Middle Years TCs:
If you’re free on Wednesday, 7 December 2011 @ 11:00 am PST, you can watch a FREE webinar on DI – Hybrid Learning Pushes Personalization Forward – hosted by Education Week and presented by 2 practicing middle school teachers from Edmunds MS in Vermont. For more details check out the webinar rego page. You can find access to more webinars and many other educataionally-themed resources at the Education Week website.
– LH
After I presented a lot of admin-related info we got down to the business of considering how to effectively manage your classroom. Here’s a rundown:
Admin
Paperwork
Unit Planning
LLED 320
Bits & Pieces
Classroom Management
Your EDUC 315 reflections indicated to Dave and I that classroom management is on the minds of many of you. As such, we wanted to take some time to introduce you to some management related materials that should help you on your 2-week prac in January.
The materials we presented today were adapted from Classroom Management: A Thinking and Caring Approach by Barrie Bennett & Peter Smilanich. The PPT slideshow below supported Dave’s presentation (Please note that I’ve had to remove the slide themes in order to shrink the file size to post on the blog):
Here’s what we did:
We ran out of time to present the role plays so we’ll do that next session.
If you’re interested – and I suspect that you are – here is the section from Bennett and Smilanich’s book that identifies all of the low-key management we’re playing with in class:
You’ll need to muster one or more of these strategies if Russell’s in your class 🙂
See you Wednesday.
– LH
Inquiry One-Pager
We’ve spent a lot of time this term considering the nature of inquiry and the shape of powerful inquiry questions. At long last the time has come for you to make a tentative commitment to a question and jot down some ideas about it. The vehicle for this exercise is the Inquiry Project One-Pager. Here’s the handout:
Once you’ve completed the four questions on this sheet, please cut your writing and paste it into a post on the Initial Inquiry Questions section of our EDUC 310 VISTA site.
Dave and I realize that your question will evolve over time – most likely in response to your experiences on your 2-week prac. That said we’re looking for a general sense of the direction your inquiry might take at this stage in the game. Your one-pager is to be posted on EDUC 310 VISTA site by Wednesday, 30 November 2011.
Administriiva
Unit Planning
After showing you the UBD unit planning template (also in the Get Yer Forms! post below) and reminding you that your draft unit plan and full lesson plans for the first two lessons must be submitted by email to your SA and FA by Monday, 5 December 2011, I spent some time presenting a slideshow on assessment. Here’s that PPT slideshow:
And here’s the video clip I showed to wrap my presentation that speaks to the anonymity of standardized testing:
[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2NfuniN0Sdg[/youtube]
See you on Monday.
– LH
TCs:
Here are 3 forms you will need in the not too distant future:
– LH
Administrivia
KUD & Assessment
Rather than give you a long blurb on the connection between KUD and assessment, I thought I’d let you see an example of how results and assessment are connected and let you draw some conclusions from that experience. So, here’s what we did:
My goal here was to further clarify your understanding of KUD and show how it’s connected to assessment. More to come on this in next Wednesday’s class.
– Lawrence
Hang on tight as there’s a lot to cover here:
Classroom Observation Task Debrief
We used the Inside/Outside Circle strategy to process the information you gathered for the Classroom Observation Task. At the end, we asked you to debrief the pros and cons of the strategy.
Aoki Debrief
Dave asked you to bring one a short piece of the Aoki text to share in class today. You did so as part of a small group strategy called The Final Word. This is a great strategy to use when you desire to develop the active listening skills of your students.
What makes a powerful inquiry question?
Seeing as today was our last inquiry-related reading, we thought we’d get you to look ahead and consider what a powerful inquiry question might look like. To that end, we asked you to look over some questions from posed by last year’s TCs and the questions that Sims asked. Then we asked you to complete this graphic organizer – The Frayer Model – as you considered the attributes, examples, non-examples and a graphic that fit with the question “What makes a good inquiry question?”. Here’s the Frickin’, er… Frayer Model:
KUD Formative Assessment
After a brief review of the KUD definitions and a short blurb about the importance of KUD coherence – making sure each K and D fit with a U – I asked you to jot down your PLO and one item in each of the KUD boxes so I could formatively assess your understanding of the KUD writing process. We’ll pick this thread up on Wednesday.
– LH
TEO hands out a large number of awards to TCs. Many of them are based on nominations by faculty but the Emily Longworth Memorial Award winner is chosen from the list of TC’s who apply before 30 January 2012. Applications can be made through the TEO.
Here are the details:
“This award is available to Elementary (and Middle Years) Teacher Candidates and provides funds for teacher candidates to undertake a special learning opportunity for the children with whom the TC will work in the extended practicum. There is a preference for projects that provide opportunities for children/schools that are less advantaged and who might not otherwise have access to enrichment activities. These funds are not intended for the purchase of major pieces of equipment or for TC activities not involving the kids in the class. Teacher and Principal agreement is necessary.”
Please see TEO for details.
For information on all the awards handed out each year, please see the B.Ed Awards List.
– Lawrence
We forged ahead with our unit planning piece today starting with a Wordle of your one-word “I feel” responses to the UBD introductory PPT last session. Here’s the Wordle:
Wordles are simple to create and can be a powerful teaching tool.
KUD Sort
In an effort to help you recognize the difference between:
We gave you a set of KUD statements (unidentified as such) and asked you to sort them into the category that they fit best. Afterward, we did a Gallery Walk and checked your categorization against the Answer Key.
When a C4U indicated that understanding of each element of KUD was high, we developed KUD statements consistent with this Life Sciences: Ecosystems PLO from the Science 7 IRP:
We came up with a list of items under each heading and discovered that the PLO itself is actually a D – do, as it focuses on the skill that students should develop. A K for this outcome would be a definition of ecosystem and a U could be that human actions impact ecosystems and/or organisms in an ecosystems are linked to one another.
To close, we asked you to apply your KUD understanding by choosing a PLO you’ll use on your 2-Week prac and developing a KUD chart for it. Please bring this KUD chart to class on Monday, 14 November 2011.
Assignement Reminders
– Lawrence
After a reminder about the Microteaching Analysis task due today and the Classroom Observation Task due next week, we got down to business.
Lesson Planning Suggestions
Dave and I require the you include both a Teacher Activity and Student Activity column in your lesson plans. This will allow you to imagine what you will do as you teach and – perhaps more importantly – what the students will be doing as they learn.
We also urged you to include all of the Lesson Design components – mental set, stating the objective, input, modeling, checking for understanding, practice, and closure – whenever possible. I made reference to the fact that 62 % of my non-management related comments to last year’s TCs on their 2-Week Prac referenced issues related to lesson design. The better the design, the better the implementation and the better the learning.
You might be interested to see what my “What To Work On” comments were for last year’s TCs during their 2-Week Prac. The first file is the comments I showed in class – the ones missing the management comments. The second files contains all the suggestions. Take a look and see if you can notice what themes emerge:
Sims Article Discussion
As a means of processing the Sims reading, Dave asked you to sort all of the questions she asks in the article into categories that made sense to you. We then wrote those categories on the board and looked for some common threads. The goal here was:
Here’s a photo of the categories you came up with courtesy of Lovey’s writing and Eric Man’s camera (with a dash of Jan the ham mixed in):
Introduction to UBD
We started our look at unit planning today. To that end, I shared a PPT slideshow that touched on some key ideas related to the Understanding by Design model. Here’s that PPT presentation:
Also, here are the vignettes we played with in my session:
I will take a peek through your exit slips and comment on them at the start of next class. Also, in that class we will take a deeper look at Stage 1: Desired Results.
Reading Entrance & Exit Slips
Here’s what’s due and when:
’til next time.
– LH
Stop. Start. Continue. Results
Dave presented the results from our formative assessment and outlined our thoughts on them. You can find all of the ideas in each column here:
Teacher Inquiry is…
We asked you to consider the essential and non-essential elements of teacher inquiry using the article your Reading #3 article as a stimulus for your thinking.
The Coyote Project
In an effort to show you how an inquiry process might play out, I read The Coyote Project and asked you to use the strategy Thinking Bubbles as a during-reading activity. TB is a strategy I first discovered while reading Brownlie & Close’s Beyond Chalk & Talk. Beyond Chalk & Talk It’s a great book full of hands-on and minds-on collaborative learning strategies.
Susan Close describes the TB strategy this way:
“With this tool learners generate what they think a character is picturing, sensing, thinking, saying, feeling and noticing in thinking bubbles – revealing cartoon-like representations.”
Post-reading I asked you to add any other ideas to our list of essential characteristics. In the end, here’s what our list looked like (Thanks to Jerin for the photo – LH):
Upcoming Due Dates
That’s all for today.
– LH