Learning to Code Becomes Learning to Learn. Jane is my student, and she loves stories. Jane loves movies, she loves narrative video games, she loves telling stories to friends, and hearing stories read aloud. But Jane struggles to write and read. She loves to experience stories but lacks some of the skills that make stories possible. So I talk with other teachers and learn what works in math or history. I scaffold assignments with Jane and check in frequently. I use her interests to find relevant books and topics.
Until recently, I was like Jane, but with technology. A year ago, though, I became a beginner, an apprentice, a struggling learner. Immediately, the experience became less about designing websites and more about experiencing the growth mindset, improving confidence with technology, and learning that failure is part of the process. The Lessons 1. Learning to code was a reminder of the need to ask for help. My experience: In order to learn how to code, I started from zero. 2. 3. What’s working? Empathy and Growth. New Teachers: A Primer on Assessment. In order to effectively plan instruction, it’s important to determine students’ current level of knowledge and state of academic, social, and emotional skills.
There are a variety of ways for teachers and students to arrive at this understanding and gauge student progress through assessment. View the video "Five Keys to Comprehensive Assessment" for a helpful overview of the various types and purposes of assessment. Then explore the resources below for tips and strategies to help you plan and craft assessments to guide teaching and learning in your classroom. After you have seen the video, make sure to read "The 5 Keys to Successful Comprehensive Assessment in Action" for a better understanding of what these elements look like in practice. Setting Meaningful Goals Using Rubrics How Do Rubrics Help? Exploring Different Ways to Collect and Use Data Different Forms of Assessment What Are Some Types of Assessment? Checking Understanding and Providing Student Feedback Self- and Peer Assessment. 6 Ways to Honor the Learning Process in Your Classroom.
Roughly put, learning is really just a growth in awareness. The transition from not knowing to knowing is part of it, but that's really too simple because it misses all the degrees of knowing and not knowing. One can't ever really, truly understand something any more than a shrub can stay trimmed. There's always growth or decay, changing contexts or conditions. Understanding is the same way. It's fluid. Yes, this sounds silly and esoteric, but think about it.
In fact, so little of the learning process is unchanging. Design, engineering, religion, media, literacy, human rights, geography, technology, science -- all of these have changed both in form and connotation in the last decade, with changes in one (i.e., technology) changing how we think of another (i.e., design). And thus changing how students use this skill or understanding.
And thus changing how we, as teachers, "teach it. " The Implications of Awareness The implications of awareness reach even farther than that, however. 1. 2. 3. Making Learning Meaningful and Lasting. Even after eight years of teaching history, I struggle with helping my students retain and make effective use of their learning. Several years ago, a returning senior asked if she could retake the final exam in my United States history course in September. She had earned a solid "A" just three months earlier, but after a long and eventful summer, she wanted to know how much she remembered. As it turned out, not much. My once-shining star had devolved into just an average student, earning a "C" on the same exam. To better understand why this happens, I recently spoke to Mark A. Connect Content With Meaning My student found no reason to remember facts which meant little to her personally. Discourage Rote Memorization I had also formerly encouraged my students to burn facts into memory by reading and rereading the text.
Encourage Self-Testing McDaniel encourages certain techniques to foster learning and memory. Let Students Figure Out the Problem Give Frequent, Low-Stakes Assessments. Is It Wrong to Teach to the Test? Many of us would agree that teaching to the test has become an offensive phrase. I propose that teaching to the test may not be such a bad thing, as long as we are doing it in the right way and for the right reasons. An apt reason to teach to the test is so that your students can be successful in demonstrating their knowledge and skills. I am referring to designing instruction that directly builds knowledge and skills found on an end-of-unit test, or assessment. That assessment may be a project, an essay, or a lab experiment -- some way to evaluate if the students can apply the knowledge and skills they have learned.
In Understanding by Design, Wiggins and McTighe say that before we design the instruction, we must create the assessment first. Sadly, that is easier visualized than realized, with myself included. Backwards Planning The issue with that strategy is that sometimes we forget that the state test is a minimum-standards test. Formative Assessment. Failure Is Essential to Learning.
One of my favorite things to say when doing strategic planning with teachers is that the plan has a 50 percent chance of success and a 100 percent chance of teaching us how to get "smarter" about delivering on our mission. I love saying this because it conveys an essential truth: Failure is not a bad thing. It is a guaranteed and inevitable part of learning. In any and all endeavors, and especially as a learning organization, we will experience failure, as surely as a toddler will fall while learning to walk. Unfortunately, in education, particularly in this high-stakes accountability era, failure has become the term attached to our persistent challenges. Why Failure Is Important Early educational reformer John Dewey said it best: "Failure is instructive. Instead, we see failure as an opportunity for students to receive feedback on their strengths as well as their areas of improvement -- all for the purpose of getting better. How do you make failure students' friend?
One Student's Story. Big Thinkers: Howard Gardner on Multiple Intelligences. Comprehensive Assessment: An Overview. Narrator: They are dueling with robots in Florida, and study microorganisms in New York, designing future schools in Seattle, and racing electric cars in Hawaii. All across the country students are being called upon to show what they know in challenging tests of their abilities.
Man: Here we go! The national championship on the line. Narrator: These are the fun tests. Teacher: Today we're going to take SAT I, the reasoning test. Narrator: But today's students face other kinds of exams and their score on one of them can determine their future. With pressures mounting and stakes on the rise, some educators believe we are asking the wrong questions with standardized tests. Linda Darling-Hammond: There's an irony in testing in American schools.
So there are thousands and thousands of hours spent on taking these tests and preparing for these tests which give very little indication of what kids can actually do in real-world situations. Eeva Reeder: Is this what the science wing would look like? Making Sure They Are Learning. Sarah Kaufmann: I think of authentic assessment as my ability to teach each student where they actually are.
I'm Sarah Kaufmann. I teach sixth grade humanities at School of the Future. In order to know where they actually are, I have to be able to assess them really specifically and in a variety of ways that are appropriate for that student, so that what I'm doing is every day giving that child an environment where they're challenged, where they feel good about what they're learning and they feel like they're learning.
Stacy Goldstein: What's been amazing to watch in Sarah's class as a sixth grade teacher is also, she just is extremely rigorous in what she demands from the kids. And so her class really has high standards. Sarah Kaufmann: A lot of that work started with myself when I would think about reading and I would do Post-Its while I read to figure out what I was actually asking the students to do. My name's Eamon McCormick. Student 1: I just borrow Owen's description--