Artifact: Running Record Workshop

Standard 3 is making decisions on curriculum, assessment, and method of instruction with the intention to develop students intellectually, physically, emotionally, socially, creatively, and morally.  It is making appropriate decisions based on knowledge of student growth and development.

This artifact is an excerpt from a UBC workshop that I attended during the winter term as part of the required course subject.  It was a general overview workshop on teaching phonics and reading in the elementary grades.  Of note in the workshop were two pieces of information: text has 3 sources of information in meaning, structure, and visual, and the optimal difficulty of lessons fall within the 80% to 90% range.  Although there was much more content that I learned in the workshop, these two pieces of information stayed with me throughout my practicum and affected many facets of my implementation.  Of the two pieces of information, the second statistic was unique in the sense that it was applicable to almost every subject that I taught.  Whichever lesson that involved a numerical assessment brought up the idea of optimal difficulty.  As well, because the language arts are so pervasive throughout the elementary curriculum, the first statement also had a large impact on my lesson planning, implementation, and assessment.  In this way, these two statements is an example of an experience which has allowed me to understand student learning better.

As a result of learning how students obtain information from texts, I proceeded to vary the classroom reading between the 3 types of cues: meaning, structure, and visual.  For instance, in social studies I entrenched a sense of structure into my class’ reading by naming the topic being read for the lesson rather than name the page number.  From my understanding of the UBC workshop, I believe that doing this prompts students to logically deduce that the reading is related to the topic that I had named.  In turn, this primes their thought processes to anticipate and expect what is to come next.  Next, I drew attention to pictures whenever available during reading and asked the class to infer some sort of meaning from the pictures.  Other than to maintain focus on the content of the reading, this has the added benefit of allowing more beginning readers or special needs students to “catch up” in a sense.  Finally for the activity, I would typically require some sort of representation demonstrating understanding of meaning behind the reading.  Through this method, I ensured that each lesson incorporated the three types of cues that learners use while reading.

The second statement was the one that was even more prevalently implemented in my practicum as I aimed for the 80-90% success rate in many of my academic subjects for my class on the whole.  In mathematics, this was relatively easy to accomplish due to the numerical nature of assessment for learning in math.  Language arts required a more subjective view of the necessary difficulty level, while social studies and science were similarly subjective.  With the observations in mind, I would then adjust further lessons on the topic to target that success rate.  An effective method for decreasing difficulty may be simply dividing a lesson into several smaller portions and providing more time for students to work on a particular topic.  In a way I was keeping a running record of the class’ performance in each subject and responding to each entry as an indicator of students’ growth and development.  Prior to learning of the optimal success rate from the UBC workshop, I would have intuited to decrease difficulty when the class is having trouble understanding a subject and vice versa.  However, this workshop provided me with a specific range to target and because this range is founded on research and experience, I assume it to provide the greatest benefit to student learning.

I believe that in the future when I gain some knowledge that illuminates how students grow and develop, that knowledge should be applied to the all applicable instances so as to maximize benefits to student.  This is because more in-depth understanding of student growth and development will result in more accurately addressing different students’ needs and modes of learning.