do next. This was also the early 2000s and the crafting/DIY movement was just getting started – all the cool kids were knitting. I have always been a crafty person and knitting appealed to me. I wanted to make beautiful knit garments that I could wear or give to friends and family. And, for the first time in my life, I wasn’t a student – no homework, no exams to study for, more time for hobbies. I also had this sense, which is funny to me now, that my real adult life was beginning. I was thinking a lot about what I wanted that life to be like, what kind of an adult I wanted to be, and part of how I envisioned myself was as a maker or a crafter – a knitter.

My knitting education began with me buying a skein of yarn, a pair of single-pointed knitting needles, and a how-to knitting book for beginners. I remember sitting on my bed at my parent’s house, teaching myself to knit. I think I successfully managed to cast-on, knit, and purl, but I quickly realized that if I wanted to do more, I’d need some help. So I signed up for a knitting class through the local continuing education program.  The teacher structured the class around knitting a sweater because she said a common mistake made by beginning knitters is that their first project is usually a long scarf in simple stockinette stitch – most people get bored with this, put the project down, and never pick it up again. Knitting a sweater is more interesting and demands that a knitter learn more than just simple stitches. I never finished the sweater I started in this class, but I’ve never stopped knitting. Taking that class, working through the mistakes and awkwardness of my first project with the instructor and my classmates, initiated me into the culture of knitting. I was no longer an outsider, with no clue what knitting was all about – I was knitting literate, at least on a basic level. I didn’t learn everything about knitting in that class, but I developed confidence in my ability to knit, allowing me to move forward and learn more on my own. I was officially a knitter.

Though now I am at the point where I can teach someone else how to knit, I still continue to learn about knitting every time I start a new project. When I need help, I turn to books, magazines, online videos, and other knitters. The community of knitters is rich and lively, both online and in real life. Knitters love to get together to share projects, talk about knitting, and help each other out. No matter what strange town I might find myself in, I know I could go into the local knitting shop and ask for help with a project (after fondling all the beautiful yarn, of course). The knitting community was particularly important to me in the year after I lost my father, when I joined a local Stitch & Bitch group. The weekly act of knitting with others, building new friendships over a shared interest, was healing. I’m inspired by the beautiful and creative things that other knitters make – from complicated Fair Isle sweaters to silly stuffed dinosaurs. I’m especially impressed by knitters who can create their own patterns, a level of knitting literacy that I have yet to achieve. I mean, check out this brilliant anatomically correct knit brain! And beyond learning more and more about how and what to knit, I love learning about the history and evolution of knitting. I love art inspired by or involving knitting, such as Dave Cole’s Knitting Machine or the giant knit rabbit made by Italian art collective Gelitin. I love the political side of knitting culture as well; that knitters are yarn bombing trees and army tanks and sending knit uteri to congress.

I have never thought about knitting in the context of literacy before, but as I do now, I realize how much of a specialized language knitting requires. There are the terms I’ve mentioned already, such as knit, purl, stockinette, casting on. But that’s just the beginning. There are many other types of stitches and techniques – garter stitch, seed stitch, ribbing, cables, binding off, increasing and decreasing, intarsia. There are needles of all sizes and they’re double-pointed or circular or used especially to make cables. Yarn comes in bundles called skeins, in numerous materials and weights, such as fingering and worsted and sport. You must learn how to read knitting patterns, in which everything is abbreviated – to know, for example, that “ssk” means “slip, slip, knit” (and what does that even mean?). And when you’re ready to try lace knitting, there’s the daunting challenge of reading lace charts. And now you want to crochet? That’s a whole new language. I’ve loved learning the language of knitting and being a part of the “knitting literate.” I also love the math and spatial reasoning of knitting, the problem solving. I’m a better knitter than I was when I bought that first skein of yarn, but knitting continues to be a pleasurable challenge.

For me knitting is more than a hobby, it’s something of a mindfulness practice. It’s simultaneously stimulating and relaxing, almost meditative. It can be a social activity, connecting me to others, or a solitary one, connecting me to myself. When I’m feeling down, the act of knitting can pull me up – on a bad day, if I accomplish nothing else, at least I can say, “I knit an inch of a sock today.” It feels good to have made something with my own hands. It’s interesting to think of the impact knitting has had on my life through the lens of literacy and in considering my future as a teacher. It’s helped me to recognize my knitting abilities as literacy, literacy that has helped me develop valuable skills and allowed me entrance into a rich community. As a teacher, sharing this experience with my students may be a way to model motivation for learning. I had an interest, set a personal challenge, and reached out for the help I needed to accomplish my goal. Furthermore, I want to be a teacher that recognizes and values the non-traditional literacies of my students and helps them use those skills and interests for academic success. I want to send the message that it is not only the traditional academic subjects that have value in our lives. Knitting could easily be brushed off as simply a fun hobby, but it has enriched my life and expanded my mind. And the world is full of other such seemingly unimportant pursuits for all of us to explore.

This is me (years ago) with an octopus I knit.

SED 407 Reading Response: Wilhelm – ‘Strategic Reading’ Chapters 1 & 2

While reading these chapters by Wilhelm, I kept thinking of that question that has come up in every education class I’ve taken so far (as it should): What kind of teacher do you want to be? Wilhelm essentially begins this book by asking that question. Specifically he is asking, ‘As a teacher, what will guide what happens in your classroom?’ Will you be a teacher who sees their role solely as content-deliverer, following a curriculum dictated by a textbook? Or will you be a teacher guided by a clearly articulated theory of teaching and learning?

Though my enrollment in the RITE program is the beginning of my formal training as a teacher, I have taught in various contexts throughout my professional career and I have always thought of myself as a “naturally” good teacher. However, when I think of this now, I wonder if what I really mean is that I am simply good at explaining things so that people can understand them – not a bad thing, but there is clearly more to teaching than that. Though I think there is more going on when I teach then simple direct transmission of content (as in the curriculum-centered model that Wilhelm writes about), I have never really thought about what I am doing when I teach and why I think what I am doing will work or not. As Wilhelm points out, a teacher’s most important job is to teach students how to get and process information, to read and write, to master literacy and problem solving skills and strategies that they can carry out of the classroom and apply in a wide variety of contexts – to teach them “the rules so they can play the game.” Though I think the way I teach gets at this kind of learning in some ways, I have never been clear in setting such objectives. And now, when I think about explicitly teaching literacy, I admit that I feel unprepared and a little overwhelmed. I appreciate that even as a science teacher, I will be teaching literacy – both general and content-specific – and I am eager to learn more about how I can do so successfully. I want to be a “wide awake” teacher with a clearly articulated theory of teaching and learning that, while it may (and should) evolve over time, guides what happens in my classroom – I agree with Wilhelm that to have such a theory, to teach to it, makes one a better teacher. (As Wilhelm points out, most teachers hold implicit theories about teaching and learning that inform what they do without their being aware of it – I think this is dangerous teaching.) I found these chapters by Wilhelm to be an excellent starting point for developing my own theory of teaching and learning, as he puts forth a model that makes a lot of sense to me.

I enjoyed the scenario ranking activity in the first chapter, and find the question that it raises very interesting – ‘Can learning usefully be separated from the teaching that engenders that learning?’ This question threw me off at first, but as I read the scenarios, I began to see what Wilhelm was getting at by asking it. For example, in scenario 4 where Tom learns to play his piano piece “exactly the way his teacher did” – his teacher was teaching, but did Tom really learn? His behavior changed, but did his understanding? And if Tom didn’t really learn, I guess this begs the question, did his teacher really teach? In scenario 5, with Jude in the student-centered classroom in which her teacher did very little actual teaching, was she really learning if she couldn’t articulate what she felt she had learned? Could she not have learned a lot more if her teacher had actually taught? Complicated questions, but important to think about.

I ranked scenario 6, in which Arlene learned about electricity in a real-world context with the guidance of her uncle, as the scenario in which the best teaching and learning was happening. It seemed like such an ideal situation to me that I didn’t even notice at first what was said about Arlene being burnt-out by the experience. (I can see how such burnout is something of a downside, but I think despite it, Arlene learned things that will stay with her and be applicable in other contexts, even if she steps away from the topic of electricity.) Arlene’s scenario exemplifies the Vygotskian perspective of teaching and learning and George Hillocks’ model of environmental teaching, both the basis for the model put forth by Wilhelm, Baker, and Dube in their book. (Side note: I was really glad to see Vygotsky in a deeper context, beyond just the passing knowledge I gained about his theories in Ed Psych last semester.) This “community of learners”, teaching/learning-centered model sits well with me, as opposed to the teacher/curriculum-centered or student-centered models it is compared with. While I do see a teacher as “a more capable other” with a responsibility to share their knowledge and experience with their students, I don’t think teaching and learning should be passive as they are in the curriculum-centered model in which teachers lecture and students memorize. Also, while I see value in giving students opportunities to naturally explore and guide their own learning experiences, as they do in the student-centered model, I don’t think this is enough on its own for real learning. The teaching/learning-centered model is exciting to me as it proposes that teaching and learning is a two-sided collaborative process through which both the student and teacher can be transformed. In this model, teachers work, play, and problem solve alongside their students, letting students make mistakes and discoveries, and giving them support when they need it. Learning begins with modeling, continues with guided practice during which support scaffolding is gradually removed, and ends with students working independently, having mastered or internalized the skills initially modeled by their teacher. The concept of scaffolding was made much clearer to me by Wilhelm than it was when I first encountered it in Ed Psych – I have this clear image now of a student building their cognitive abilities from the ground up, with the teacher supporting their cognitive structure as it grows. Scaffolding is gradually removed as one set of skills is internalized (becomes part of the student’s zone of actual development) and new scaffolding is built when the student is ready to take on a new skill set (work in their zone of proximal development). An excellent concept, but I am now eager to see scaffolding in action. While I appreciate the specific literacy and reading strategies Wilhelm outlines – guided reading, the Inquiry Square, Tharp and Gallimore’s six methods for teaching reading strategies – it’s difficult just reading about them to really understand how they pay out in the classroom. I hope to get to observe these strategies in action.

I think one of the most powerful things about the Vygotskian perspective and the model proposed by Wilhelm is that it encourages teachers to approach teaching by first recognizing their students’ current strengths and abilities and building on them, versus the more common approach of seeing students as having weaknesses that need to be remedied. Such a simple change in perspective, but so powerful in shaping the kind of teacher one can be. However, I recognize the significant challenge it must be to identify the ZPD of each student you encounter as they will each be at different levels in different cognitive areas. The goal is to recognize each student’s current skill set and provide a structure in which they can successfully build to the next level, to keep each student challenged and engaged, but not frustrated by being asked to do something they are not yet ready for – not easy to do when you will likely be working with something like 100 students a day.

There’s so much more in Wilhelm’s chapters that I could respond to … the major theories about learning to read and their parallel literary theories – the idea that “all reading and writing begin with inquiry” and how this can shape a teacher’s approach to teaching literacy – how teaching reading is especially challenging because the processes are internal or abstract – how reading support usually ends after elementary school even though middle and high school students need support as they encounter more varied and complex texts – the idea that what is learned must be taught (and subsequently why it is so important for pre-service teachers to think about the literacy skills that we have internalized and take for granted) – the idea that language is “the tool of tools” – the challenge of putting content into a real-world context and making learning “play that does work” … but this blog post is already so long that no one will want to read it, so I’ll stop here and save the rest of it for class – looking forward to the discussion!

What is School For?

A few weeks ago in SED 406, we looked at the work of John Dewey and Ivan Illich in the context of addressing the question ‘What is school for?’ Dewey and Illich have very opposing views regarding the value of schools as social institutions. Dewey sees schools as the foundation of society, “bringing the child to share in the inherited resources of the race, and to use his own powers for social ends.” Illich, on the other hand, calls for a “deschooling” of society, a disestablishment of institutionalized learning, which he believes promotes “psychological impotence” by fostering dependence and causes “global degradation and modernized misery.” Though seemingly so opposed, there is a commonality in the ideas of Dewey and Illich – the idea that real learning empowers students to let their interests guide their educational journey. Both Dewey and Illich prioritize a development of personal agency as a goal of education. However, Dewey believes that school fosters agency while Illich believes it kills it.

Class discussion on this subject was very interesting. I think many of us saw some sense in Illich’s radical ideas, but felt that a complete deschooling of society is impractical. While Illich would argue that institutionalized education is inherently subject to inequities, we questioned how doing away with institutions and putting the power of education completely in the hands of individuals could possibly lead to equity in a society such as ours in which there is so such great income inequality. On the other hand, I don’t think any of us would argue for returning to Dewey’s time where education primarily meant imparting the values of rich, white men unto other rich, white men. In thinking about what school is for in modern America, I agree with Dewey and Illich on the matter of developing agency – I believe that the goal of schools is to foster critical thinking and problem solving skills while providing a standard of basic knowledge. I tend to agree more with Dewey however on the idea of educational institutions being beneficial for society. I think it is possible to have institutions that provide equitable access to education and give power to the people served. Whether or not this is actually happening in schools today is another question – Illich may be more correct on that fact. However, just because institutions can be structured in such a way as to disempower those they serve, I do not think this is inherent to their nature. I think it’s important to look at the structure of an institution, what it values and how its values guide its practices.

Following this discussion, we spent some time observing classes at Central Falls High, keeping the question of ‘What is school for?’ in mind. I observed a history class in which the students worked in groups on laptops researching military technology used in World War I. They were instructed by the teacher to fill out a detailed description of how the technology worked, how it was different from what was used in previous wars, what the equivalent technology looks like today, and how it affected the soldiers, which the teacher stressed was the most important part. The students would be giving brief presentation on their research the following day. While only a small glimpse into what is going on in the classrooms at Central Falls High, I think this was a good lesson in that it was student-focused. Alternatively, the teacher could have lectured to the students about this subject, but I don’t think this would have been as effective. By structuring the lesson as a research project, the teacher has put the power of learning into the students’ hands and is helping them to develop critical thinking skills that are widely applicable. I think this suggests that the goal of Central Falls High is not simple to get students to spit back a lot of information to which they see no connection, but to help them develop agency and empower them in their learning. Though, there is also a message in the school of how important graduation is in and of itself (there are literally signs in the hallways saying, “Get on track to graduate!”), which I think reflects the practical reality of school sometimes – we discussed this in class after our observations, how in poor communities, school is often important in simply meeting the basic needs of students. Still, the school seems to care about the students in terms of their whole development – there are lots of after-school activities offered that reflect varied interests and cultures and I think they are on the right track to becoming a school that provides valuable learning experiences and builds young people into strong and thoughtful citizens.

Microteaching II... and the semester comes to an end!

On Tuesday, I did my Microteaching II lesson for SED 406. This time we were to do a 35-40 minute indirect instruction lesson. My lesson was on population ecology and asked students to graph and analyze real-world data collected on Canada lynx and snowshoe hare populations. The essential question of the lesson was: How do populations of related organisms within an ecosystem change over time?

I think the lesson went pretty well. I was oddly nervous (I feel like I get more nervous in front of my peers than I do in front of students) and went slightly over time again (blergh!), but in general I think the lesson was a success. I haven't watched the entire video yet, but one thing I was thinking was that maybe I talked with the students a little too much during their exploration time - I think it's important to interact with students during this time to make sure they're on the right track and to push them farther, but by the time we got to the discussion part of the lesson, I felt like I had already had the discussion. Anyway, let's see what my "students" thought...

PS - to my fellow SED 406 students - it's been great getting to know you this semester, hope to have more classes with you as we continue on this adventure!

Assessment Observation

Last week in SED 406 we had the opportunity to spend some observation time in classrooms in Central Falls High. We were asked specifically to pay attention to assessment strategies used by the teachers we observed. In other words, how did they hold their students accountable during class? How did they make sure that students were actively involved in whatever learning activity was happening?

Before we were let loose to observe, we talked about some things to look for in the classrooms. We discussed how moving about the room and using students’ names while teaching is one way of making sure that students are keeping their heads up off their desks and their attention on you. Another strategy is to give students a worksheet to fill out during lecture segments or reading assignments, or to instruct them to take notes. However, this is only effective if you collect worksheets and notes afterwards – to make students truly accountable, they need to know that their teacher will know if they are actively involved or not. Effective assessment also requires an understanding of how to assess without disrupting class or taking up too much teaching time and of how to collect data on assessment – how will you keep track of each student’s assessment from day to day?

We also discussed things that teachers should avoid when it comes to assessment. Teachers need to be conscious of both the tendency to teach something and then not assess it or assess something that was not taught – both of these situations can turn students off from classroom engagement. Another pitfall of assessing is mismatching the level of learning objectives with the level of an assessment strategy.

The first class I visited was an engineering class. The students were watching a ’60 Minutes’ video about the design and construction of a protective dome for the Chernobyl disaster site. The teacher informed us that the students would be asked to write a reflection, given a prompt, after viewing the video. However, the students did not have the reflection prompt before them as they watched the video and I did not see any students taking notes. I think it would have been more effective to have given the students the prompt during the viewing or to have had them take notes. This would have focused their attention and likely led to more meaningful reflections. As the video played, the teacher did move around the room a bit, tapping inattentive students on the shoulder and directing their attention back to the video. But as the video played on, attention seemed to wane in general. As the Chernobyl segment of the video ended, I expected the teacher to have a brief follow-up discussion with the class about what they had just seen, but this did not happen – he quickly moved on to the next segment. It seemed to me that the students were not being effectively assessed on what they were (or were not) learning from the video – there was little accountability and therefore little learning happening.

The second class I visited was an English class. When I entered the classroom, the students were working quietly with their textbooks open, some alone and some in small groups. They were reading ‘The Devil and Tom Walker’ and were working on answering questions on the worksheet about what they had read up until that point. The teacher in this classroom was more experienced and he seemed to have an excellent rapport with his students. The classroom had a friendly, playful atmosphere but there was also real work being done. As the students worked, the teacher walked about the room, checking in with groups and individuals, talking with them about the questions. From time to time, he would say things to keep the class on track like, “You should be working on question seven by now.” After a few minutes of this, the teacher called the class’ attention back to him. He gave a synopsis of what they had read so far, asking the class questions as he did so. If the class had no response to his question, he would direct them to particular parts of the text, guiding them to find the answer. Then he read the next part of the story aloud to the class, but before he did so, he directed their attention to question 8, telling them they would be expected to answer this question after the reading. As he read, he interjected with questions for the class, such as “Anyone want to make a prediction?” At the end of the segment, he called on a student by name and asked them to sum up what he had just read.  I left this classroom with a sense that this teacher was very effective at assessment and holding his students accountable. I noticed that as he read, most students were taking notes on their worksheets. They were also willing to answer and ask questions. They were paying attention and actively involved – it was clear that they had learned that in this class, they were accountable. I think this had a lot to do with the teacher’s behaviors of moving about the room, asking questions, continually checking that students were on track. There also seemed to be mutual respect between the teacher and his students and I think this is hugely important when it comes to holding students accountable.