3B - Student Talk

The FA Process is a habit of mind for teachers.  It is a way of being.  It is our practice.

Shift in thinking from "The answer wrong because it is not the answer in MY head or that I determined to be right." to  "What created this answer? How is the thinking being influenced?  How can the thinking be extended?"

Assessment:

• Diagnostic Assessments are given to determine where a student's skills are and plan instruction.
• Summative Assessments are given periodically to determine at a particular point in time what students know and do not know as compared to standards.  They are a gauge.
• Formative Assessment is part of the instructional process.  It provides the information needed to adjust teaching and learning while they are happening.  In a sense, FA is pedagogy and clearly cannot be separated from instruction.  This is true if the information gathered is used to inform instruction.  
• Often seen as "practice"
• Not graded
• Student involvement underpins the effectiveness of FA.  Students need to be involved both as assessors of their own learning and as resources to other students.
• Research shows that the involvement in and ownership of their work increases students' motivation to learn.
• FA should help students ask better questions.
• What is the most important way to raise student achievement?  Answer:  Formative Assessment or so the authors of
• Articles about Formative Assessments:
• "Inside the Black Box" assert.
• Also:  Their follow up article:  "Working Inside the Black Box
• "5 Key Strategies of Formative Assessment" article (math slant, good for all)
• ASCD - Educational Leadership (Same idea of 5 Key strategies but without the math slant): "Classroom Assessment Minute by Minute Day by Day"
• Also:  Dylan Wiliam's follow up book:  Embedded Formative Assessment  (my notes)
• Also:  Interview with Dylan Wiliam.
• Formative Assessment Power Point...(quotes; charts - teacher, students, peer; 5 key strategies expanded)
• Why mistakes are powerful in learning...
• "The Power of Feedback" by John Hattie and Helen Timperley

Assessments for ALL:

• Stop Light Assessment - 1 minute Teaching Channel Video

Assessments for LA Teachers - Reading/Writing:

• Teacher's College:  Assessments
• Reading Assessments
• Writing Assessments
• Spelling Assessments
• Benchmarks - includes Assessments for IR and Reading Stamina
• Additional Tools - includes In-Book assessment and reading logs
• Book lists for Classroom libraries and units
• Sample units for reading - sample curriculum maps
• ReadWorks.org - check out books and passages.  You can print passages designed for 6th grade.

Assessments for Math Teachers:

• Mathematics Assessment Project - at this point most are high school level.

Resources:
Notes from Advancing Formative Assessment in Every Classroom by Connie Moss and Susan Brookhart:

Chapter 1:  What is FA?

• FA is a philosophy of teaching and learning in which the purpose of assessing is to inform learning, not merely to audit it.
• FA is an intentional learning process teachers engage in WITH their students to gather information DURING the learning process to improve achievement (13).
• FA is an active and intentional learning process that partners the teacher and the students to continuously and systematically gather evidence of learning with the express goal of improving student achievement.
• FA is a learning partnership that involves teacher and their students taking stock of where they are in relation to their learning goals (13).  Teachers and their students actively and intentionally engage in the FA process when they work together to do the following:
• focus on learning goals  (Where am I going?)
• take stock of where current work is in relation to those goals (Where am I now?)
• take action to move closer to the goal. (What strategy(s) can help me get to where I need to be?)
• ...to be "formative," assessments must inform the decisions that teachers and their students make minute by minute in the classroom (6).  
• FA is focused ont he learning PROCESS and the learning PROGRESS (7)
• Required elements:
• shared learning targets and success criteria
• feedback that feeds forward
• student goal setting
• student self-assessment
• strategic teacher questioning
• student engagement in asking effective questions
• Creates the Goldilocks Principle:  to generate motivation to learn, the level of challenge and the level of support must be just right (8). ... This means that all classroom decisions - those made by the teacher and those made by the students themselves - must be informed by continually gathering evidence of student learning.
• FA influences ....
• Learning factors:  ownership, autonomy, confidence, and capability = resilience
• Motivation (motive means "something that causes a person to act") or motivation is goal-directed behavior combined with the energy and the intention to work toward that goals.  Motivation gets students learning, points them in the right direction, and keeps them engaged (15).  MOtivation needs:
• self-efficacy - a learner's belief in his ability to succeed in a situation
• self-regulation - the degree to which a learner is meta-cognitively, motivationally, and actively participating in her own learning.
• self-assessment - a learner's act of observing, analyzing, and judging his own performance on the basis of criteria and determining how he can improve it.
• self-attribution - a learner's own perceptions or explanations for success of failure that determine the amount of effort she will expend on that activity in the future.

Chapter 2:  Learning Targets

• Rationale for learning targets and unit goals: pg 24
• USE forms on pages 37-49S
• Studio Questions:  43
• Are there classrooms where students understand their goals particularly well?  Conversely, are there classrooms where activities just seem to happen to get "done"?  What are the differences in how students work and how they behave in those two types of classrooms?
• Do some teachers struggle with the concept of a learning goal? With the idea of an activity or assignment tapping into that learning goal in a deep way? for those teachers, what is the level of their own content knowledge and of their knowledge of typical  student learning progressions for that topic?
• Do you observe a range of students behavior in the classroom in your school? Is there any relationship between the number and type of behavior problems in a class and the clarity of student understanding and teacher communication of goals?

Chapter 6:  Questioning

• During formative discussions, strategic questions can both "assist and assess student learning" (97).
• 
  

3/14/12 NWEA Webinar notes - featuring Dylan William:

Big Ideas:

• What children learn is unpredictable….
• Assessment is the bridge between teaching and learning….
• Use evidence about achievement to make decisions about our instructions.
• Metaphor:  Pilots navigate (origin, destination, plan the route, monitor progress make adjustments to the course as conditions dictate) VS Teachers instruct/assess 
• Changing classroom practice is more than providing a tips/techniques for teachers.  What kinds of support do teachers need to implement these types of techniques:  Slow down, provide choice, and create accountability.

What is FA?  Research says...

•  long cycle – 4-6 weeks, monitor student progress, “weighing the pig doesn’t fatten it” – are we headed in the right direction?  Grades – improves thinking about learning, but not learning itself.
• shorter the cycle, the bigger the impact!  The closer the measurement is to the learning, the more impactful it will be.  We use the cues, but not systematically.

Most important parts of the FA:

• Engagement (no place to hide) and 
• responsiveness (using the responses to make adjustments or not)….

Unpack FA:  three questions:  Where are we going?  Where are we now?  How do we get there?

1.  Where are we going?  
1. Clarify, Share and Communicate  (Learning Target)  This is essential BUT consider these cautions:
1. Not always possible to be that clear….reacting to poetry!  A whole horizon of goals that are OK. 
2. Telling them where they are going can ruin the journey/problem.  
3. Uninspired teaching/teacher if start every class period with a learning objective
2. LT:  all students benefited, but the lowest students benefited the most from LT and reflective feedback.  Sharing learning intentions (codes of success/ what good work in a subject looks like) closes the achievement gap.
1. When they find mistakes in other people’s work, they are far less likely to make those same mistakes in their own work.
2. Provide students the chance to design their own tasks/tests.  More effective form of test preparation
2. Where are we now?
1. Engineering effective questions, discussions and tasks to find out where students are right now.  Sometimes a statement will lead to more thoughtful discussions than a question.
2. The RIGHT questions are hard to create on the spot - we need to spend time planning these.
1. When we ask a question and we get the answers we are looking for, we are tempted to assume it is for the right reasons.  What assumptions are we making?
2. You cannot give effective feedback unless you ask the right questions in the first place.  It’s hard to come up with these questions…that’s what we should spend time planning!
3. No Hands Up – more important – (if hands – 2 classrooms:  1) volunteers who are getting smarter and 2) avoiders that are missing out on getting smarter!  Creates bigger and bigger gap.) 
1.  Random picking,
2. “IDK” – “Great I’ll come back to you.” Get 3 answers and then say, “Which of those did you like more and why?”
3. Every 20 – 30 minutes – get response from every student.  (clickers, dry erase boards, etc…)
3. What will we need to do to get there?
1. Providing feedback that will move learning forward is essential.  Goal:  not feedback about what happened in the past, but feedback about how to improve in the future.  Students should be able to use it in future learning/efforts.
1. Tells learners what they need to do and HOW to do that.  Causes thinking  - as soon as feedback causes an emotional reaction, learning has stopped.
2. 4 Responses to feedback:  A) change behavior, B) change goal (increase or decrease level of complexity), C) abandon goal ("math is stupid"), D) reject feedback
3. Do grades result in the response we want?
1. If there is a grade, students don't read comments.  We have to stop doing the things that take too much time and don't produce the results we want.  What is that?  Grading!  We grade too much and it doesn't impact learning in a positive way.
2. How do we get students to read comments? 
1. Write comments and give them to groups.  Have groups match the comment with the paper/project.  Explain why.
2. Vague comments:  5 problems are wrong - find them
3. Feedback should be more work for the recipient than teachers! Make sure your feedback causes them to do something!!  This means there has to be time allotted to respond to feedback.
4. Give the same amount of feedback to all students.  How to improve and how to get even better.  "There is no there!"
5. Goal:  less feedback, high quality feedback, and time to respond to the feedback.
2. Create students as learners and resources for each other.
1. When students are involved in their own learning and the learning of others, they have better retention both in the long and short term.
2. Activating students as owners of their learning (independence and autonomy, increased freedom of choice and personal responsibility):
1. Doubles the speed in student learning
2. Idea:  Learning portfolio (shows your journey, effort leads to progress, smart is not something you are, it is something you become.  Looking back reinforces this idea.) – not performance portfolio (latest and best work)-
3. What did you find + easy / - hard, challenging / Interesting or weird
3. Training students to pose questions after a piece of learning.  Encourage students to ask questions, “In your group, find out if anyone has a question that you cannot answer in your group.”  Or “Put a question on a slip of paper and then sort questions and answer them.”  “We went over complex material, you must have at least one question.”
1. **Making students ask questions as they are learning has a lot of research backing it.****
4. Resources for each other:
1. Idea:  always have a "pre-flight" check list - buddy is responsible and held accountable for signing off on checklists....

·         Keeping Learning on Track – NWEA resource.


"Rubrics and Formative Assessment:  Feedback and Student Self-Assessment" in How To Create and Use Rubrics by Susan Brookhart:

• Rubrics are a good framework for feedback!
• "Yellow and Blue make Green" - student highlights where they think they are on the rubric, teacher highlights where they think they are - if they both are the same, GREEN emerges.  If they are different, TEACHING emerges.
• Paired-Peer Feedback
• When you are Giving peer feedback:
• Read or view your peer's work carefully.
• Talk about the work, not the person who did the work.
• Use terms from the rubrics to explain and describe what you see in the work.
• Give your own suggestions and ideas, and explain why you think these suggestions would help to improve the work.  Connect your changes to improvement on the rubric using terms from the rubric.
• Listen to our peer's comments and questions.
• When you are Receiving Peer Feedback:
• Listen to your peer's comments.  Take time to think about them before you respond.
• Compare your peer's comments to the rubrics, and decide what comments you will use in your revisions.
• Thank you peer for the feedback.
• Look Fors:
• How are students using the rubric?
• How clearly can they describe the work?
• How useful are their suggestions for improvement?
• How supportive are they?
• How did they respond to feedback about their work? 

I have a new protocol/talk ticket idea below....

Background thinking:

I've been thinking about the rationale of the outer ring.  I am now thinking that truly LISTENING would actually makes us all smarter.  

How we can bring status to that instead of sharing all the time?  I'm thinking that this is the next step for the hogs/PEAK students because it will force them to be accountable to CREATING accurate information and help them to be accountable to the group's learning in a way that deepens their understanding as well.

Also, many times when students say something that is incorrect or partially correct, they never get to figure out what is incorrect about what they have said.  Because they don't do that, they actually hold onto that misinformation/first idea.  AND, the people who understand it, never practice figuring out how to synthesize or fix the incorrect responses as a way to deepen their own understanding.  (This could actually be a learning target!)  They just share the right answer and then their peers either accept it for no reason other than who said it OR accept it to avoid conflict OR accept it because they figured out their mistakes internally even though they didn't vocalize it.  

Basically, all of this relates to the CCSS Mathematical Practices of Evaluating the Reasoning of Others as a way to Deepen Understanding.

What about this protocol/process for the outer ring??

Today, you will listen carefully to everything that is said in the inner circle, think about what's been said, and then respond accordingly.

1.  Listen to determine if the person's thinking is right or wrong:

• The thinking and statement are both right - 
  • Does their statement confirm/solidify what has been said.  If so, it is a SUMMARY. 
    • Response:  "____ just summarized what we've all been saying."
    • Response:  "____ just said what we've all been saying in a new way, but s/he is saying the same thing because _____."
  • Does their statement represent a different way of saying what is being talked about?  If so, it is a DIFFERENT REPRESENTATION.
    • Response:  "____ just brought up another way of looking at it.  It is the same as what's been said because _____ , but it is different because ____.  The difference still confirms what we've been saying because _______."
• The thinking is right, but the statement is wrong - 
  • Label it INCOMPLETE REASONING.
    • Response:  "I think you are on the right track; could you elaborate?"
    • Response:  "I think you are right, but could you clarify _______?"
    • Response:  "I think you are thinking about it this way _________, but we need to remember/include/explain ______ , too."  
    • Response:  "Your reasoning holds until (this point), but then you have to remember/realize/recognize ________."
    • Response:  "We all agree _______________, now we need to figure out _________."
    • Response:  "Using your thinking, how would you explain _______?"
    • Response:  "Using your thinking, how would we answer the question?"
• The thinking and statement are both wrong?
  • Label it  INACCURATE REASONING:
    • Response:  "I disagree with your thinking about _____ because ______."
    • Response:  "Could you clarify ______?"
    • Response:  "We all agreed __________, but __________ doesn't seem right.  Could you elaborate/clarify your thinking on that?"
    • Response:  "I think you are thinking about it (in this way), but we need to think about it (in this way)."  
    • Response:  "Using your thinking, how would you explain _______?"
    • Response:  "Using your thinking, I don't think we can answer the question."

I don't think I can highlight, bold, brainstorm any more...back to depressing money matters!