Wow! We worked hard yesterday! I am impressed with your thoughtfulness and ability to take an idea and run with it. Math folks, that you for not running out of the room. I hope all had fun while learning about different ways to to view literature and all types of texts.
As I re-read the next two chapters in Fair Isn't Always Equal, I do so with an amount of shame. "Unfortunately, some teachers (and earlier in my career me included) do all these assessments, yet still go ahead and do what they were going to do anyway." This quote made me look directly at my practice of "marching on" and "covering" the content without regard to what my students had learned.
Let me know what you think!
7 comments:
The debate on mastery is an aspect of teaching that I recently struggled with. After a long time on a particular topic, I decided to move on even though I knew that all of my students had not mastered the topic. I felt that it was better to "introduce than push for mastery" as the text notes. The author raises the question of what "constitutes mastery." From the class average on the test, their mastery would be incomplete. However, I feel that they mastered the general concept. It can vary from teacher to teacher as the author notes on page 18.
In reference to differentiated assessment, two aspects are mentioned. Both are applied to world language classrooms. We use authenticity when assessing. Students must demonstrate application through real-world situations.
Blog 3 due October 20 Chapters 2&3 Fair Isn’t Always Equal
In the math classroom, it IS about covering the content from the bare essentials of a concept to how it is used. There are always those in the class who must begin at the grass-roots level with the very basics. For example, I found several students this year who did not know what vertical and horizontal meant and also what ordered means in the concept ordered pair. MAP testing serves as a pre-assessment, but no skills can be skipped over. Each objective in the EOC list has to be addressed.
I believe that the key to covering all the material is to begin laying the foundation skills slowly and meticulously so as not to lose anyone. Then later in the course it is possible to pick up speed when the majority of the students are, as I say, “on the bus!” I agree with the author that students should be told exactly on which they will be tested. I do this with lots of formative assessments tied to homework problems which lead to the summative assessment. Lots of papers to grade but I wholeheartedly agree with Marzano that “the most powerful single innovation that enhances achievement is feedback”. (text page 28) But giving students an actual copy of their test before teaching the unit is going a little far.
Yes, Paula, it took all my strength not to run! Actually I thought the ideas expressed about Click, Clack, Moo were quite humorous. They make me want to be a fly on the wall in your English classroom!
I found chapter 2 to be of particular interest for a variety of reasons. To ensure student mastery of a subject matter, there are several things that we must do. In short, the book implies not to use closed answer questions but to use evaluative questions that require a well thought out, lucid, written response. It is this manner that allows us to evaluate if the student has achieved mastery. There was much in this chapter that reminds me of Bloom’s Taxonomy. In order to get higher level responses, we as teachers need to ask higher level, open ended questions. The better the question (higher level), the better the chance of determining weather a student has achieved content mastery. We should be using words like “analyze” and “compare and contrast” when testing students.
BCSCRI Blog 3
Chapter 2 - When reading about mastery, I just became full of more questions. I am beginning to think that there is no way to assess true mastery. I think I have mastered baking a pound cake. I even won a blue ribbon at the SC State Fair! But every once in a while, one of my cakes will fall or have a thick, gummy streak in it. SO, if my cakes come out right 95% of the time, I have mastered baking that cake. Does 85% mean I haven’t? Maybe it depends on what is being mastered. We all want doctors who achieved 95% or higher mastery in their content area because we all want top doctors in charge of prescribing our meds or operating on our bodies.
In education, we want all of our students to master concepts being taught to them because as teachers we are graded by the results of an end of course test, exit exam, or college admittance test. Wormeli states that “the clarity required by differentiated instruction and assessment defeats vague pedagogy, for they force us to begin with the end in mind.” Mastery is just that. We begin with “what do we want the learner to be able to do?” Then we teach, guide, test, and sometimes re-teach until we think, “oh yeah, she’s got it.” But every once in a while that cake does fall, no matter how many times you did it just right.
Chapter 3 - I can see where the differentiated classroom can sometimes cause confusion for the teacher especially when it comes to assessment. For instance, the student who is great at speaking in front of the class will do well on oral book reports or booktalks. The student who is scared to death of getting up in front of people would probably receive a low grade. The student who is great at artwork would love to illustrate his book cover, but the one who doesn’t draw stick people well would think it unfair to have a book cover graded. I am not so sure that I agree with going ahead and giving the students the end-of-unit test on the first day of teaching the unit, simply because the students may just look for answers and not how the answers are actually derived. But I do think that it is okay to go ahead and let them know that in a particular unit, which concepts they will be expected to master.
I do like the KUD! Teachers can place this in their syllabi and on their walls. Know, Understand and Do is almost as catchy as KISS- keep it simple stupid. For library research , I might change the acronym to SKUD. Search, Know, Understand, and Do.
We must look back to the standards to define mastery for our curriculum. If students are having a hard time fully mastering the concept, should we stop and make sure every student understands. Should we offer extra sessions for students who are not quite there? Just covering the material is not the answer. Students must at least have the concept before we move on. Assigning homework when students do not at least have the concept can also be dangerous. They can build bad habits that we must correct. So, this is also a critical decision during instruction.
Good assessment is very difficult. Asking the right questions, designing the correct rubric is all so important when determining if the student has mastered the standard, etc. And if they have mastered it are they able to use higher-level thinking to solve a real life situation. This is when I feel a student really knows the material. A lot of effort needs to be placed in designing the lesson and recording what we really want our students to know at the end of the unit. By monitoring and assessing throughout the entire unit, we can adjust our pace and build the correct foundation.
I really attached to Ghallager's comments on page 15: "...we'd like students to make an inference and elaborate on how they arrived at their conclusion in writing, orally, or some other way. We don't accept unexplained, one-lined responses like, "He was speaking about man's morality in that passage."
In the past year and a half, I've really tried to hone my students skills of backing up their arguments. They are so quick to argue--both in and out of the classroom--that I feel it's important for them to have the power of claiming evidence to support. "Because" is the reason a five-year-old gives...if a fifteen-year-old is still giving that answer...there's a problem--he/she doesn't know how to get the answer.
One piece of literature this has worked well in has been Julius Caesar. When we get to the Act Three funeral speeches I have my students fill out a ballot. They have to decide who they feel (if they were one of the swayed plebians in the crowd) demonstrates the best leadership skills. They must back up their answers with rhetorical devices the characters used. Beyond that we continually catalogue strengths and weaknesses of all characters in power throughout the play--they must back up their descriptions with evidence in the text.
This procedure has been monumentally useful--especially this past year during the presidential election.
There are times that students will ask “When are we ever going to use this?” They seem to ask it most often if they think that the work looks like more effort than they want to put in to it. As a math teacher I appreciate the comprehensive list given in chapter 3 under authentic assessment, which includes persevering and explaining our thinking symbolically. This list is one that could be posted in every math classroom for frequent reference
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