JISD Professional Development Newsletter - February 2011

 

Getting Students To Do Good Metacognitive Work

            In this Principal Leadership article, Seattle Pacific University professors John Bond and Arthur Ellis and Redmond (WA) principal Laurynn Evans suggest “reflective assessments” as a way of involving students in thinking about their learning in real time – and providing teachers with valuable information on what students are taking in.
head with puzzle pieces Three examples:

            • “I learned” statements – Three minutes before the end of a class, students are asked to write “I learned…” on a sheet of paper and complete the sentence, telling what skills and knowledge they gained in the lesson. The teacher collects the “I learned” statements as students leave the classroom, reviews them to get feedback on how successful the lesson was, and returns them to students the next day with a quick comment, a plus mark, a smiley face, or some other acknowledgement. The teacher might use a document camera to share one or more of the statements with the class to provide a model for “I learned” statements as well as to review previous content and set up the next lesson.

            • Clear and unclear windows – Three to five minutes before the end of a class, students draw a line down the middle of a sheet of paper and write Clear at the top of the left-hand “window” and Unclear on the right. Under Clear, they jot down what they are really confident they learned that day, answering the question, “What from today’s lesson would you be able to teach to another class?” Under Unclear, they jot things they don’t understand or are confused about – questions on particular concepts, terms that didn’t make sense, missing pieces of the puzzle. These reflections help students by making explicit their learning challenges and help teachers see what worked and what didn’t so they can improve in subsequent lessons.

            • The unit in review – At the end of a chunk of instruction, the teacher asks students to reflect on the most significant ideas and concepts they learned. Students do this solo and then in a small group so every student has a chance to have input. Each group then jots down its ideas and gives them to the teacher, providing excellent feedback on what was learned – and good material for review and launching a subsequent unit.

“Reflective Assessment” by John Bond, Laurynn Evans, and Arthur Ellis in Principal Leadership, February 2011 (Vol. 11, #6, p. 32-34), no e-link available; the authors can be reached at bondj@spu.edu, levans@lwsd.org, and aellis@spu.edu.

Guiding Struggling Students to Figure Out Their Misconceptions

           “When students get stuck, teachers must respond so that they can improve understanding, correct the error, or address a misconception,” say San Diego State professors Nancy Frey and Douglas Fisher. “The way a teacher responds can leave the students feeling either successful or helpless.” The key is not to give struggling students the answer too quickly and get them to figure out the error student stressthemselves.

Frey and Fisher suggest four steps, which they say are most effective with small groups of students:

           1. Check for understanding. The teacher asks questions to see if students have misconceptions or errors – for example, a science teacher asks students how they know if something is living and follows up by asking, “So is evolution a characteristic of life?”

           2. Prompt. When students’ answers reveal that they have a misconception, the teacher’s next move should be to provide prompts or clues, for example, remind students of the order of operations (in a math class) or the difference between speed and velocity (in a physics class).

           3. Provide cues. If prompts fail to resolve the learning problem, the teacher can become more directive and give a cue to get students focused on something they’ve missed or overlooked – for example “Take a look at the figure on page 112. Does that help?”

           4. Explain. If prompts and cues aren’t successful in getting students back on track, it’s time for a direct explanation, followed by having students repeat the information back in their own words or answering a direct question correctly.

           “"Instructional teachers must give this type of support to students who are stuck,” conclude Frey and Fisher. “Without guided instruction, students learn helplessness and become dependent on adults for information.”

“Guiding Learning: Questions, Prompts, and Cues” by Nancy Frey and Douglas Fisher in Principal Leadership, January 2011 (Vol. 11, #5, p. 58-60), no e-link available. The authors are at nfrey@mail.sdsu.edu and dfisher@mail.sdsu.edu.

 

Editor: Dee Thomas, JISD Professional Development Coordinator