by Andrew K. Miller | Feb 23, 2015 | ASCD, Blog, InService
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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Teachers often want to know where to start with differentiated instruction as it can seem overwhelming and daunting. Questions like the ones below go through the minds of all teachers, especially those new to the teaching profession.
How can I manage small-group instruction?
How can I organize learning for students at different levels? How can I make time for one-on-one instruction?
How can I meet the needs of all students?
I think these questions come from a lack of preparation in terms of assessment practices. When I first started teaching, I know I was not given enough tools and practices to both assess well and use assessments effectively. Assessment, as it turns out, is really the cornerstone for differentiated instruction. That being said, it totally makes sense that I was unable to differentiate effectively when I first started teaching. However, as I gained the necessary skills and practices to effectively assess my students —through self-directed learning and formal professional development—I started to realize that I could in fact differentiate. I believe that if teachers leverage formative assessment best practices more, differentiation will come naturally.
Setting Purpose and Feeding Up
In their book The Purposeful Classroom: How to Structure Lessons with Learning Goals in Mind, Douglas Fisher and Nancy Frey explain that the first part of formative assessment is for teachers to know what they’re setting out to do with their students. Teachers should ask themselves this question every day: “What are we learning today?” (with the keyword being today). If teachers have specific and manageable goals for learning with their students, they know what they need to check for understanding on. The first step to differentiation is to have a clear daily purpose for learning.
Checking for Understanding
Teachers need to remember that there are many ways to check for understating. Questions, prompts, and cues can allow them to truly see if students understand what they have set out to learn. Teachers can use questions to see if there are errors in student understanding. In addition, teachers can use writing tools, performance tools, quizzes, technology tools, and more to check and see where students are in their path of learning. They can use formal assessment tools that require time for feedback, or they can use quick assessments tools like student-response systems and exit tickets. Teachers need to check for understanding to successfully plan for differentiated instruction.
Feeding Forward
In their book, Fisher and Frey also explain that formative assessment allows teachers to “feed forward”—that is, to use assessment data to plan the right types of instructional activities to use in the future. By checking for understanding and using error-analysis tools to look for global and individual errors, teachers can work smarter to plan the right type of instruction. They can create learning activities to challenge students further and plan learning to support for students who are struggling. In addition, teachers can effectively plan individual, small-group, and whole-class instruction because they know where their students are and what they need. This is the key to differentiation.
Student Engagement
When teachers use formative assessment to drive differentiation, student engagement inevitably increases. Think about it. If teachers improperly feed forward and plan whole-group instruction when only half the class needs it, they are actually setting themselves up for failure in terms of student engagement. On the flip side, if teachers use formative assessment effectively, they can differentiate to provide “just-in-time” instruction that students truly need and find relevant. Timely and relevant instruction produces higher student engagement.
Teachers looking for new ways to improve their differentiated instruction practices should start with formative assessments. Formative assessments allow teachers to know their students better and, therefore, to make the best decisions to challenge them appropriately and engage them in the learning.
by Andrew K. Miller | Sep 22, 2014 | Blog, InService, Whole Child 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 all know that project-based learning (PBL) works, and there is research to support this. Districts leaders and individual teachers use PBL to deliver content, including content aligned to new, rigorous standards such as the Common Core State Standards or the Next Generation Science Standards. Projects integrating this learning strategy can come in all shapes and sizes; some projects are interdisciplinary while others focus on a single discipline, and each project can use varying levels of technology. Though each project can cover a wide variety of topics, there are common “essential elements,” as identified by the Buck Institute for Education, that must exist for true PBL to take place. While these elements provide a great foundation for building effective projects, educators can take project design even further to motivate all learners.
True Voice and Choice
To effectively implement PBL in the classroom, educators must first motivate and engage their students. Teachers can often accomplish this by allowing students to provide input on their learning experiences. When educators begin providing voice and choice to students, however, they often do so sparingly. Instead, teachers need to personalize each student’s level of voice and choice based on how they learn. On the ambitious end of offering voice and choice, an educator can serve as a conductor overseeing how students will shape their learning experiences, what path they will take, and how they will demonstrate that learning. Educators should continually aim for this student-centered learning style, and not adhere to a permanent practice of offering limited voice and choice.
Authentic Work
One necessary element of PBL is that students engage in authentic and meaningful activities. In order to reach this level of engagement, students must be able to envision an authentic audience that would benefit from their learning activities. Engaging students in authentic work can make it easier for them to see how their activities could influence an authentic audience by introducing them to real world challenges. Reflecting on questions such as “Who can provide us with relevant, expert feedback?” and “Who would find our work valuable and needed?” can help educators develop meaningful PBL activities. Students can make a difference, and educators should build projects around authentic purposes. When the work matters and is shared with an authentic audience, students are intrinsically motivated by the fact that what they are doing has value.
Challenge and Rigor
One major myth of student engagement is the idea that all learning should be fun. Yes, fun projects can engage some students, but only temporarily. In fact, challenging and rigorous assignments are often more motivating than fun and easy activities. We’ve all experienced times when we were appropriately challenged; we lost track of time, we thought more deeply, and we learned. Educators should seek to challenge students. When educators provide rigorous and authentic projects and give students voice and choice, students will accept that challenge. PBL doesn’t demand more work; it demands challenging work.
Educators who implement PBL using the following strategies will find that their students want to dig deeper and learn the material. Sometimes these projects “get out of control” in a good way and spawn new, authentic projects that teach important content skills. A skilled educator can see this deviation as an opportunity to harness student motivation and to further engage students in the learning process.
by Andrew K. Miller | Sep 15, 2014 | ASCD, Blog, InService
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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ASCD is excited to offer a new Professional Development Institute (PDI) on student engagement. This PDI, which uses a new model of learning, will help to unpack what student engagement really is and provide practical tools that can be used immediately in the classroom to increase student participation and achievement. Through materials from a variety of highly acclaimed authors and guidance from an expert ASCD Faculty member, participants will learn how to decide when to implement certain strategies in order to successfully engage students and ultimately increase their own effectiveness.
A New PDI Model
As mentioned, this PDI will use a new, more engaging model—the blended learning model. With this model, participants will learn about student engagement through both digital and on-site activities. Initially, participants will read online materials, watch webinars, and collaborate digitally with other participants. Next, they will come on-site to reflect on what they have learned and dive deeper into specific strategies for student engagement. Together, participants will determine how to implement the strategies they learned in their classrooms to meet the specific needs of their students. Finally, participants will get the opportunity to implement their ideas in their classrooms. They will use digital tools to continue to collaborate and share how their implementation went. This blended learning model seeks to practice what it preaches—that is, to allow participants to experience first-hand the elements of and strategies for student engagement.
Intentional Practical Strategies
Through this PDI, participants will not only learn practical strategies to increase student engagement, but they will learn how to determine when to use which strategies. We all know that some strategies work better for different circumstances—some work better for text comprehension, while others work better for reflection or independent application. Participants will discover how to align specific strategies to cognitive objectives so that they are using the right engagement strategy, not just any engagement strategy. In addition, participants will use new rigorous standards as a guide for determining what cognitive objectives and strategies will be needed for a lesson, and then they will design that lesson for their class.
Educator Effectiveness
Student engagement is one of the topics educators talk about most when it comes to professional development needs. Educators everywhere constantly express concerns about student engagement, and they want specific advice and feedback to help them better engage their students. Because student engagement is such an important part of classroom instruction, it is also becoming an important part of new teacher evaluation frameworks. Essentially, student engagement is a quality indicator of teacher effectiveness.
We hope that this new PDI, using a unique blended learning approach, will encourage participants to not only learn about student engagement issues but also to collaborate with one another as they try to determine the best strategies to implement in their classrooms and ultimately become more effective educators.
Learn more about this ASCD institute.
by Andrew K. Miller | Aug 22, 2014 | ASCD, Blog, InService
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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Stefani Hite and Andrew Miller are ASCD Faculty members in the FIT™ Teaching Cadre. They attended and cofacilitated the Summer Academy on FIT Teaching, which covered topics such as school culture and climate, establishing purpose in the classroom, the gradual release of responsibility, and formative assessment. All of this work drew on the work of Doug Fisher and Nancy Frey, experts on how to take this work and create a framework that is intentional and targeted. Here are some of Hite and Miller’s take-aways from the Summer Academy.
Recognize that wrong answers came from somewhere. Dig deeper to find out where they came from. Teachers feel there’s never enough time to remediate for students when they struggle. But, if we can learn to understand the difference between a mistake (when pointed out, a learner knows what to do next) and an error (when pointed out, the learner has no idea what to do next, thus requiring reteaching), then we can spend precious instructional time where it’s most needed. Did a student simply forget to capitalize the first word of the sentence? Or does that student truly not understand punctuation rules? Teachers can maximize their student interaction time when they spend some time analyzing student responses.
Ask students what they are learning, not what they are doing. This seemingly small change in questioning allows a shift in focus that can help teachers better gauge students’ understanding of content. Rather than asking students what they are doing—that is, asking them to explain a task—teachers should ask students what they are learning—that is, asking students to explain the purpose of a task and how they are learning from it. At Health Sciences High and Middle College, where Fisher and Frey teach, staff—and even visitors—regularly ask about learning rather than doing. Try this change in your classroom to see how it shifts the conversation and helps you to better determine your students’ levels of understanding.
Separate compliance from competence. This has huge ramifications for grading practices. Why do we grade every worksheet, homework, or quiz that students turn in? If we grade everything, we are asking students to be compliant (that is, keep up with the work and you’ll get more points). If we focus on students’ mastery of concepts, however, we’ll send an important message: I’m here to help you learn and will only give you a grade when you appropriately demonstrate your competence in this subject.
Automate responses to recurring events. Principals are faced with daily demands that take away from the time they can spend in classrooms focusing on the teachers and students. More and more, principals are asking the question, “How can I spend more time focusing on instruction in my building?” The answer is to analyze the systems within your school and create automated responses to recurring events. Buses arriving late? Have a response team ready with a standardized checklist of action items. Cafeteria won’t be open for lunch on time? Plan out the response in terms of personnel and schedule revision. Planning for automaticity in a system means that principals can have more time in the classrooms focusing on the most important aspect of their job: instructional leadership.
Establish the purpose of a lesson. Determine what students should learn and why they should learn it. One of the most important ways we motivate learners is by establishing a good reason for the learning to take place. Without a clear goal, students rightly perceive their work in school as artificial, and this may lead to compliance or even defiance. If we instruct without a purpose—or fail to convey that purpose to our students—then we shouldn’t be surprised when they don’t meet the learning target.
Get kids to produce language, not just hear it. Encourage collaborative work using academic vocabulary. Teachers need to scaffold and assess language needs so students can better access content. The Common Core, in fact, asks for students to use rich academic vocabulary. One of the keys ways to support students in learning language and using academic vocabulary is to ask students to produce and practice using language more. Collaborative work time should be used to have students speak and use academic vocabulary. Fisher and Frey recommend that teachers aim to set aside 50 percent of a lesson for collaborative work. While this will not always happen, teachers should always keep in mind that collaborative work, where students are encouraged to communicate and interact, will help students build language skills and increase academic vocabulary usage.
Remember that the gradual release of responsibility does not have to be linear. Many are familiar with the Gradual Release of Responsibility (GRR) framework, which articulates how responsibility should be turned over from the teacher to the student. Focus lessons (“I do”) and guided lessons (“we do”) place the responsibility on the instructor, while collaborative work (“you do it together”) and independent work (“you do it alone”) put most of the responsibility on the student. There is a common misconception, however, that this framework is linear—that is, that the different types of instruction have to go in order. In fact, good teachers use formative assessment to pick which element of GRR is needed for individual students and differentiate accordingly. Here is an example from Fisher and Frey’s YouTube channel that shows that the GRR framework does not have to be implemented linearly.
As all of these different take-aways show, participants at the FIT Teaching Academy were able to dig into the FIT Teaching model and consider how it resonates with them. The Academy was a full three days of amazing conversations about current practices and how FIT Teaching can provide an integrated and streamlined approach to make teaching more responsive to student needs. Participants left energized, motivated, and encouraged.
To meet the FIT Teaching cadre members and arrange for a guided professional development, go here.
by Andrew K. Miller | Oct 5, 2011 | ASCD, Blog, InService
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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Why might teachers be pessimistic about setting aside valuable time for professional development?
One major reason is that teachers often have little to no role in designing their own PD. But an often even more pervasive reason is that PD time is misused or wasted on nonessential items. Here are three quick tips for maximizing the time devoted to PD:
Parking Lot: If something comes up during PD that is unrelated to the focus and can be addressed via e-mail later, put it in the parking lot.This can be a digital or physical space or a piece of paper where those requests are honored, but also put to the side, so that the time is sacred to the task at hand.
Use Digital Tools: Instead of spending 20 minutes of valuable PD time to go over logistics or schedules, capitalize on digital platforms to push out general info and announcements. Perhaps you post important information on Edmodo or a Google Doc, have your teachers read and ask questions by a certain date and time, and then come to the meeting with those answers ready. Make sure that the information being pushed out is manageable and also held in one space. This helps to make sure there isn’t password and destination overload for teachers, and ensures documentation for future return and reflection.
Set Next Steps: At the end of a PD session, set next steps with teachers that include dates and times, deliverables, and locations—perhaps a digital collaboration space to get more information or continue work. When next steps and goals are set in a concrete way and teachers can see a product connected to their PD, then the time spent working toward goals will be sacred.
How do you make sure PD time is time well spent?
by Andrew K. Miller | Jul 15, 2011 | Blog, InService
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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This one is for my online and hybrid teachers or any teacher who has used technology but has found it difficult to foster collaboration and community.
First and foremost, even though many have been trained not to, your students can collaborate. In fact, students might not know they’re already collaborating; my WoW students (World of Warcraft) consistently collaborate to solve quests and gain experience.
The online world of education can be a lonely one, and until collaborative projects and assessments become the norm (they are not now), it will remain a challenge to leverage community and collaboration online. Here are some tips:
Translate their world of collaboration and community to one you want for your classroom.
The culture of online games and technology comes with cultural resiliencies. Use them. Ask students to share moments in their online, gaming, or even real lives where they have worked together. Honor them, and make connections to the type of community and collaboration you want.
Don’t grade discussion board assignments.
Yes, I said it. Discussion boards are a formative assessment, not necessarily graded. They’re intended as a way to check in on student discussions, but primarily, discussion boards are places for students to grapple with content and concepts. Use scaffolding to have them ask questions of peers, but don’t use discussion boards as a punitive tool. Otherwise, students will not use them the way you want them to.
Allow for space and time in discussion boards and other collaborative spaces.
Some of the best discussions occur over a good chunk of time, longer than we might want. A good discussion can last anywhere from one week to a semester. Students may even want to discuss ideas you may not. Honor student voice, and give space for it. Good learning will occur there and will lead to a sense of community and student ownership. Remember that the learning is occurring synchronously and asynchronously, so time is not the ultimate driving force. Again, this relates to Tip #2 and grading. Once students show they know how to use discussion boards, then you can be more flexible with time and space.
Do many team-building activities online.
Just like in the first week in brick-and-mortar schools, you need to do a variety of team builders and icebreakers to create a safe place for students. Hybrid teachers, you need to do both because you need students to see the community and collaboration in both places. The challenge is to take these activities that occur in the physical world and translate them into the activities that work online.
Pick the right tool for the purpose.
Before you go technology-happy with all the tools available, make sure you limit your choices to ones that foster community building and collaboration. Ask yourself how you want students to collaborate and build community, and then pick your tools.
I half-joke with teachers I work with, “If I’ve made you uncomfortable, then I have done my job.” Perhaps some of these ideas are causing some cognitive dissonance, and that is great. Just remember, if we want true student communities online and innovative collaboration, then we may need to do things differently than we have before.
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