by Andrew K. Miller | Jul 18, 2014 | ASCD, Blog
This post originally appeared on InService, the ASCD community blog. ASCD (formerly the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development) is an educational leadership organization with 160,000 members in 148 countries, including professional educators from all levels and subject areas––superintendents, supervisors, principals, teachers, professors of education, and school board members.
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I’m really excited to be part of the FIT TeachingTM Cadre. It’s a group of amazing practitioners that build a culture of achievement, design purposeful lessons, and implement effective formative assessment practices. These are three components of the upcoming ASCD Summer Academy on FIT Teaching (The Framework for Intentional and Targeted TeachingTM). This is one amazing way to make sure you are “FIT” when you return to the classroom in the late summer and fall. However, if you missed out on your opportunity to reserve a seat at the ASCD Summer Academy on FIT Teaching, there are many other ways you can get “FIT” this summer.
Start Reading: The summer is one of my favorite times to catch up not only on light reading, but also on some educational reads I’ve neglected during the year. We have some time during the summer to focus our learning. Perhaps you’d like to learn a bit more on one or more aspects of FIT Teaching. You could start with the Formative Assessment Action Plan or Checking for Understanding if formative assessment is your area of learning. Or, you could read How To Create a Culture of Achievement in Your School and Classroom, if you’d like to work on build the best culture you can in your classroom or school. These books are great for a book study or even a primer before related professional development, as they have very practical strategies. Or, consider some ASCD AriasTM publications—short books that can be read in one sitting with strategies that can be put into practice right away.
Watch a Webinar: Nancy Frey and Douglas Fisher presented a webinar on June 4. They will be going over the framework and explaining what it looks like in the classroom, as well as sharing resources. In addition, they will align FIT Teaching to existing teacher evaluation frameworks, a concern for both classroom teachers and education leaders. Watch the webinar to get not only the basics, but also the rationale.
Take Time to Reflect: Take some time this summer to reflect intentionally on your use of formative assessments in the classroom. How have you used formative assessments to meet the needs of all students? How have they changed the way you teach? What steps did you take to build a classroom culture of achievement? How will you make sure your lessons are targeted to not only content goals, but also language and social goals? These are just some of the reflection questions to ponder that connect to FIT Teaching. Great teachers reflect on their practice, and you can use FIT Teaching to focus this reflection.
FIT Teaching may seem like a lot, but I’ve found it really ties all the great practices I’ve done as a teacher, as well as great practices I’ve seen, up in a nice little package, where everything connects and makes sense for not only instruction, but our students as well. If it feels like a lot, focus your learning on just one of the areas. It will surely ensure that you become a more “FIT” teacher.
by Andrew K. Miller | Jul 7, 2014 | Blog, Edutopia
This post originally appeared on Edutopia, a site created by the George Lucas Educational Foundation, dedicated to improving the K-12 learning process by using digital media to document, disseminate, and advocate for innovative, replicable strategies that prepare students. View Original >
I wrote a blog about one of the pitfalls of personalization for the ASCD Whole Child Blog. Specifically, that pitfall is the lack of engagement. With all the focus on personalization through time, pacing, and place, it can be easy to forget about the importance of engagement. No matter where students learn, when they learn, and the timing of the learning, engagement drives them to learn. When we factor all the pieces of personalization together, we can truly meet students where they are and set them on a path of learning that truly meets their needs and desires. Project-based learning can be an effective engagement framework to engage students in personalized learning.
Moving Past “Course-Based” PBL
Due to the antiquated restraints of the education system, most educators are forced to implement PBL in a “course-based” manner. This means that the project occurs within the traditional discipline structures, where there may be integration, but learning is framed within grades and competencies. In addition, start and stop times, driven by the Carnegie unit, force teachers to start and stop a project for all of their students around the same time. What if PBL wasn’t held to antiquated rules of time, space, and discipline constructs? In that ideal situation, students could be engaged in personalized projects.
Student-Designed Projects
Students at Phoenix High School have been engaged in a model similar to the one I’ve described. In it, students design their own driving questions and select the 21st century skills they want to work on, as well as the content learning objectives. They select and design their own products to show their learning in a true commitment to performance assessment. They decide on due dates, benchmarks, and the authentic audience of the work. There is also a heavy push toward community impact and work outside the four walls of the classroom.
My PBL colleague, Erin Sanchez, (formally Erin Thomas), created an amazing graphic of this continuum that shows the power of PBL truly aligned to the learner. As teaching colleagues, we did our best to implement personalized projects for students, and we experienced many of the same challenges faced by teachers who attempt to do this. However, we also saw the payoff: engagement! When students are truly in the driver’s seat of their learning, the impact of their work and the learning associated with it can be powerful!
Role of the Teacher
When teachers move toward personalized PBL, their role continues to shift, just as it does when teachers move traditional instruction to “course-based” PBL. While still involved in the design process, they also serve as advisors. Teachers frequently use question techniques to help students focus and crystalize their projects and project plans. They coach students in creating effective driving questions and student products. They’re still involved in frequent formative assessments, but instead of planning all instructional activity for the students, they help students plan it themselves. In addition, teachers help students select standards and learning targets that will align with the project and products. Teachers at Phoenix High School, for example, help ensure that all standards are targeted for a year, but do not limit the standards that students may want to hit in a project. Here the teachers create and facilitate the infrastructure for the learning rather than designing the PBL projects themselves.
Not every teacher may be ready to jump into this type of personalization. To make it work, they’ll be required to adopt a different teaching role. They’ll need strong management skills and a commitment to disruptive innovation. In addition, the current constructs of the education system may hold us back. What if we could make this dream of personalized PBL a reality? I say that we work toward it, creating a push on the system that demands change in the education of our students.
by Andrew K. Miller | Jun 13, 2014 | Blog, Edutopia
This post originally appeared on Edutopia, a site created by the George Lucas Educational Foundation, dedicated to improving the K-12 learning process by using digital media to document, disseminate, and advocate for innovative, replicable strategies that prepare students. View Original >
I know that many project-based learning teachers are fearful of fully embracing PBL due to the expectations around standardized testing. We need to honor that fear, because it’s not coming from a bad place. Why do we worry? Because we care about kids! Many of our kids are held accountable by the standardized tests they take. From Advanced Placement and International Baccalaureate to end-of-course and graduation exams, we want to make sure that our students are successful. But how do we avoid the pitfall of only teaching to the test?
The Good News
Edutopia recently released a study that showed the success of PBL projects in AP government classes. These projects were deployed in two school districts that were different not only in terms of place, but also socio-economic status and demographics. Students who took the PBL course generally scored higher, especially in the areas that called for deeper understanding, where the knowledge is applied in performance tasks in the exam. This makes sense. PBL, with its emphasis on depth rather than breadth, creates learning that “sticks.” We remember learning in a context that is relevant and connected to the real world.
AP is Changing
CollegeBoard has released the major changes and a timeline for these changes on their website. A couple of key points they make around these changes are:
Greater emphasis on discipline-specific critical thinking, inquiry, reasoning, and communication skills . . .
Rigorous, research-based curricula, modeled on introductory college courses, that strike a balance between breadth of content coverage and depth of understanding.
Here we can see how 21st century skills, a major component of PBL, are being leveraged and honored in the revision. If we take the appropriate time to scaffold and assess these skills in our PBL class, we are preparing our students for the AP exam, no matter the content. Also, PBL does demand content knowledge, as we want students to learn the content in depth and apply in relevant context. In addition, multiple-choice questions are being reduced in the exams, with a greater emphasis on questions that require deeper thinking.
AP Classroom PBL Tips
Embedded AP Assessments
I wrote a blog on a similar topic about embedding standardized testing stems in a PBL project. For AP, it is very similar. The AP exams from the past are released, and teachers can continually go back and steal practice material from these exams. Instead of doing practice AP exams outside of a project, use parts that are relevant to the project. Find test questions to apply toward whatever content you might be targeting. These could be multiple-choice questions for a quiz on Friday or an essay question as part of the project. This will not only prepare students for the exam, but also give you great formative assessments to know how students are doing and adjust instruction as needed. Additionally, it includes the “test prep” within the context of a meaningful project.
The Meaty Content
As teachers look at past exams, they should analyze the tests for the content that is often tested or is worth a large part of the exam. We want this specific content to stick, perhaps more than other content. PBL can help the learning stick for these areas of the exam. It’s similar to power standards, where teachers target learning objectives that are heavily assessed, complex, and perhaps challenging. PBL projects are rigorous and complex, and can provide a great space to hit these major content areas of an AP exam.
Target Critical Thinking
We all want our students to be critical thinkers, and much of the AP exam requires a heavy deal of critical thinking, especially with the changes that are occurring. AP teachers should be focusing on the critical thinking skills needed as well as on the AP content itself. By doing this, teachers are preparing students to navigate critical thinking questions, tasks, and prompts regardless of the content they encounter on the exam. Consider using this rubric from the Buck Institute to support students in building their critical thinking skills.
Hopefully these tips will help teachers design and implement PBL projects that help students learn important content within the AP framework and the skills needed to access the AP exam itself. The AP exam is changing, and students are finding success on that exam through PBL projects. We as educators can support our AP students by creating learning that sticks through PBL!
by Andrew K. Miller | May 26, 2014 | ASCD, Blog
This post originally appeared on InService, the ASCD community blog. ASCD (formerly the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development) is an educational leadership organization with 160,000 members in 148 countries, including professional educators from all levels and subject areas––superintendents, supervisors, principals, teachers, professors of education, and school board members.
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We already know about best practices in assessment. We know that we should use formative assessment to look for patterns in errors and adjust instruction. We also know that we need to have clear learning targets to assess, and that these assessments can be common. We know a lot. One area we don’t yet know as much about is how time factors into assessment.
Time is always an issue for educators. We never have enough, and we often feel we must rush through the material. Great educators try not to let time get in the way of good instruction. But even then, time can get in the way of better use of assessment. We use some sort of formative assessment exercise to check for understanding at the end of the day’s lesson; we give end-of-unit assessments; and our districts and states often take a specific week to give an end-of-course exam or grade-level assessment. What’s interesting here is that time is still the inflexible piece.
Why do we always assess students at the same time and let that be the governing factor for student achievement? We know that students each learn at their own pace. Some take longer; some take a shorter amount of time. We have the same high expectations for our students, but we also know students take different amounts of time to get to those high expectations. One critical element of personalization is that time is no longer the driving factor. Instead of relying on the Carnegie unit, students show mastery and are assessed when they are ready. Granted, so many outside forces are demanding our time, but how might we move past them to meet students were they are in the assessment process?
Create Rigorous Competencies
To start being more flexible with when to give assessments, you need to begin with the end in mind. Many schools that have become more flexible with when they give critical summative assessments create rigorous competencies from standards, including the Common Core. Douglas Fisher and Nancy Frey also advocate for this:
“Grade-level teams or departments usually specify course competencies and corresponding assignments. Competencies should reflect the state standards while offering students an array of ways to demonstrate mastery, not just paper-and-pencil tasks. The competency assessments should be numerous enough that students can adequately gauge their own progress at attaining competencies; generally 7 to 10 per academic year is best” (2009, p. 24).
Competencies are built from standards and include measurable and transferable learning objectives. When designing a competency, you keep both academic and 21st century skills in mind so that the competency moves toward applied learning of multiple learning objectives. When you cluster standards and objectives like this, you can be more comfortable designing flexible assessments to meet these synthesized objectives.
Be Flexible When You Summatively Assess
It is perfectly appropriate to formatively assess the whole class after giving a lesson, and often educators formatively assess students individually. Through the formative assessment process, we can differentiate, give feedback, and meet the needs of students. When we formatively assess, we know when students are ready or not ready for the next steps. This is where time often gets in the way of good intention. If students are not ready for the summative assessment, why should we make them do it? It may be appropriate to allow some students to take the summative assessment after other students have taken it. Again, this should be a rigorous performance assessment that demands construction and application of knowledge. Summative assessments should only been given when students are ready, and, therefore, we must personalize when we give them.
Allow for Late Work
This is probably one of the most challenging shifts for veteran teachers. On the one hand, we want to foster good work ethic, which means adhering to deadlines; on the other hand, we want to be flexible to meet the needs of all students. The key here is to know what are you are assessing. Are you assessing work ethic or content? Students should never be punished for not learning content in a specific amount of time, hence allowing work to be late. Some educators find it appropriate to assess the 21st century skill of work ethic, but they in turn do not let that affect their content learning grade. Once you allow for late work, you can have students complete assessments, mostly summative, at various times.
The movement toward flexible time for assessment is obviously challenging, but these steps can make the shift more manageable—even in the face of immovable educational demands on our time. If we begin with the end in mind when designing assessments, we can use personalization to keep time as a malleable component to meet the needs of all students. This is a move toward true personalization of assessment.
Reference
Fisher, D. & Frey, N. (2009, November). Feed up, back, forward. Educational Leadership, 67(3), 20–25.
by Andrew K. Miller | May 21, 2014 | Blog, Whole Child Blog
This post originally appeared on The Whole Child blog, an ASCD initiative to call on educators, policymakers, business leaders, families, and community members to work together on a whole child approach to education. View Original >
Personalization is quickly becoming a buzzword in education, especially in terms of blended learning and educational technology. I joined a team of educators on a panel on the same subject on the Whole Child Podcast. We unpacked what it is and what it might look like in the classroom. We talked about its challenges and benefits and collaborated to explain its implications for education. Most importantly, we talked about the critical role of relationships. When you break down personalization, most of us would agree that there are great aspects. Take a look at this chart.
I think one of the most overlooked pieces for personalization currently is that the learner “connects learning with interests, talents, passions, and aspirations.” Those who know personalization believe it is a critical component, but in the implementation it can be lost or “put on the back burner.” There are couple reasons for this.
First, the language is key. Here the learner is in complete control, and it almost seems as if a teacher is not part of the picture. In fact, a teacher is still integral to personalization, not only in helping provide scaffolding and instruction, but most importantly the engagement. A pitfall is to look at this language around personalization and engagement to a point where teachers have no role in it. In fact, student engagement—whether in a model of personalization, differentiation, or individualization—is arguably the most important factor. If you ask teachers what their biggest concerns are for the classroom and education, student engagement is at or near the top of the list. We need to remember that this is still true in personalization. Relationships and the creation of engagement still remain a critical component of personalization.
Secondly, there is a danger with regard to personalization and technology. Much of personalization is done through blended or online learning. I, myself, am a big advocate for online learning. However I have major caveats and critiques. I have seen digital courses where students still receive the “sit and get” instruction, where they is no choice in what they learn or how they show their learning. The digital curriculum may have amazing tools, such as videos, games and more; but the model of learning is still grounded in traditional instruction. Yes, students may have control over time, place, and pace, but often the engaged tenet is not truly manifested in this model of personalization.
As we move forward with personalization, we need to make sure not to forget student engagement and its implications for truly personalizing learning, where student passion and interest are not only allowed, but a critical component of the model.
by Andrew K. Miller | May 19, 2014 | Blog, Edutopia
This post originally appeared on Edutopia, a site created by the George Lucas Educational Foundation, dedicated to improving the K-12 learning process by using digital media to document, disseminate, and advocate for innovative, replicable strategies that prepare students. View Original >
Although the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) have not yet been fully implemented, more and more states are signing up as early adopters. The NGSS call for a conceptual shift in teaching and learning. Along with traditional subject matter, science and engineering are now integrated into the standards, and students will learn about the principles of engineering and engage in the engineering design processes.
In addition, many concepts are cutting across content. For example, the concept of “systems and system models” is used in the exploration of nuclear energies as well as ecosystems. Also, scientific and engineering practices are aligned multiple times with the disciplinary content. The NGSS calls for a deeper understanding and application of content. The focus is on core ideas and practices of science, not just the facts associated with them. This is a great opportunity for project-based learning, because not only can PBL align to the shift in pedagogy, it can also enhance what the NGSS demand.
The Alignment
Just as the draft NGSS calls for deeper understanding and application of knowledge, PBL demands the same — in-depth inquiry into the content. When teachers design PBL projects, they choose to focus on power standards, or standards that usually take significant time to teach and focus on depth, not breadth. The NGSS will be a similar kind of standards, and thus easily used when designing PBL. In fact, a teacher designing a PBL project might target one of the crosscutting concepts, something that permeates the entire year of content. This is no more evident than the NGSS App available on iTunes. Take a look at the Grade Four Earth Systems Standard:
Identify evidence from patterns in rock formations and fossils in rock layers to support explanation for changes in a landscape over time.
This standard focuses on explanation of changes — not just identifying them, but using them to think critically about the content. In fact, the NGSS app provides an “Assessment Boundary” that says: “Assessment does not include specific knowledge of the mechanism of rock formation or the memorization of specific rock formations and layers.” This is about depth, not rote memorization, which is ripe for a PBL project. In fact, the clarification statement of this standard highlights possibilities for a PBL project:
Examples of evidence from patterns could include rock layers with marine shell fossils above rock layers with plant fossils and no shells, indicating a change from land to water over time; and a canyon with different rock layers in the walls and a river in the bottom, indicating that over time a river cut through the rock.
Being a Scientist
Most state science standards were linked to the scientific inquiry process. The NGSS continue to honor this as a key component to science education. Dimension 1 of the NGSS focuses on practices which “describe behaviors that scientists engage in as they investigate and build models and theories about the natural world and the key set of engineering practices that engineers use as they design and build models and systems.” Embedded throughout standards is language where students must “use evidence,” “make observations,” “ask questions,” “combine information,” and “apply scientific ideas,” to name just a few. All of this language focuses on the art of being a scientist to learn the content. PBL calls for students not only to be scientists, but also citizen scientists investigating real-world scientific problems and challenges to make an impact. Like the NGSS, PBL focuses not only on the content of science, but also on the content of being a scientist.
STEAM PBL
I wrote about this in a recent blog. As we notice the new engineering focus of NGSS, we might consider design challenges, a key component of science, technology, engineering, art, and mathematics (STEAM) education. However, design challenges are not necessarily PBL by default. One can take a design challenge, add some PBL-essential elements to it, and make it into a PBL project, yet there are some components that must be added to make it a true PBL project. In the example from my previous blog, students made recommendations for retrofitting a local bridge and presented this information to city officials and engineers. Yes, the product might be a bridge design, and yes, students might engage in a toothpick contest along the way. The difference is that the work goes outside the four walls of the classroom and is actually an authentic situation where students are engaged in real-world work. As the design process and other components of engineering are leveraged in the NGSS, PBL projects can be designed to teach and assess these standards.
The NGSS will be successful only if we give students the learning models that call for the rigor and depth they demand. Not only is PBL ready for the challenge, but it can create deeper engagement with the content, where students’ deeper learning in the classroom makes them real scientists and engineers of the real world.
by Andrew K. Miller | May 14, 2014 | Blog
This post originally appeared on Edutopia, a site created by the George Lucas Educational Foundation, dedicated to improving the K-12 learning process by using digital media to document, disseminate, and advocate for innovative, replicable strategies that prepare students. View Original >
Both project-based learning and STEAM education (science, technology, engineering, art and math) are growing rapidly in our schools. Some schools are doing STEAM, some are doing PBL, and some are leveraging the strengths of both to do STEAM PBL. With a push for deeper learning, teaching and assessment of 21st-century skills, both PBL and STEAM help schools target rigorous learning and problem solving. They are not exactly the same, but teachers can easily connect to them to teach not only STEAM content and design challenges, but also authentic learning and public, high-quality work. In fact, many know that STEAM education isn’t just the content, but the process of being scientists, mathematicians, engineers, artists and technological entrepreneurs. Here are some ways that PBL and STEAM can complement each other as you deliver instruction.
From Design Challenges to Authentic Problems
Many of us have experienced, either as a teacher or student, the bridge design challenge. It often unfolds in this way. Students are given the challenge to make a bridge out of materials that will hold the most weight. These materials might be marshmallows, glue, toothpicks and the like. Students are given multiple opportunities to try out ideas and refine their work. It might culminate in a public content or presentation day when the bridges are tested for the last time. This is a fun and engaging design challenge that encourages the freedom to fail as well as opportunities for revision, reflection and using critical thinking skills.
PBL can take this design challenge up a notch. Instead of just designing a “fake” bridge, students might actually make recommendations to real architects and engineers for local bridges that need repairs. Some further math or physics content might be intentionally included and scaffolded so that students end up writing a rigorous design briefing and make a public presentation to the architects. Here the work can be more authentic and perhaps make a real difference as students truly become designers of real-world STEAM work.
21st Century Skills
One of the essential elements of PBL is the 21st century skillset. These skills are often defined as the 4Cs — creativity, collaboration, critical thinking and communication — although there are many more, including technology literacy and health literacy. In a PBL project, teachers teach and assess one or more of these skills. This might mean using an effective rubric for formative and summative assessment aligned to collaboration, collecting evidence, facilitating reflection, and scaffolding many quality indicators and collaboration skills within the PBL project. Although STEAM design challenges foster this naturally as an organic process, PBL can add the intentionality needed to teach and assess the 21st century skills embedded in STEAM.
For example, a teacher might choose to target technology literacy for a PBL STEAM project, build a rubric in collaboration with students, and assess both formatively and summatively. In addition, the design process, a key component of STEAM education, can be utilized. Perhaps a teacher has a design process rubric used in the PBL project, or even an empathy rubric that leverages and targets one key component of the design process. When “marrying” PBL and STEAM in projects, the 21st century skills not only fit well, but fit intentionally into the assessment process.
Integrated Disciplines
Project-based learning can target one or more content areas. Many PBL teachers start small in their first implementations and only pick a couple of content areas to target. However, as teachers and students become more PBL-savvy, STEAM can be great opportunity to create a project that hits science, math, technology and even art content. The key is to start with the content. When teachers design projects, they need to leverage the backwards design framework and begin with the end in mind. The questions should be:
What STEAM content will be assessed?
What products will students create to demonstrate mastery of these many content standards?
As STEAM focuses on integration of content, pairing STEAM with PBL can hit not only STEAM content, but also content outside of the core STEAM subjects. English can be integrated, as well as foreign languages and social studies. It’s all about designing effective PBL that targets these content areas.
As STEAM and PBL continue to grow in implementation, teachers can fit them together in curriculum and instructional practice. Additionally, these two approaches can capitalize on each other’s strengths and fill each other’s potential gaps. The key is an intentionality in design that recognizes what might be missing from each approach. Engage in your own design challenge to create STEAM PBL projects, and share your work with like-minded practitioners.
by admin | Apr 30, 2014 | Blog
This post originally appeared on Partnership for 21st Century Skills (P21), the leading national organization advocating for 21st century readiness for every student. P21 brings together the business community, education leaders, and policymakers who believe our education system must equip students with rigorous academic coursework and the skills to be successful employees and citizens. View Original >
Driving Question: How Can We Assess Creativity in the Classroom?
Explicitly and effectively assessing creativity is one of my passions. I was lucky. My parents put me into many arts programs, music programs and the like to build my creativity. Later it would become an area of study as I practiced vocal jazz, and sung in my musicals and chorale groups. In fact, it was that work I can strongly attribute to my current creative abilities which I have been able to transfer into “non-arts” subject matter and ideas.
Indeed, we know creativity is not limited to the arts, but that also means we need to provide instructional opportunities for students to be creative in all subject areas, be assessed on creativity, and improve.
Let’s be clear, we are using the word “assess” here. Assessment does not “equal” grading. Those are two different things, although the can complement and build upon each other.
Some schools do put in a creativity grade, while others may feel uncomfortable doing so. Regardless, students need to know where they are at in terms of the creativity in order to set goals and improve. Assessment does this with or without grades.
Unpacking Creativity
The first step to assessing creativity it to know what it is. Despite popular belief, it is not a nebulous concept. Creativity, in fact, has quality indicators to it that help us to understand what it looks like and how we build our creative skills. Rubrics exist that articulate these quality indicators, such as the Buck Institute for Education’s Creativity rubrics for elementary and secondary grades.
In a rubric published in the Ed Leadership article “Assessing Creativity,” Sue Brookhart describes the category of very creative with the description “Ideas represent a startling variety of important concepts from different contexts or disciplines” as well as “Created product draws on a wide variety of sources, including different texts, media, resource persons, or personal experiences.” In BIE’s K-2 Creativity rubric, two quality indicators are “I can help pick the best idea” and “I can think of ideas for what to make or do in the project.” These are some samples of helping students understand what creativity looks like, and gives them quality indicators. We need to unpack creativity in this way because students may or may not know what it is, let alone how to get better. Simply saying, “Be creative,” will not give students the specific goals to work toward.
Creativity with Content
Creativity doesn’t happen in a vacuum. Students must have some “thing” with which to be creative. For example they can be creative with World Religions content knowledge or solve linear equations in a creative way. In addition, tying creative thinking to an important concept or idea provides a great opportunity to assess more content-based standards along with creativity; giving them both equal footing in the assessment plan.
When teachers design a unit or project, they begin with the end in mind, target specific content skills and objectives that they want students to learn. From there, they consider how students can be creative with that content. What context will they give students that demands they be creative with the content? What voice and choice will theygives students in products students will create?
Consider this example. A teacher might design a unit where she wants students to learn about world religions, as well as speaking and listening skills. From there, the teacher might come up with the context about discrimination that occurs with world religions and tasks student with uncovering and solving this issue of stereotypes and discrimination. Next, the teacher might provide voice and choice to students in the products they create as well as the audience they intend to target. While the learning of content and skills is focused, the space and demand for creativity is there as well.
Formative and Summative Assessment
Teachers can assess creativity in a final product or in summative assessments. If the unit or project calls for a creative product, a criteria for evaluation might be creativity in addition to the content skills and knowledge students have to demonstrate. However, if teachers intend to summatively assess creativity, but they must formatively assess in order to scaffold appropriately and to have students build their creative thinking skills.
Paired with a good rubric, they can formatively assess one or many quality indicators of creativity. Students can set goals and reflect upon these creative goals. As the final product calls for creativity, journals, reflections and even oral individuals can be used to check for creative indictors. These formative assessments can be used as self, peer and teacher assessments to improve creative skills. It further fosters that creativity is a process. For a quality final product that shows creativity, the creative process must be valued through formative assessment.
Assessing creativity must be intentional when teachers plan instruction. If we want our students to be creative, then we must assess it. It we want creativity to be valued as much as content, then it is must be assessed just like content. The good news is that it can be done, and we have the tools to do it!
by Andrew K. Miller | Apr 24, 2014 | Blog, Edutopia
This post originally appeared on Edutopia, a site created by the George Lucas Educational Foundation, dedicated to improving the K-12 learning process by using digital media to document, disseminate, and advocate for innovative, replicable strategies that prepare students. View Original >
Standardized testing is one of the “lighting rod” issues in educational policy debates. Whether it’s a group of teachers boycotting a test in Seattle, districts across the United States tying teacher evaluations to test results, the new PARCC or Smarter Balanced Assessments being implemented, the ranking countries with PISA scores, or the SAT trying to revamp itself, the debate and topic of standardized testing simply will not go away. So what is an educator to do? With all these forces in play, whether at the district or federal level, it can be disheartening and daunting for an educator to create learning in the classroom. With all the changes, there is always pressure to teach to the test. But I think we can do better.
Encourage Higher Order Thinking
Standardized tests hit a huge range of depth of knowledge or cognitive levels of Bloom’s Taxonomy. Often a prompt may just be focusing on recall or comprehension, or inference at best. There might be some more critical thinking prompts, but those won’t necessarily dominate the standardized assessment. I believe that we, as educators, should be aiming higher, beyond what a test demands. When we aim higher, we are preparing our students for more than a test — we’re preparing them for 21st century skills paired with content.
To do this, educators need to make sure that the assessments and projects they assign their students are rigorous and focused on depth of knowledge and/or higher levels of Bloom’s. To get there, students will indeed have to do the lower levels of thinking, but we can’t just stop there. Instead, the lower level thinking should serve as scaffolding for higher order thinking. Let’s aim higher than what a standardized test might ask of our students, ensuring that they’re not only ready for the test, but more than ready for college, career and life!
Embed “Test Prep”
Instead of wasting everyone’s time prepping for the exam right before it happens, embed test prep into your daily instruction. Try to make it a meaningful assessment tool while still practicing for the test. For example, you can look at the standardized test to find the stems. Steal these stems and use them to create formative and/or summative assessments for a more engaging project or unit. These might be short-answer or multiple-choice questions, or longer essay-like questions. As a teacher, these small, low-stakes, test-like questions can help you effectively check for understanding. They also help your students become familiar with how the standardized test will look and what it will feel like. Don’t forget to be transparent — show your students how this will be like the standardized test, but also explain why you are using these questions in your instruction.
Error Analysis for Reflective Instruction
Error analysis is an excellent and intentional way to look at the student performance data for patterns and trends, and then use this data to prepare for instruction in an upcoming unit, whether that is a unit next year or next week. Douglas Fisher and Nancy Frey, two of my favorite education authors, articulate the process in “Making Time for Feedback,” an article that appeared in Educational Leadership.
So how does this fit in with standardized tests? Standardized test items should be aligned to a standard, which means the data is disaggregated into these different performance areas. Once students have taken the standardized test, the data is given back to the teacher, and the teacher should be looking at it to make informed decisions on instruction. In this case, it is often for the next year, but the data might also inform remedial instruction. Regardless, teachers can aim beyond the standardized test as just a summative assessment, and instead use it as a tool to reflect upon instruction and meet the needs of individual students.
Instead of just viewing standardized testing as “scary beast,” we can do our best not only to make it useful through error analysis, but also to prepare students for it in meaningful ways and with instruction that’s better than just test prep. We don’t need to be focusing on test prep — we need to be focusing on our students and effective instruction!
by Andrew K. Miller | Mar 19, 2014 | Blog, Edutopia
This post originally appeared on Edutopia, a site created by the George Lucas Educational Foundation, dedicated to improving the K-12 learning process by using digital media to document, disseminate, and advocate for innovative, replicable strategies that prepare students. View Original >
Being a mentor teacher to a teaching candidate is quite a privilege and honor, as you are integral in nurturing and helping that new teacher to reflect and improve upon his or her instruction. I recently reached out to fellow mentor teachers and asked them about their advice and best practices, not only for teacher mentors, but also for new teachers in the field. Here are some great quotes and points from these practicing mentors.
For New Teachers
Make Relationships with the Right People
Ted Malefyt is a middle school science teacher for Hamilton Community Schools in Michigan. He has a passion for project-based learning that creates relevant learning. He tells us to “build working relationships with the forward-thinking teachers who are excited about being a life-long learner.” I remember that, when I first started teaching, there were some teachers who were often negative. I chose not to align with them, as I knew it would not help me nurture myself, nor remain hopeful about education. It’s important to find colleagues that, although they may challenge you, still have the best interests of students at heart, and are hopeful about their roles as teachers. Build relationships with reflective, life-long learners to become one!
Make Sure You Really Want to Teach
Heather Anderson is an English and Spanish teacher at the Health and Sciences High and Middle College in San Diego, California. She has expertise in gradual release of responsibility, close reading and text-dependent questions. She echoes a core belief that I think all potential educators need to consider — make sure you really want to be a teacher. “First and foremost, make sure that this is the career for you. I think that many beginning teachers have a sense of grandeur that does not meet the reality of the classroom. Make sure you visit schools before you student teach. We learn a lot of theory in our classes, but the actual implementation and day-to-day grind of teaching is very different than those courses you took in college.” I really do agree with the advice to visit schools before jumping into a program. Set up interviews or coffee with a teacher friend and ask great questions.
For Mentor Teachers
Be Patient and Compassionate
As a veteran teacher, it can be hard to remember what it was like as a brand new teacher, or one considering jumping into the profession. Sometimes we focus so much on the technical side of becoming a teacher that we forget the social-emotional component. Heather reminds us, “New teachers are eager and passionate. They are also extremely scared and delicate. They need someone that they can trust. They need someone that they can celebrate with and also someone who will let them express their fears and concerns.” Give new teachers the benefit of the doubt, be honest in feedback, and give time for improvement. After all, we were all there at some time.
Nurture Unit and Lesson Design
Sometimes we focus too much on delivery of the lesson rather than the design of the lesson itself. As mentor teachers, seek opportunities to let teacher candidates design or co-design lessons and units. I wrote about this belief in a previous blog. Ted says, “Providing as many opportunities as we can to design and create for the classroom is very important in changing the culture of education.” I couldn’t agree more.
For All Teachers
Become a Reader
I was not much of a reader when I first entered teaching. I think it was because I was “forced” to read material that I didn’t find relevant. However, the more I looked for great books on education or got recommendations from colleagues, the more I was able to re-find that love of reading. As Ted says “I also highly recommend becoming an avid reader of books that deal with everything from education to innovation and creativity.” There are so many books on education out there. Find something that works for you and that will push your thinking. It will help to keep you energized and model life-long learning for your students.
“Fail Forward”
Almost all the mentor teachers I talked to reminded me of a phrase I use often, to “fail forward.” They expressed that all mistakes they made were part of the journey. As Heather says, “Teaching is a dance. You change your style and movements depending on your partner. With each student and each classroom dynamic, you, in essence, have a new partner.” We all have good days and bad days, but every day we touch the lives of children, and we can learn from these moments to improve education for all.
Leverage Social Media
There is so much that social media has to offer teachers, both experienced and new. Build your PLN, participate in Twitter chats, read blogs and find resources. There are great ideas out there, and we can support each other. Consider sharing your ideas in a blog as well, if you’re comfortable putting yourself out there.
I would love to hear more from mentor teachers, both in terms of the role they play and their advice for anyone considering the teaching profession. I believe that, although there is a formal mentor teacher in the student-teaching phase, we are all mentor teachers, and we have much to learn from each other.
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