In my previous school district, I was the only teacher teaching a physics course with set, district-wide learning outcomes. These same outcomes were also taught in physics classrooms at the other high school in our district. But at our school, I was one of the 2 physics teachers. The other teacher taught the AP-level physics courses. So, in many ways, I had opportunities to incorporate strategies I believed were best for learners and that I found worked best for them without being seen as out of alignment with anyone in our building. My amazing friend and one of my teaching philosophy goddesses, Katie Novak, stated the following misconception about alignment: All teachers must deliver instruction in the exact same way. True alignment, she says, is about shared goals, rigor, and outcomes. Thank you, Katie! Katie has taught me to truly believe that learner variability is the rule, not the exception. I encourage you to take 10 minutes to listen to Katie Novak explain it in the ...
Learners in my classroom are very comfortable doing what they are assigned to do. They aim to complete the task at hand as defined by me. Many do not question the why of the learning because of an understanding that this is what it means to “do school”. When given an assignment, it is a task to completed. The learners in my classes are very compliant in that way. When given hands-on tasks that ask them to create a product, they are highly engaged. Some take the opportunity to unleash their creativity and go beyond the norm to own the process while the majority create within safer prescribed paths. I want to provide more opportunities for students to own their choices on a daily basis in our classroom.
For a few years now, I have been working with freedom of choice in forms of summative assessments in my classroom. But, the day to day practice work in my class has really fallen into the compliant practice question mode. The practice work my students do has several faults that I have a hard time justifying and want to address.
- Too many questions/problems
- The range of difficulty rises too slowly through a set
- Feedback is slow when students choose to do the questions on paper
- The practice does not tap into personal interests or give students little voice
- The practice does not connect to the world outside the classroom
I hope to address these failures with some tips given to me by my friend Kate Sommerville from The Institute for Personalized Learning. She’s helping me move to a practice format which would contain limited problem sets. This would allow learners to spend practice time exploring connections between the topic we are addressing and how it applies to the outside world or their lives.
How will this address the shortcomings that I’ve previously identified?
Too many problems: Why do I need a worksheet with 25 problems which include repetitions of the same type of problem? I’m moving to a max of 10 problems for a problem set. One sheet front and back.
Range of difficulty: This 2 sided sheet would ramp up difficulty over the course of the problems. Students would be asked to make the choice for themselves. Are they ready to start from the back side which lacks any scaffolding? Or should they start from the front with scaffolds that will aid in the progression to higher order questions on the back.
Feedback: Students always have the choice of doing the questions digitally through our LMS or on paper. Feedback is instantaneous with the digital version. But it takes me a day to get back the paper version. A smaller problem set would allow me to correct at a glance. It can become more of a conversation as students complete rather than waiting until the day after to address it.
Connections to interest and the world: Once students complete the quick question set successfully, they can move onto practice options that show how the topic relates to the outside world or allows a more interactive experience. For each topic, there will a list of options including simulations, games , videos (such as ESPN Sports Science), and news articles related to the topic allowing learners to dig deeper with some choice.
I hope to progress to a state where students will be comfortable and empowered enough to seek out their own practice resources related to something they are interested in rather than relying on a curated list from me. The can help create an ongoing list of resources. This ability to seek out their own connections could lead to something bigger and could be lead to a summative assessment piece that the student co-designs with the teacher. I hope for a day where students in my classroom feel they have the agency to propose their own practice work. Practice that they find rewarding and want to dig deeper into.
Empowerment is not something I can give to students. It is something that they have to step up and take. It is a scary thing to do in a system of compliance. As brave students step up, the systems need to be in place to be ready to support and celebrate them in this risk they are taking.
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