Robo-readers aren’t as good as human readers — they’re better In April of 2012, Mark D. Shermis, then the dean of the College of Education at the University of Akron, made a striking claim: “Automated essay scoring engines” were capable of evaluating student writing just as well as human readers. Shermis’s research, presented at a meeting of the National Council on Measurement in Education, created a sensation in the world of education —among those who see such “robo-graders” as the future of assessment, and those who believe robo-graders are worse than useless. The most outspoken member of the second camp is undoubtedly Les Perelman, a former director of writing and a current research affiliate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Perelman makes a strong case against using robo-graders for assigning grades and test scores. Instructors at the New Jersey Institute of Technology have been using a program called E-Rater in this fashion since 2009, and they’ve observed a striking change in student behavior as a result. Why would this be?
Inside the Classroom Door… » Socratic Seminar Guide Socratic Seminar Preparation Guide A Socratic seminar is one where we examine a text for a deeper understanding of the ideas rather than “right” answers. It requires knowledge of the text and using the text to support your thoughts. The questions are mostly open-ended—they invite discussion. As we practiced in our listening skills unit, we look each other in the eye when listening and speaking, we use each other’s first names, and we acknowledge what others said before adding our opinions. You will probably notice many of the questions and skills in the Socratic seminar are similar to those we use in literature circles. The seminar requires you to prepare in advance. · Read the text completely, using sticky notes if it’s a textbook or annotating the text to highlight the most important or key passages. · Look over the text to consider the prepatory questions that you have been given. · Create a list of “big ideas” or themes you think the book discusses. · Spoke loudly and clearly
Designing Better Lessons? | Jim Burke I haven’t much time to discuss the image below but wanted to share something I am doing this first week, which I cannot yet promise to keep up but is showing promising benefits for me and those with whom I collaborate at school. I wanted to create a lesson plan template online that I could share and use to collaborate with my colleague Melissa for our senior class. What I settled on (so far) was using Google Sheets, which is Google’s version of Microsoft Excel. This whole planning question and conundrum has been on my mind because of an article I am writing for the Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy and also because of the great blogs Grant Wiggins has been writing about this issue of planning lately. To make full sense of it, you need to consider that each column is a day’s lesson plan and prints out with about a 2″ margin on the right, which turns out to be pretty useful for making additional notes (about what went wrong and why, of course).
Socratic Seminar Student Guidelines "The unexamined life is not worth living." -Socrates Guidelines for Participants in a Socratic Seminar 1. Refer to the text when needed during the discussion. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. Expectations of Participants in a Socratic Seminar When I am evaluating your Socratic Seminar participation, I ask the following questions about participants. Speak loudly and clearly? What is the difference between dialogue and debate? Socratic Seminar: Participant Rubric
What Teachers Need to Know about Depth of Knowledge (DOK) Framework August 14, 2014 Depth of Knowledge is a conceptual framework and a vocabulary reference developed by Webb (1977) to help with analyzing the cognitive demands and expectations students are to meet when engaged in Common Core learning. DOK categorizes the curricular activities into four major groups with each one of them corresponding to a particular cognitive level it addresses. DOK looks into the kind of thinking and cognitive rigour required for students to complete a given task. There are four major DOK levels: DOK1: elicits recall and reproductionDOK2: focuses on basic application of skills and concepts and simple reasoningDOK3: expects strategic thinking and complex reasoningDOK4: requires extended thinking Rigorous instructional materials should include a mixture of tasks from across DOK levels. Here is a great Guide available for free download in PDF format that will help you better understand Webb's Depth of Knowledge.
Socratic Seminar Guidelines: A Practical Guide Balancing Participation: In the first discussion of any group, three to five people will monopolize the conversation right away. This is natural but far from ideal. Ideally, the conversation is equally shared among all of the participants. Those who naturally dominate should be encouraged to listen first and speak later. Try out some of the following ideas to help support this: Limit those who speak often to a certain number of questions and responses. Note that those who talk a lot will become frustrated when they reach their limit and can no longer speak. The leader must resist the temptation to save the participants from the uncomfortable silences! The process takes time and lots of repetition, but the results are powerful.
15 terrific resources for close reading Snap Learning is a longtime partner and supporter of The Cornerstone, and they have sponsored this post. Though their products are not included in the roundup below as these resources are free, I encourage you to check out their Close Reading Portfolio or request a demo of the product here. They’re a fantastic company and I believe their interactive close reading exercises are among the best on the market. Close reading is an important part of Common Core because it helps students think and reflect deeply on the text. However, it think it’s a great strategy for ALL teachers to use, regardless of whether your state has adopted Common Core. It’s just plain good teaching! I remember teaching my third graders to use “think marks” like stars, question marks, and exclamation marks as far back as 2001. There is no one set way or “right” way for teaching kids to do close reading. Hopefully your students aren’t doing THAT kind of close reading.
Observation Challenge: What Do You Hear (Part One of Three) The Importance of Learning to Observe I distinctly remember when I needed to understand the game of football. Sure, I’d spent years as a fan, cheering the touchdowns and feeling disappointment with dropped passes. But frankly, all I could see was the surface — all the strategy, all the athleticism, all the orchestration of plays simply went over my head. So I started to ask questions about rules, about positions, and I asked people (patient people) to start pointing things out to me as we watched. If you’re wondering what football has to do with teaching, let me offer this: we’ll never understand the complexity of the work we do if we don’t learn to see beyond the surface. Yet, I know from having all kinds of observers join my classroom, that learning to observe is a tough endeavor. How This Challenge Works In this blog series, we’ll look at one lesson in three different ways: what you hear, what you see, and what’s invisible. This exercise has one clear focus: pay attention to language.
Assessment Design: A Matrix To Assess Your Assessments Assessment Design: A Matrix To Assess Your Assessments by Grant Wiggins, Authentic Education On Rigor, Language, & Verbs Rigor is not established by the unthinking use of Webb or Bloom or other verbs. A moment’s thought after looking over these verbs should make you say: Huh? Take “predict” for example. In summary, just throwing some verbs around as starters for “rigorous” tasks is not enough to address the first bullet concerning the challenge of the task.
Nurturing Intrinsic Motivation and Growth Mindset in Writing It's the first writing conference, four weeks into the year, with this blond senior. He stiffly leans back from me as far as the metal desk will allow, exuding cynicism, too cool for meeting with teachers about his writing. I can see he doesn't trust me yet or know why we conference, and he's afraid. He says, "So, what is this meeting about then?" And we begin. The Power of Teacher Enthusiasm Conferencing and portfolios work for me. But I wish the research would point to these systems as consistent and universal means of student growth. Then, two years ago, I read Daniel Pink's Drive and Carol Dweck's Mindset, and I realized that a system of portfolios and conferences was not enough to change student engagement on its own. Intrinsic Motivation Pink’s Drive argues that employees -- and students -- after their basic needs are met, are motivated by autonomy, purpose, and mastery. But sometimes, I also got it right. Growth Mindset The Payoff: Engagement and Ownership
Dipsticks: Efficient Ways to Check for Understanding What strategy can double student learning gains? According to 250 empirical studies, the answer is formative assessment, defined by Bill Younglove as "the frequent, interactive checking of student progress and understanding in order to identify learning needs and adjust teaching appropriately." Unlike summative assessment, which evaluates student learning according to a benchmark, formative assessment monitors student understanding so that kids are always aware of their academic strengths and learning gaps. Meanwhile, teachers can improve the effectiveness of their instruction, re-teaching if necessary. Alternative formative assessment (AFA) strategies can be as simple (and important) as checking the oil in your car -- hence the name "dipsticks." In the sections below, we'll discuss things to consider when implementing AFAs. Observation: A Key Practice in Alternative Formative Assessment A fundamental element of most AFAs is observation. New to Alternative Formative Assessment?
Sharpen Your Workshop Routines: Setting up the Writer’s Notebook for a Year of Writing Let’s have a conversation about sharpening workshop routines. Welcome back, readers! We have returned from our July break refreshed and ready for a new school year of sharing ideas, resources, and teaching practices here at Two Writing Teachers. For many of us, the first day of school is right around the corner, and we are turning our attention to preparing our lesson plans and classrooms. I always bring along my current writer’s notebook, and I do so because I want my kids to see that it is a living, breathing writer’s notebook, not a pre made prop I haul in every year for a demonstration. and keep our minilessons in the back: On average, each student will need two notebooks over the course of the school year. Use your notebook to breathe in the world around you. All of this is to remind students that the purpose of the writer’s notebook is just that…to practice and grow the craft of writing. Quickwrite, to me, means to write fast for a short amount of time,less than three minutes.