Reflection for 11/29

Happy Belated Turkey Day!

I’m sorry this is being written post-Thursday, but I just could not find the time to get this done in the week leading up to Thanksgiving. Patrick, my husband, and I, in an effort to spend time with both of our families, typically celebrate each holiday for about 5 consecutive days. So, we are just beginning to come down from a Thanksgiving preparation-and-celebration bender. Not a good excuse for not having this done…but maybe better than “the dog ate my blog post”.

On the brighter side, our group did have a chance to meet this Tuesday afternoon and work on some objectives and other unit essentials. We looked at the objectives first. In particular, our aim was to use the class’ and Cynthia’s feedback to finalize (for now) the objective wording. We were able to do this with an amount of success. We had already implemented many of the suggestions given by the class, so that part was easy! Then, we looked at Cynthia’s feedback. I think we agreed with the valid and interesting points – well, all but two of them. It was actually kind of amusing, because the two pieces of advice we grappled with were about the two objectives that we had previously discussed at length within our own group.

One of the challenging objectives: “Learners will be able to distinguish between effective and detractive literary devices when used as components of a story”. Cynthia had asked whether we could do without this objective – or maybe more precisely, is it needed within the larger list of objectives. Nathan, Julie, Janet, and I discussed this and realized that we do feel there is a need for this particular objective. Our reasoning is that kids often will employ literary devices in their writing that do not properly fit into the work and/or are incorrectly used. We thought there would be value in showing our students different pieces of work – some with appropriately-used literary devices and other with overblown or incorrect or distractive literary devices. Our aim is for kids to understand that authors do not simply use literary devices randomly, but instead employ them to enrich their pieces and add meaning to their work.

Our other dispute centered on the idea of assessing “voice” in this unit. We have gone around and around about this one. I think, for me, the biggest issue I have with writing a voice objective is that there is (in my mind) no way to objectively score that component of students’ writing. I think voice is so individualized that it’s very hard to pinpoint exactly “what it is” and where it’s used. In the end, we decided that the unit is quite full as is – and since we would not be explicitly teaching voice in the unit, that we should not be assessing for it. (Note: I am not sure how to “teach voice” at all… maybe I need to write another whole unit on that one!) We compared assessing voice to assessing mechanics: we are not actively teaching mechanics in this unit, so we do not have an objective for it. However, we have taught mechanics in the past, so we feel the kids should employ the rules taught in past units. Our thinking came around to the idea that we should not try to assess too much the first time we teach this unit, as we need to try it first on a smaller scale – and then possibly add on while revising it for the following year.

So, finally, we decided upon 11 objectives that we think are doable and will teach kids the “meat and potatoes” of our unit. We then worked on enduring understandings. This may be unpopular, but I do not see the need for enduring understandings. I feel that if the kids are able to master the skills/knowledge in the objectives, then they will understand what I want them to “understand”. However, we worked some out – and the process did help us pinpoint what we want the kids to take away from the unit in a more specific way. We wrote these understandings around the idea that students need to learn what literary devices are, need to know where to find them, and then need to know why we use them. We also wanted the kids to use these devices to enhance their own writing. I hope this is the correct way to word the understandings. Is it ‘ok’ for them to be redundant when read in conjunction with the objectives. Are we on the right track with these?

After grappling with the enduring understandings, we worked on the “essential questions” of the unit. We had already written one:

“What makes a piece of writing worth reading?” I really like that question. I think kids will get that idea and be interested in the exploration of that question. Other questions we developed:

“What are literary devices?” (Simple and forthright)

“How are literary devices used?” (Stolen from the objectives)

“How can we enhance our own writing so that it is more descriptive, more accessible, and more interesting for our readers (aka worth reading)?” (Here, we were trying to list the reasons that literary devices are used by authors – and why readers prefer to read the work of those who are successful at utilizing literary devices. Not sure if we hit the mark here…)

All in all, we didn’t come up with too many essential questions, but we hoped to keep the list short and the wording simple. Since we will want to assess our students on these questions, they are very closely aligned with our objectives and mirror them in many ways. Is this acceptable? Should we design more questions – like one for each objective?

Finally, we talked about how to assess each individual objective. That process was tricky. We are on the right track here, I think, but have barely scratched the surface. A lot of work remains to design some assessments that hit all three corners of the assessment triangulation (student products and performances, teacher-directed evidence, and observations & conversations). We have much to do! I think we’ll have plenty to do when we get back to school on Monday!

I hope you had a great holiday! See you a week from Thursday (I will be at the conference in Boston this week). Cynthia, please let me know what I can do to make up the time I miss. Thanks!

Reflection for 11/15

Happy Early Thanksgiving! (I will say it now, as we do not have class scheduled for next week.

Objective Update: I was really pleased to have an opportunity to gather feedback on our objectives last week in class. It’s funny how the objective writing process works…

1. An individual writes the objectives that he/she thinks are flawless and precise.

2. A group of individuals dissects the individual’s objectives and determines that they were neither flawless nor precise.

3. Group of individuals draft new objectives. They feel confident that their objectives are better than the individual’s objectives. The group assumes that this set may not be absolutely precise and may be imperfect.

4. Group of individuals bring objectives to a larger forum. Objectives are found to be imprecise, slightly confusing, and imperfect.

5. Using feedback from the forum, group rewrites objectives and prays that no larger consortium ever spend a block of time analyzing said objectives. Objectives are left in a state of constant revision.

Ok, maybe it wasn’t all that bad.

I am glad that we had time to work together as a group to look over our objectives and really get to the “meat & potatoes” of what we want the kids to know. I am also glad that we were able to rework our objectives with the larger class (and Cynthia’s) feedback to make them more readily understandable and measurable. I am looking forward to meeting up with my group again to do a final (for now) revision of the objectives and see where that leaves us. (Later, I know we will want to review our objectives as we are teaching the unit and upon its completion.)

As I consider the objective creation process, my thoughts wander to the application of this “Unit Objectives Creation Process” in my everyday teaching…

On creating objectives as a group…. I have found that planning with others is a valuable activity. I learn so much about content – and how to teach it – when I work with other professionals to write lesson plans, craft assessments, and evaluate student work. I gravitate toward teachers who also thrive off this model of group planning (for example: Mrs. Buck!).

On our daily teaching/learning objectives… I think that we (Janet, Tonya – our fearless special educator, and I) often orally go through the same objective creation criteria when we meet to plan SS and LA. We think about what we want the kids to know and then come up with a means to reach those ends. We discuss student learning in terms of quantity of information and precise language. We always think about how much kids need to know about a certain topic and what score they will need to achieve on an assessment to prove mastery of a topic or skill. We also try to create scoring rubrics and checklists that tell kids exactly what we want to them to do/know.

So, I guess the objective creation process is not so far from what we do everyday. We just don’t write it down (which seems to make it so much simpler!). I think working on the set of objectives for our writing unit is helping me to create other sets of objectives for current units being taught and those I will teach in the future. It’s nice to have an opportunity to look at a unit in isolation and spend a good amount of quality time hashing out what we want kids to know and be able to do.

In other news… I hope that we will have time to talk more about UD assessment before we are set forth to create assessments for our unit. I understand that we will be using three different types of assessment. I also plan to create a rubric or other grading criteria list for each type of assessment we will use. I think I am most confused about the assessment reporting format you would like us to use. I also hope that we may find time in class to work on this aspect of the project – as finding other opportunities to work together is a quite difficult for our group.

Hope you are having a great week! See you Thursday!

Reflection for 11/8

Happy Monday!

This week, I’m actually a little digitally speechless (which is very unusual!). I think I’m meeting-ed out this week, so much so, that I am feeling a little passionless about any one particular hot topic. All the PLC, RTI, social studies curriculum, universal design, report card talk has fried my brain!

A few disjointed thoughts… I was glad to learn about Grab last week – I have used it before, but it had been awhile, and it was a nice refresher. I could see applications of that program in making technology manuals for kids (0r adults) to use. I am also excited to learn more about Podcasts and the application for that technology in my classroom. I haven’t tried creating or playing any yet, but plan to tackle that media in the coming weeks. I could see broadcasting information for kids from one of the many Podcasts available on I-tunes. I could also see the application for Podcasts on a sub day. You could leave your instructions in a Podcast format so that the kids could hear directions and guidelines as intended by the classroom teacher. I suppose I would have to have a technologically-savvy sub, but I think we are moving toward that (hey, and you could always burn it on a cd!).

Our objectives are coming along. I think we came a long way from our original draft. We were also to rework or delete any objectives that we perceived as subjective or unclear. We refined exactly what we were looking for in the process and narrowed our statements down to the essential ideas and skills.

We really struggled with finding a way to assess voice in writing. I think I’ve always struggled with this in my correction of student work. It is hard to say exactly what voice is. It can also be very subjective. What I consider good voice could be very different that Janet or Julie’s perception of the same piece of writing. So, we dealt with this by debating what we specifically wanted to see in the students’ writing – and eliminating the term “voice” altogether. I think in the end, we were able to develop quantifiable objectives by really thinking about precisely what we wanted instead of using blanket terminology (like voice).

Although I’ve known this is what we needed to do to develop objectives, it wasn’t until we had drafted some vague ones that we were able to rework those ideas and design concrete and quantifiable objectives. It also took the discussion between my colleagues and myself to really hash out what we wanted and how we were to word our demands.

I think this process will help me in creating everyday lesson plans. I will be able to think about the “meat and potatoes” (or essential understandings, to be more technical) I want the kids to gather from a lesson. This focus should help drive my instruction and assessment. I also plan to work harder to make my objectives (daily and unit) more available to students. It gives the kids a sense of purpose and understanding when they can see what they are working toward and a possible route to get there.

I think that’s it for this week. I am looking forward to our “objective share” this week in class and hope that we will be able to cement our objectives and get to work on the assessment piece.

See you Thursday!

Article: How Can Teachers Promote the Use of Accessible Tech in schools?

Article 1: How can I advocate for universal design and accessible technologies for my students?

Burgstahler, S. (2004). How can K-12 teachers promote the use of accessible technology in schools? National Center on Accessible Information Technology in Education. Retrieved September 17, 2007, from http://www.washington.edu/accessit/articles?1252

This article presents useful definitions of terminology related to accessibility:

AT – Assistive Technology – grammar checks, text-to-speech technology, etc.

IT – Information Technology – computers, software, web sites, etc.

UD – Universal Design – In this sense, educators should be choosing products that are able to be utilized by everyone.

Accessible Information Technology – “Producers consider the needs of people when developing IT.”

The authors promote the idea that Accessible Technology & Information Technology can work together.

The authors point out that promoting Universal Design can lead to implementation of NCLB. It is also stated that educators can follow a four step plan to meet the needs of all learners.

1. Educators should be knowledgeable about UD and accessible technology. (In our case, check!)

2. Teachers should “identify the barriers” students have when they attempt to access technology and education. (Working on it…)

3. Districts should write a technology plan that is sensitive to learners’ needs. (Perhaps, next step?)

4. The plan should be instituted and be used to always consider accessibility in the purchasing and utilization of technology.
There are also some useful websites on this page that educators can use to access more information.