Skip to main content

Thank You for 20 "Mo" Years.

By
After 20 years of teaching at Brookfield Central, I am saying goodbye. Although I spent the majority of that time in the physics classroom alongside my learners. That changed for my last 18 weeks. I ended up in a place similar to where I started, teaching chemistry and biology. So, rather than dealing with juniors and seniors at the end of their high school careers, I was in classrooms with freshmen and sophomores still trying to find their place. At the same time, I was learning and teaching a set curriculum I hadn't taught in over a decade. So, we were learning. But, of course, I already knew the content.  The point of this post is to take a step back, reflect, and share the gratitude from the last students I had in my 20 years at Brookfield Central High School, as expressed through the cards and notes they made for me on my last day with them.  I don't take many "yay me" moments. But after 20 years, I'll soak this one in.
Post a Comment

Reflect to Assess to Progress

Image
By

Over the weekend, I read Teaching Students to Self-Assess by Starr Sackstein.  It was a fantastic read.  The book focuses on the importance of reflection in the learning progress. This post only provides a few highlights. Her book has great student examples of reflections and discusses tracking progress over time using reflection.  I highly recommend reading and reflecting on what her book sets out.

Why is reflection so important?

  • If we want students to become more independent, life-long learners, they need to understand how they learn.
  • Reflection involves analysis and evaluation which are higher order skills in Bloom’s Taxonomy.
  • The results of reflection will help students make informed choices about how they personalize learning.
  • The results of student reflections will help instructors modify their instruction to reach all learners.
How does reflection fit into the learning cycle?
The graphic below is one I made last month after reading John Hattie's Learning Made Visible.




I’ve created a new graphic to highlight how reflection fits into the process.







Sackstein does a wonderful job outlining how to build reflection into the classroom over time.










I’ve formatted her guiding questions into the Google Form below.  She is a champion of Google Forms for collecting data.








Once students are ready for narrative reflection, she recommends the following guidelines to be easily accessible in guiding the process.



Ultimately, students are writing reflections for themselves but they could be very informative for others.  So, collecting reflections in a format that can be shared is ultimately the final stage of reflection.  

Essentially, this blog is an attempt to make my reflections public.  Sackstein advocates that teachers model their process for students.  I hope to be able to bring my process into the classroom and make it transparent for students in attempt to show the importance of reflection.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Twitter Cards for Blogger

By
So, I’ve been seeing people with beautiful Twitter Cards in my Twitter Stream. They make it clear that there is a web page to visit and give a quick preview of what would be found. Something like the one below: I’ve been wondering how to get one of the cards to appear when I tweet out a link to my latest blog post.  Since I use Blogger, there is not a simple button to click to turn this on.  I had to find a way to paste new code into the HTML code of my blog.  It took some searching from multiple sites to get a completely functional.   This site though was quite helpful.  But, I’d like to walk you through my process and hopefully it helps a few out. There are a few types of Twitter Cards.  Two that at most frequently see are the basic summary card and the summary card with large image.  Below you can see the layout of each, but realize that they both have the same content pieces. This is going to look like a lot ...
13 comments
Read more

Pear Deck, Quizlet, GimKit Appsmash

By
As a part of March Madness, my students did a EdTech Tournament bracket. The finals were between Gimkit and Pear Deck. Pear Deck won, but my students love both tools.  So when someone asked me if I ever thought of an appsmash between the two, I had to try something out. This is a triple app smash that links Pear Deck to Gimkit using Quizlet. The appsmash uses student generated explanations, definitions, and visuals to create a GimKit. If you are not familiar with Pear Deck Vocabulary it allows students collaborate in the creation of flashcards from a list of predetermined terms or concepts. These flashcards are have both a written and visual component. For all the details on Pear Deck Vocabulary, I’d recommend heading over to Getting Started with Flashcard Factory. If you are not familiar with Gimkit . It is a formative quiz game that allows students to work at questions at their own pace while competing against their classmates. In addition, participants can go to an in ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Personalized Learning Tasks and Roles

By
Yesterday, I read a great post by Jim Rickabaugh dealing with the roles of learner and teacher in a personalized learning environment by looking at tasks . The roles were set up on a continuum. This article timed perfectly with a reflection on part of Students at the Center by Allison Zmuda and Bena Kallick on idea generation and task development I had in mind. These two works are the focus of my reflection here. I think a key misunderstand teachers have when it comes to digging into personalizing learning is that for planning purposes, we no longer begin with standards but with student desires.  I believe like all good instruction, we need to start with the standards.  Think about it, standards are what we want all learners to know and be able to do as a result of passing through our educational system. That is why it is essential that we make sure that standards are representative of what we believe is important for learners to be informed and productive in th...
1 comment
Read more