LLED 360

I especially appreciated this week’s reading on assessment because I have found this to be one of the more difficult aspects of lesson planning and teaching.  What type of assessment to use, how frequently, and in what forms are issues that I have been struggling with when it comes to unit planning as well.  One tool of assessment that I have seen being used not only in my practicum school but here at UBC is a rubric.  I believe that rubrics are helpful for teachers and students alike, because they give the teacher a specific set of criteria to use when marking which is not only efficient but fair, and they ensure that students know exactly what is expected of them before they hand in an assignment.  I have heard some teachers say that they don’t want to give out a rubric or specific criteria about what is expected of students because it is like giving away the “answers.”  I don’t agree with this at all; if we let students know exactly what they should be doing and learning, and they are able to produce the desired criteria, isn’t that exactly what we want our students to be doing? Why hide our expectations or make them a guessing game?  I think rubrics can be especially helpful for ELLs by providing clear and explicit criteria for assignments.

A good friend of mine, who was an ELL, had a difficult time in our writing-heavy courses (such as History and English) because of the large essay and research assignments we had. Therefore when I think about writing expository genres, I think of his experiences and how I want to be very conscience of how I approach my writing assignments (as a Socials Studies teacher) and how it will affect differentiated learners. I realize that at times, academic writing can have seemingly arbitrary rules, appear disconnected from life, and flat-out boring. And this is coming from somebody who enjoyed and continues to enjoy writing academic and research papers. Therefore I hope to find the right balance of choosing good expository essays that are highly informative, academically sound, well-organized, rich in content and detail––but also creative in language, in including a more narrative element, etc. I also think about the chapter’s emphasis on always teaching things in context––such as grammar rules––and to not utilize isolated and abstract writing exercises. Therefore the chapter highlights the importance of immersion and how ELLs and students in general just need to encounter good writing, again and again and again. I think that literature or popular fiction can be engaging and informative tools to help with academic writing.

I think therefore I would want to incorporate more examples of popular culture such as screenplays, comic books, TV shows, movies, and other rich narrative elements and sources in my lessons. Through the dissection and analysis of what makes these examples good writing and good stories, my students will learn more about organization, about clarity, about perspective, about setting up a problem or tension––all of which is involved in academic writing. Students therefore need good teachers who are not only passionate about writing, but who can use the right tools, examples, and methods to cultivate the passion and skills in the students for academic writing yes, but also writing in general.

Michael Yang

This class with the inclusion of this book has really helped me develop an awareness of the struggles that English language learners face.  It also points out the significant challenges regular, “non-ELL” students face when it comes to learning and learning effectively.  This chapter dealt with how to create successful lesson plans that are engaging and educational.  It is very easy to overlook the vocabulary that is essential to fully understanding certain academic subjects.

My discipline is art so it is easy to forget to incorporate appropriate vocabulary when teaching.  My experience with high school art is very different from how we are learning to teach in the modern art classroom.  We emphasize the need for self assessment, particularly critiques of artwork.  This can be done individually during various check-in points (formative) as well as at the very end of a project with a group (summative).  Although as a student, I despised going through the critique process and could not wait until my critique was over, I found the experience to invaluable because it allowed me to really reflect on my process and technique.  I was also better able to interpret and critique art produced by others.  The crit process can be very intimidating because it is easy to take things to heart but even with the constructive feedback I received, I was better able to develop my ideas and alter a few things here and there to make it more effective.  Being successful in a crit requires you to be able to talk about others’ work in addition to your own.  This means that mastery of the academic language in relation to the art practice is crucial.  It was not until university that I was actually able to develop my understanding of academic art language and the significance of being able to explain art work.

There are plenty of strong ideas in this chapter including how to successfully prepare for an oral presentation.  Much like standing up there to defend your work in a critique, presentations require attentiveness to the information.  The audience must be engaged and they must LEARN something new.  Contrary to what a lot of the presentations that I have done in and out of this program, I would often present on information that the class already knew.  My job was to reiterate this information in a more visual and dynamic way.  Whether or not I actually achieved this is uncertain.  What the chapter did point out was that it is important to make the information you present “new”.  This could mean expanding on the current readings (if it is a shared class reading) and adding visuals, performances, and activities that would force them to understand the information in a different and perhaps more holistic way.  This is a great tip and I think that having my students do more presentations would be a fantastic way to not only engage the audience (as they see their classmate up there) but also to create mini “experts” out of them.  Teaching is the best way to learn after all.

In relation to https://blogs.ubc.ca/lled360/2013/11/17/chapter-9-lesson-plans-and-assessments/

Though the chapter and overall book has some flaws, I found this text to be incredibly helpful. The information it provided about teaching and understanding ELLs has opened my eyes to new perspectives and new techniques that I had never considered previously. I have found that, out of the numerous texts I have read so far in this program, this text is the most applicable to the everyday classroom situation and has the most practical advice, which translates directly to the management of a classroom and the planning of lessons. The activities and techniques described in this text are applicable to effectively teaching our content areas as well as to the teaching of academic language and I believe that I will use many of the techniques in this book numerous times, as I plan lessons for my practicum and further teaching.

I agree that this chapter (Chapter 9) is particularly helpful because it integrates much of the information from the other chapters into more fully developed lesson plans, which gives readers a clearer idea of how to use these activities and strategies in a broader context.

One of the elements of the chapter that I thought was most interesting was the use of rubrics. I have always viewed rubrics as a method of assessment that defined the criteria for grading. However, this chapter broadened my understanding of what rubrics can be used for and how they can enhance, not just evaluate, learning. Having the students create their own rubrics is an excellent way to discuss expectations for what the students should know about their content area. This helps the students to focus on the most important information when doing research and creating their products. It also works to give the students a sense of autonomy and create a more democratic classroom environment. I also like the idea of having the students assess their own and other students’ works using rubrics. This helps the students to fully comprehend what good quality products are and how to create them. It is especially helpful if the students are able to edit and rework their product before the final assessment of the teacher. These methods of using rubrics will undoubtedly improve students’ learning as well as the quality of their final products.

Melanie Reich

The chapter’s development and focus of lesson plans and assessment strategies I found to be incredibly practical and relatable. It seemed to finally put together all of the theories, strategies, and example activities and how they can be effectively put to practice in different classroom environments.

That being said, I wish that this format and general summarization had been introduced earlier on in the course. Using lesson plans and assessment strategies as a framework to base the various techniques studied would have allowed more tangible ideas and possible activities to be envisioned for future lesson plans. Perhaps this is my own learning bias, but given examples that I can take and reshape to specific classroom settings that I will encounter would have allowed me to better appreciate what has been reviewed.  Providing the structure and the details about how to organize components of lesson plans and incorporate different techniques within different stages, may have better emphasized the significance and impact of activities such as read alouds or visual organizers for example.

During my two-week short practicum, I was introduced to many different students form different backgrounds. I found it interesting how there were not very many ELL students in my classes. This being said, I realized how important the LLED 360 class is and how useful it is for our practicum. One thing that I found myself doing when teaching was focusing on the language I use. In the discipline of physical education, I often just think, Oh everybody knows what this means, just because I have so much experience with the language. After taking a moment to think back, I realized that I did not learn about anything like Rate of Perceived Exertion or Maximal Heart Rate until I was in university. This being said, when I taught a lesson on Rate of Perceived Exertion, I really had to focus on the language I was using with my students. I often found myself repeating ideas in different words to try to make sure that everybody could understand what I was talking about.

Another thing that I realized about language during my practicum, is that the language you choose to use has a very big impact on how the class will run. For example I did a fitness circuit with a class one day. When most people hear fitness they do not get overly excited, therefore I tried to make it more fun. When students asked what we were going to do, I responded by saying that we are going to play this really fun fitness game using cards. I was surprised that by just using that simple word, game, all of the students were more excited to do the lesson that I had planned. When discussing this with my sponsor teacher after my lesson, she commented on how great it was that I called it a game and how important it is to make the lessons seem more fun and appealing for the students to do. Therefore, one of the biggest things that I learned through my two week practicum is how important language is and how you explain activities, what you refer to activities as for all students in your class.

I think it is really important for math teachers to include performance based methods of assessment in their math class in order to show students a different side of math than what I think many people are used to. Using these types of assessment techniques are often great for showing students how math can relate to the real world and also allows them to have some fun when using math.

While on my short practicum, I did an activity with my Math 8 class where they were given a menu from a restaurant that I had created and were asked to choose one appetizer, one entree, and one dessert and then calculate the tax and tip on the items as a part of their assessment for the calculating percents unit. My SA does a similar activity with his classes where he brings in Best Buy flyers and the students are given a certain amount of money to spend but they must add PST and GST into their calculations. Given more time, I think that a project like this could be further expanded to have the students have to calculate what a restaurant should charge for each dish if they were given the cost of the ingredients and told that they should make a certain percent profit for each dish.

Activities like these are often fun and help students remember the concepts and procedures a lot better by helping to cement them in their minds. However, I think that it is important to recognize that certain types of questions on a typically formatted math test can also help to evaluate students’ understandings of concepts at a deeper level. When many people think of math, and the textbook alludes to this as well, they think of the rigid, black or white, one answer only type of question that have frequented math tests and texts. I believe that it is important for teachers to include open ended questions that require students to think at a deeper level and show a complex understanding of concepts in their assessments in order to properly assess learning. This is an idea that I think is becoming very popular in math classes nowadays and I think can help evaluate students in the same way as the performance based assessments because they require a very similar form of thinking.

As a teacher, I am to use plenty of performance based assessments and open ended questioning to try to help my students to the greatest of my ability.

My experiences during the short practicum were on the whole very positive.  I was excited and nervous with the opportunity of teaching a Spanish 11 course.  The importance of scaffolding became apparent early on, as everybody in the class was new with the language and ultimately fairly unaware of how to use it properly.  Also of importance were the uses of cognates, which helped the students to get a grasp of the meaning of the Spanish words in English.   Fortunately with Spanish, the cognates work well with the English language and are easily incorporated into a lesson with little initial preparation necessary.

In regards to chapter eight on language for academic writing, many useful activities were presented which can be incorporated into both my social studies and Spanish classes.  I was particularly fond of the written recap activity, which allows students a few minutes at the end of class to write down what they have learned during the lesson.  These few minutes are usually unproductive, as the students have crossed their threshold of focus.  This allows students to think about and process what they have learned in class.  It also; however, allows the teacher the ability to know if the students really understood the material that was presented during the lesson.  I do feel that the use of a few prompts such as “I learned that…, I do not agree with…, etc.” are necessary to get students to really think about their responses.  Perhaps also as a modification to this recap activity could be changing the questions to:

1. I know that…
2. I still need to learn that…

https://blogs.ubc.ca/lled360/2013/11/12/academic-writing-in-english-classes/

Thank you for sharing your positive experience with us Lucy. I am glad that your school advisor provided such a thorough template for essay writing for his students and that you have found his methods for teaching academic writing to be helpful.

As I read your blog post, I began to consider the ways that academic writing is approached in my content area, which is theatre. Drama classes can vary wildly in the amount of writing that students are encouraged to produce, both creative and academic. Some drama classes include very little academic writing and very little writing in general. Many drama teachers prefer not to include much writing for a number of reasons. For some teachers, there is a persistent worry that if students are asked to write that they will not enjoy the class. This is a concern because students may disengage from the course altogether if they become bored and they may even choose not to take the course in subsequent grades. Also, students who are struggling with writing for any reason may feel demoralized by an emphasis on writing in courses in which they are not expecting to encounter this challenge. Another reason drama teachers may fear asking their students to write is that teachers want to encourage oral and kinesthetic skills more than writing, because theatre is a performance art.

These are all legitimate concerns. However, I believe that it is a disservice to students to not incorporate both creative and academic writing into theatre classes, as these skills are absolutely necessary for the professional world of theatre (not to mention post-secondary theatrical training programs). Also, theatre has its own creative and academic writing genres that students need to know how to identify and use. Therefore, I believe that it is essential that students do both informal and formal writing activities in theatre classes. However, the crucial element to these activities is that they must be engaging and enjoyable for the students. If this is the case, the fears teachers have in relation to writing in their drama courses would no longer be valid, as students would be happy to complete the activities and would not try to avoid them. One of the examples of such activities is writing a short review of a performance. Students love to voice their opinions and this activity gives them a constructive method in which to discuss and critique the work of professionals and/or more experienced practitioners. Other examples are character biographies, favorite actor research projects, production proposals etc. All of these assignments allow the students to study and write about a topic that they are interested in and allows them to express creativity and to voice their own opinions. Also, encouraging students to work in groups to pre-write, write, and/or share their writing makes the activities even more enjoyable and promotes oral language, as well as fostering cooperative skills.

I intend to use assignments such as these in my theater classrooms in order to make enjoyable academic writing part of my curriculum.

Melanie Reich

Over the past two weeks during my short practicum I had the chance, like the other teacher candidates, to observe what goes on in classes and how teachers interact with their students. One observation that I found particularly interesting happened in my drama 9/10 class. Each of the Drama classes that I will be teaching has a handful of students who are ELL at different levels. During one of the exercises a student had a hard time trying to understand the concept that the teacher was trying to run. The student doesn’t have an aid to help with language barrier difficulties in class and it seemed that most of the students weren’t willing to help either. My SA had noticed this and walked over to see if she could be of any assistance. The student made it clear that she did not understand the instructions and the teacher tried to explain the steps again. For a student who can comprehend english easily the instructions sounded pretty straight forward but I don’t think that the ELL student had a concept of some of the terminology the teacher was saying. However, the teacher persisted but continued with the same language and slowed her voice down and over emphasized what she was saying in hopes that the student would eventually understand. It was evident that the student still didn’t understand and I could tell that she was becoming frustrated with the teacher. It seemed as if the student was feeling patronized by how her language barrier was being handled. She looked uncomfortable for a few more moments before she saw a student performing the exercise, understood it ,and then went and did it herself.

This incident provided me with the thought that even if I come up with a lesson plan and have key words, brick words, that I want to teach to students I should have a back up list in case I have students who have trouble understanding the original word that I am trying to teach. Hopefully by having a list of back up words I will be able to properly communicate to a student so that they aren’t feeling left out and can contribute to the class as well.