Reflections on the ENTIRE course

Reflections on the Third Teacher

Final Project: REDESIGN

Making small changes

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The three SPACE DRIVERS I chose for my classroom are:

1. Collaboration
2. Creativity
3. Cognitive Flexibility

I was encouraged to start by making a SMALL change and so I started with the most simple of my three space drivers, collaboration.

Previously my classroom was arranged in groups of 4 or 5.  I have 22 desks in my classroom, so that is 2 groups of 4 in the "front" of my classroom, 1 group of 4 in the middle, and 2 table groups of 5 desks each at the back of my classroom.  And this is how my classroom was permanently arranged.


Although there are 22 desks in my classroom, I don't have a class with more than 21 students in it.  So typically my students work in groups of 3.  When it's time for group work, I usually post the groups up on the board, and then students find their partners, and move around the room finding a space to work.  Some groups of 3 sit at a table of desks.  Sometimes students move the desks around.  Some students work on the floor, or the stand at the lab counters in the back, or work out in the hallway.  It gets a little messy, and it's a little chaotic, but I've always been fine with that.

   

Until now.  For this course, I challenged myself to think about how collaboration is done in my classroom, and what role the physical space plays in the collaboration of my students.  

It is SUCH a simple change to make ... it's almost embarrassing that I haven't thought of it sooner.  I changed my table groups to be arranged in groups of 3 (as I typically group my students) and now each group has their own space at a table.  That makes it a lot easier for them to work effectively and efficiently during the class period.  It also gave me more space to spread the table groups out and there is more room for me to walk between them and circulate throughout the classroom.

  

Separating into groups is much more efficient, and because groups have an appropriate table space, they can work more effectively.  This is a good example of making a small change to make a big difference!!  

Now .... what else can I do???

Space Drivers

What is a Space Driver?

A Space Driver is a learning behavior that you can use the classroom to teach.  A "simple" example is flexible seating.  You can use flexible seating in your classroom to teach the students to work with others, to be flexible, to collaborate, etc.  Space Drivers are used to link design changes with skill development.  The space that you create in your classroom (if you are redesigning it) supports the skills you have identified.

Here are my reflections on some of the Space Drivers we have learned about in this class:

COLLABORATION

CREATIVITY

STUDENT CENTERED

EXPLORATION

COGNITIVE FLEXIBILITY

Student Input

One of the ideas I like best from this course on Redesigning the Classroom is the idea of asking for student input.  Why not??  

I asked my students two questions ...

"What kind of space would help you learn?" and "WHY would that space help you learn?".

This is what they told me ....

It is mildly hilarious that the word "HELP" appeared so many times and is just HUGE in this image ... but they repeatedly said that they wanted a space in the classroom where they could to to get help when they needed it.  So that might (hopefully) be different from what you were originally thinking ... ha ha ha --- that my students are asking for HELP!!!

Final Project for Assessment

Portfolios for Assessment

Have I mentioned my incredible teaching partner and team that I work with before?  They are truly amazing!  We have been on the forefront of implementing digital portfolios at our school.  It hasn’t always been an easy road, but to our credit, we have always had a purpose for our portfolio’s driving decisions and policies at our school, and that was reflection. That was always the primary purpose

Having said that, I learned a ton from Holly Clark during our google hangout.  Here are my biggest takeaways from her session.

REFLECTION

Reflection is the most important part of the portfolio.  She talks about the difference between a process portfolio (highlighting the steps taken), a showcase portfolio (highlighting the final product) and the best option … the hybrid portfolio, where reflection is at the core.  

One of the ways I think she simplifies the reflective process is by suggesting that students use Google Drive to collect all of the work they could put into their portfolio and the use screencastify to have students make a video reflection while going through their digital work.  

By reflecting on their work in this way, we can get much richer and detailed assessment from students, and see their own thinking about their process and growth.

VISIBLE THINKING

Holly jokingly (?) wants to rename digital portfolio’s as “visible thinking portfolios” and I love that.   

The idea that a students portfolio visualizes their thinking and development of ideas makes it much easier for us teachers to assess how they are understanding and growing in their learning.Holly talks about how a reflective portfolio is a tool that can be used to get inside a students brain, to see what they are thinking.  

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DIGITAL FOOTPRINT

I teach 6th grade, so my students are 11 and 12 years old.  What is the proper age for students to publish their work online?   

Holly says 4th grade.  She talks a lot about digital citizenship and how teachers need to give students opportunities to practice positive digital citizenship since they might not be doing that in their personal social media lives.  

PORTFOLIO TEMPLATES

Holly suggests giving the students a template for their blogs to reign in their creative tendencies, arguing that there is a time and place for creativity but that a digital portfolio is not it.  By providing templates, students will have a more polished and professional looking portfolio that they can feel proud of.  And when they are older, they can begin designing their own website.

I loved all of her ideas about portfolio’s and she’s really pushed my thinking about how I can better use my students portfolio’s for learning and also for assessment.  One question I had was how to take a student’s rich reflective video and document their learning based on the video in a report card and grade book.  I’m guessing these things are counter productive to one another but it is also the reality of many teachers who are restricted by grading and reporting policies.  So I’d love to hear from others who are using reflective portfolios as assessment.  Comment below or send me a message @laurenteather!

Using technology to make assessment better

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This course on assessment has really pushed my thinking about assessment, in a good way.   I was really challenged to look closely at the SAMR and think about how I have been using technology to “improve” my assessment.

My professional goal this year was to be accountable for differentiation that would successfully move all of my students along the continuum of learning.  So I experimented with different ways of assessing student understanding and using instructional strategies to remediate and extend different groups of students.  Needless to say, the paperwork quickly became overwhelming!

I started with a very cool differentiation worksheet that looked like this:   

It gave me a good start to tracking differentiation, but eventually I had so many different versions of this sheet for a single learning objective as it got updated and kids shifted back and forth from different columns, I quickly became buried in papers.  It didn’t take me long to start experimenting with digital tools for assessment. One of my favorites is the combination of Doctopus & Goobric.  Doctopus is a way of electronically distributing digital worksheets to your class (making you the owner of all docs) and Goobric is the add-on that enables you to assess those documents using a rubric.  Watch this video by the incredible Jennie Migiera for more information.


Once you have installed the add-on, it really does walk you through the steps one at a time.  It’s pretty simple and you’ll get the hang of it in no time!  I promise!

Assessment and feedback go hand in hand and I have two new (to me) tools that make that not only possibly digitally, but quick and easy too!  

Formative is an awesome digital assessment tool that can be used to give traditional types of digital assessments, but it also has a white board tool which is perfect for open ended math questions, or for adding elements of visual literacy into your assessments.  

This is the white board tool, you can see everyone responses as they are being drawn.  You can project this too and the app give you an option to remove student names for projection.

Students can draw their responses and you can see the results live. Another really great feature of this tool is that you can give feedback to students individually based on their responses.

This is where you can score the work and send feedback to the student.

Another great tool I tried is Recap.  Recap is unique because it asks students to create video responses to open ended questions.  Videos can be just 30 seconds long making it quick and easy to watch and give feedback directly within the app.

This is the teacher overview.  The self-assessment option gives you the "got it" "partially got it", etc feedback.  

These types of digital tools for assessment not only make grading student work quicker and easier, but the results that are collected from these assessments makes it very easy to tell me:

• Which concepts I need to teach again to the whole class
• Which students are ready for enrichment
• Which students need more practice
• Which students need to come after school for extra help

And so much more.  I think students really like getting the individualized feedback and my goal, of being accountable for differentiating and moving all students along, can be met!  I have a struggling student, who I almost always have to give remediation to after these types of assessments.  He actually came to me after school one day for extra help and thanked me for helping him.  He said that he felt like other teachers expected him to get the extra help on his own.

Sigh .... Assessment!

Assessment is a topic that I have always found uncomfortable. My assessments and my grading practice have been heavily critiqued by parents, and heck -- by students too. I guess that's one reason it makes me feel uncomfortable.  It seems like my assessments are never good enough.  Designing a tool to measure a students growth is very difficult when different parties have varying ideas of what that growth should look like.  And I think that’s another reason I feel uncomfortable about assessments.  I’m always questioning my own ideas -- Am I looking at this the right way?  Am I being too hard on the students?  Am I being too easy? Whatever the reason  -- assessment happens.

I have really enjoyed digging into assessment during this course and trying and learning new things and ideas. My learning has caused me to question and clarify my own understanding and purpose for assessment in the classroom.  I have a really wonderful teaching partner (and team!) who always engages in these types of conversations with me.  We have gone around and around on the topic of assessment over the years.

• How do we vary assessments?  It seems like written and oral are the primary ways students communicate their understanding.
• How do we differentiate assessments?  DO we differentiate assessments?
• How do we assess individual learning that happened during a collaborative group project?
• Do individual assessments always have to be done in a closed environment (no talking, student works alone)
• How do we prepare students for assessments?
• Should we give re-do's?  How do we give re-do's?  Who gets to take a re-do?  How many times can a student re-do?
• What kind of feedback should we give on assessments?
• How much should the assessments count for?

When I try to think about the role of assessments in “real-life”  I immediately think of things like college exams, driving tests, standardized testing, etc.  But what about the life the rest of us live in? The best teachers in my school, they are the ones who collaborate well with others, take and share ideas with others, build off of the ideas of others, and work side by side with others, and continually reflect, evaluate and improve upon their own work. This is how I expect my students to learn in my classroom.  Knowledge, understanding and skills are developed through collaboration.  But when it comes time for assessment, I expect students to do it alone.

Teachers who close their classroom doors to isolate themselves from the rest of the faculty, and use their own ideas over and over and over again are not using best practice.  These types of teachers are often described as “traditional” and “old fashioned”.  And I think we all know these are not typically our best teachers.  But I think this is what we ask students to do in testing conditions.  Is it realistic to expect students not to get help and be resourceful on assessments?  We work hard to ask questions that are not “google-able” and encourage students to do ample research and use varied resources to formulate responses.

What if students who did the best on the assessments were the ones who were the most resourceful, who checked their work with other students, and then reviewed, revised, edited and reflected on their work?  Tests and isolated testing conditions are so artificial and don’t have any place in classrooms that strive for “authentic” assessment.

Why the Best Teachers Don't Give Tests is an excellent article discussing these very ideas.This is how I hope to change next year in my classroom. I want to stop giving tests, or at least seriously minimize their role in assigning overall performance measures, and assessing students skills to be resourceful and to create a dynamic product, work effectively in a team, think creatively, etc. I would love to hear from any of you who are already doing this or have good suggestions or resources to make it happen!

Digital Assessment with Google Forms

During this course on assessment we have been bombarded with so many different options for digital assessment.  I kind of have a core set of apps that I use on a regular basis, but I'm always open to trying new things.  Unfortunately, I'm not very good at giving something a second chance after I've ruled it "unfit" for my classroom.    This is what happened with Google Forms.

Yeah --- I've tried giving quizzes using google forms, and when Flubaroo came out and blew up the teacher web I tried that too, but it didn't work for me, I didn't like the quizzes I was writing.  Because ...

I felt that using Google Forms meant asking multiple choice questions or fill in the blanks and that really limited the type of understanding I was able to assess using this tool.

So I wanted to try a new add-on for this assignment.  I chose SuperQuiz.  And my assessment .... it's super cool!  SuperQuiz has a ton of really cool features that make it different from other add-ons.  Like other add-ons, it creates a series of tabs which will analyze the data in your spreadsheet in different ways.   My favorite tab that is generated looks like this:

I know the tab looks a little confusing, and slightly overwhelming, but in my opinion, this is where the magic of SuperQuiz happens.   This is where you can personalize the feedback that you are giving to students based on their responses to the quiz.  If you are able to design an appropriate assessment, this automation of personalized feedback could save teachers so much time, and really be meaningful for students.

The only area for improvement of this add-on is that it's a little bulky.  I like how the varying analytics are separated out into tabs, that helps, but like any other add-on, it takes some time to get what you want out of it.  SuperQuiz also does not have a feature to manually grade free text answers.

My final reflection on this tool is that while SuperQuiz has the function to auto-grade and give you decent analytical data from your responses, it only works for responses that are multiple choice or fill-in-the-blank.  It doesn't work for free text answers.  If I were to use google forms for a math assessment, I can really only see if the students are getting the correct answer.  It's much more difficult to design a way to assess their thinking, the strategy they developed in their mind, their thinking, their use of multiple strategies, or how they can model mathematical situations.  Even their use of mathematical vocabulary cannot really be assessed using google forms.

I know there are some of you out there who have used google forms in ways that I can only imagine, and some of you who are masters at assessing student understanding with multiple choice questions ... I would love to hear from you.  Give me some examples, something to read.  I would love to learn to be better at this!!