Author Archives: lholbrook

Looking Back At The 2-Week Prac & Looking Ahead to 310 & 419: Update for Monday, 17 January 2011

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Welcome back to campus.

After collecting your 2-Week Prac paperwork, we took some time to look back at the experience using a strategy called…

Walk-About Review

This is a powerful way to structure conversations and build in accountability.  Here’s the template we used in class.  It can be adjusted to suit your needs in any course.

To put a button on 323 and look ahead to the long practicum – EDUC 419 – I asked you to complete a one pager that outlines your main goals for the first two weeks of the long practicum.  This task is to be emailed to your FA and is due on Wednesday, 19 January 2011.

To remind you of the goals you set, your FA will be emailing you your piece about a week or two before you start the long prac.

The Shape of EDUC 310 in Term 2

Here’s the calendar for our EDUC 310 classes in Term 2:

As you can see, most time is devoted to work related to the Inquiry Project.  I’ll work in a few seminars on hot topics – management, assessment, communicating for employment, and practicum tips – as well.

Examining a Model of The Inquiry Process

To help show you what your inquiry process and project might look like, I asked you to read an article written by a teacher researcher and take some during-reading notes in a graphic organizer.

Here’s a link to the article “Joining Learning to Living” by Nick Sluyter and here’s the graphic organizer I want you to complete and bring to class on Wednesday, 19 January 2011:

That’s all for today.
Cheers,
Lawrence

If It’s Free, I’ll Take Three: The Writing Triangle & Girl Talk Freebies

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Any teacher worth his or her salt loves a freebie.  Here’s two for you, one school related and the other sure to get you groovin’ on the long bus ride home:

The Writing Triangle: Planning, Revision, and Assessment by Graham Foster

This full text of this book is available for preview at the Pembroke Publishers site.  It should be of interest to anyone teaching Language Arts on practicum.  Here’s the blurb:

“Writing improves when students learn good planning, revision, and assessment strategies that specifically apply to different writing forms — Description, Narration, Lyric Poetry, Exposition, Persuasion/Deliberative Inquiry Research, Business Letters, and Exploratory Writing. Each of these forms is thoroughly discussed in this book, with suggestions for exploring key features, planning strategies, specific revision criteria, and assessment techniques. This bold book represents a complete makeover for tired textbooks about the writing process. It illustrates effective ways teachers can guide their students to become inspired, and turn ordinary writing into something extraordinary.”

On a related note, the text you’ll be using in the LLED 320 course I’ll be teaching to you is Student Diversity and it’s also from Pembroke.

Girl Talk – All Day

According to everyone’s good friends at Wikipedia, Gregg Michael Gillis (born October 26, 1981 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania), better known by his stage name Girl Talk, is an American musician and DJ specializing in mashups and digital sampling.

He has recently released a new album and it’s available for a free download.  That’s right.  No grey areas here just go to his record label’s site and download it.  Watch and listen to this review to get an idea if the album might be of interest:

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GMKfsj1fg5g[/youtube]

I’ve been listening to All Day a lot lately and it’s fun to play “name that tune” with all the samples.  To help you out if you decide to play that game, too, here’s a (lengthy) list of all the sampled songs on All Day.

Well, there you go.  Two freebies for the holidays.  Enjoy.

– Lawrence

5 Classroom Management Skills & More: Update for Wednesday, 1 December 2010

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Well, Movember is over and so is the term.  Here’s how we wrapped up:

Nonverbal Communicative Intelligence for Classroom Management

Seeing as management is a concern for all beginning teachers, I wanted to address the topic in some manner before you headed out to your 2-week prac.  That said, the topic is huge, so I wanted to keep the session short, practical, and focused on skills that you could use on the morning of Tuesday, 4 January 2010, if need be.  Thus, I focused on five nonverbal skills:

  • Choose voice
  • Pause
  • Frozen hand gesture
  • Incomplete sentence
  • Freeze body

that research has proven to be very useful in creating effective learning environments.

Here’s a link to the Prezi I created to introduce the topic:

Also, here’s the full article on which today’s class was based:

We used the Learning Stations strategy to process the skills-based content of the article. Stations are a great way to allow students to set the pace of their own learning.  Here are some links to sites with info on LS:

After the station work, I took a few questions and provided suggestions for how management skills can be stacked – done simultaneously – to increase their effectiveness.

If you feel like kicking it old school, watch the classic training video below – “Maintaining Classroom Discipline” – to see how Mr. Grimes teaches and manages his Math class:

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gHzTUYAOkPM[/youtube]

Bits & Pieces:

Writing this heading reminds me of Kibble and Bits and that product’s TV commercials.  Check it out as we skip down memory lane:

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NP9dn3j6uDk[/youtube]

Now, where was I?  Oh, ya, bits and pieces:

– 2-Week Practicum Observation of Your Teaching

  • Bob and I will see you teach once during this practicum
  • We’ll drop by to see you and set up an observation time

– Practicum Binder

  • Please set up a practicum binder to house paper copies of your prac-related paperwork
  • Please have your binder handy at all times for your SA or FA to flip through
  • Here’s the required Table of Contents for your binder:

– LLED 320 Writing Samples

  • Please collect 4-6 samples of student writing (photocopies are fine) to use in your Term 2 LLED 320 class.
  • The samples should reflect the range of writing abilities you find in your students.
  • The writing samples could be from lessons you teach or from work your students do with your SA.
  • We will be completing a writing assessment task in LLED 320 and the best samples to work with for this assignment are:
    • Short stories
    • Paragraphs
    • Poems
    • Essays
    • Reports

Here’s the first page of a sample writing sample:

Pre-2-Week Practicum Letter

  • Bob and I will send out a letter to both you and your SAs to outline expectations some point in mid- to late-December.
  • Please read the letter thoroughly and be in touch with any questions.

Unit Planning

  • The unit plan you’ll be using in January is due a email to both your SA and FA on Monday, 6 December 2010.
  • Your advisors will look it over and give you feedback
  • Please revise the unit with the feedback in mind.
  • You cannot start teaching in January until both your SA and FA have viewed and approved your unit plan.

Inquiry Task One-Pagers

  • Thanks for handing in the one-pager with your inquiry question on it
  • As you teach, your question will likely evolve
  • We’ll delve deeply into the inquiry task in 310 class during January and February

That’s all for now.  All the best for a relaxing holiday.

– Lawrence

Unit Plan Conferences: Update for Monday, 29 November 2010

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Thanks to everyone for being so prepared for today’s 2-Week Prac Unit Planning Conferences.

I mentioned the BC Performance Standards several times in my meetings so I thought I’d post links to the resource here for easy reference.

What are the Performance Standards?

The BC Performance Standards have been developed for voluntary use in B.C. schools. They describe the professional judgments of a significant number of B.C. educators about standards and expectations for the following key areas of learning:

Why use the Performance Standards?

The BC Performance Standards are intended as a resource to support ongoing instruction and assessment. Teachers can use these standards to:

  • monitor, evaluate, and report on individual student performance
  • identify students who may benefit from intervention
  • develop a profile of a class or group of students to support instructional decision-making
  • prompt discussions with parents, students, and other teachers about student performance
  • inform professional development activities
  • collaboratively set goals for individuals, classes, or schools
  • develop evidence for school growth plans
  • provide models for designing performance tasks

How to use the Performance Standards?

Performance standards describe levels of achievement in key areas of learning. Performance standards answer the questions:

  • How good is good enough?
  • What does it look like when a student’s work has met the expectations at this grade level?

The BC Performance Standards describe and illustrate the following four levels of student performance in terms of prescribed learning outcomes:

NOT YET WITHIN EXPECTATIONS

  • the work does not meet grade-level expectations
  • there is little evidence of progress toward the relevant prescribed learning outcomes
  • the situation needs intervention

MINIMALLY MEETS EXPECTATIONS

  • the work may be inconsistent, but meets grade-level expectations at a minimal level
  • there is evidence of progress toward relevant prescribed learning outcomes
  • the student needs support in some areas

FULLY MEETS EXPECTATIONS

  • the work meets grade-level expectations
  • there is evidence that relevant prescribed learning outcomes have been accomplished

EXCEEDS EXPECTATIONS

  • the work exceeds grade-level expectations in significant ways
  • the student may benefit from extra challenge

In fact, the Performance Standards include a variety of rubrics and exemplars for the assessment of student work.  Here’s an example of a simplified rubric, called a Quick Scale, from the Grade 8 Reading Performance Standards:

Don’t, ahem, reinvent the wheel!  Use these rubrics and save yourself some time and frustration (a good rubric is really hard to develop.)

See you on Wednesday.

– Lawrence

Sims Says, Assessment Evidence, & 315 Bits and Pieces: Update for Wednesday, 24 November 2010

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“Sims Says Inquiry Is…”

We started class by considering the EDUC 310 Inquiry Task.  I used a PPT slideshow to structure the lesson, and the presentation aimed to answer three key questions:

  • What are the qualities of teacher inquiry?
  • What’s involved in the inquiry project?
  • What constitutes a good inquiry question?

After recalling your prior inquiry-related knowledge to answer the first question and picking out a few highlights from the EDUC 310 Course Outline and elsewhere to address the second, we discussed the attributes of a powerful inquiry question through the lens of the article “How My Question Keeps Evolving” by Michele Sims.

Here’s the slideshow that supported this lesson:

At the end of this class, I assigned the exit slip – completing the EDUC 310 Inquiry Project One Pager – MIDDLE YEARS COHORT.   On the front of the page are some questions to stimulate thinking about research questions, if you’re stuck at the moment, and some sample questions drafted by Elementary TCs.  On the back of the page are four questions that you need to answer on the handout and bring to class on Wednesday, 2 December 2010.  Please note that, in a manner similar to what Sims experienced, this question may evolve as you think on it and as you spend more time in the field.

If, as Confucius declared, “A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step,” consider this your first, tentative foot forward.  A baby step. if you please.

Oh, that reminds me.  Here’s how Bob (Bill Murray) “baby steps” in the comedy opus, What About Bob?:

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p3JPa2mvSQ4[/youtube]

Bob sails, too:

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YrbY4hsNh64&feature=related[/youtube]

Here’s the one-pager in electronic form:

In the end, let’s hope your inquiry proceeds more smoothly than this woman’s:

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5FRVvjGL2C0[/youtube]

UBD Stage 2 – Assessment Evidence

In preparation for the completion of the unit plan you’ll use on your 2-Week Prac, I presented some information related to the assessment of your desired results via this PPT slideshow:

Here are a few key slides from that presentation, for your reference:

Lastly, here’s a good case for assessing beyond the test:

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YCuHTMHRBS4&feature=related[/youtube]

Bob and I will be meeting with you on Monday to discuss your unit planning. All meetings are in SCARFE 1310.  Please bring:

  • Your completed Desired Results
  • Your thoughts on possible assessment tools
  • Any key resources that you may use in your teaching to this meeting.

The Conference Schedule is in the previous post.

At the end of class, I asked you to pick up a handout with samples of and information on how to create engaging and well-constructed Performance Tasks.  Here’s that handout if you didn’t get one or if your dog ate it:

Check out this link for a website with more details on Performance Tasks. For even more info, use Google to search the Interwebs using search terms such as: “performance task” “rich task” “authentic assessment” and “authentic education”.

I did that and found this site – Authentic Assessment Toolbox – that has a huge collection of information on PTs, including a bunch of tasks created for all subject areas in middle school.  Here’s a screenshot so you can see what’s on offer:

That’s all for now.  Bob and I look forward to meeting with you on Monday.

‘Til then,

– Lawrence

Microteaching, Take 2 & Housekeeping: Update for Monday, 22 November 2010

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Microteaching

Thanks to the groups that presented today.  Please watch your video, reflect on it, and submit your analysis – done individually or as a group – to me by Monday, 29 November 2010. Please use the format on the task handout and reviewed in previous posts.

Housekeeping

– Microteaching Analysis Due: If you presented last week, your analysis is due to me today.  Thanks.

– EDUC 315 Reminders: Please send me a copy of (1) a lesson you taught and your reflection on it, (2) a copy of your SA’s teaching timetable, and (3) your end-of-prac feedback form.  This last item should be the focus of a prac-wrap-up conversation tomorrow.

– Upcoming Classwork Items: (1) Read the Sims article and create an entrance slip for it complete with some of your own possible inquiry questions and (2) complete the Desired Results piece for one or more PLOs you’ll be using as you teach during the 2-Week Prac.  Bring both items to Wednesday’s class, please.

– Unit Plan Conference Schedule: Thanks for signing up for these conferences.  The schedule is below (mine on page 1 and Bob’s on page 2).  All meetings are in SCARFE 1310.  Please bring your completed Desired Results, your thoughts on possible assessment tools, and any key resources that you may use in your teaching to this meeting.

For your reference, here are a few 2-Week Prac unit planned in previous years.  While the template for these units is a little different than the one we’re using, take a look and get a sense of what your finished product might look like:

That’s all for tod… oh wait, I almost forgot.  Here’s a beginning-of-class-rant-related reminder about the importance of handwashing:

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZOeQh2-ci3M[/youtube]

– Lawrence

TC Introductory Letter to Parents

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I recommend sending home a letter that introduces yourself to the parents of all the students you’ll be working with.  This can be done during the 2-week practicum or, if you prefer, at the start of the 13-/12-week experience.   A template and a sample letter are below to serve as models.  You might want to copy this letter back-to-back with your Use of Student Images Consent form to save paper.

A strong intro letter should help your relationship with the parents of the students in your classes get off to a good start… unlike the terribly uncomfortable start to this blind date relationship:

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LMny28MxwkY&feature=fvst[/youtube]

– Lawrence

Admin. & UBD Planning – Stage 1: Update for Wednesday, 17 November 2010

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Administrivia

– Calendar: There’s been a change to the schedule.  As such, here’s what the next two Wednesdays will look like:

  • Wednesday, 24 November – 10:00 to 12:00 = Sims Article Discussion & More UBD Unit Planning
  • Wednesday, 1 December – 10:00 to 11:00 = Pre-Prac Preparation

– Reading: Please read the Sims article, “How my question keeps evolving” and develop an entrance slip for it.  As a part of your entrance slip, please jot down a few teaching and learning-related questions that you might be interested in exploring in more detail.

– EDUC 315 Paperwork: There is one formal paperwork requirement as a part of the Tuesdays practicum.  The forms are below.  You and your SA will each complete the appropriate form and email them both to me.  Before you send them off, however, I suggest that you both discuss your completed forms next Tuesday – 23 November, the last school visit of EDUC 315.  This conversation can serve to wrap up this prac experience and look ahead to your two weeks in January.

– Microteaching: I handed back the rubrics completed by the peer assessors and a feedback sandwich that summarized my thoughts on your presentation.  After you’ve completed your reflection – the post-microteaching task due on Monday, 22 November for those that presented on Monday – take a look at the feedback and see how it jives with your thoughts on your performance.

UBD Unit Planning – Stage 1: Desired Results

Now that you have a good idea of the subject, topic, and PLO(s) that you’ll be working with during your 2-week practicum, we started to look at how to design a unit that will develop student understanding on the topic.

To that end, I presented a PPT slideshow that highlighted how to unpack PLOs to uncover the:

  • Big Ideas
  • Understandings
  • Essential Questions
  • Skills
  • Knowledge

that, when played with in class, will lead to student understanding of the topic under study.  Here’s my slideshow:

Here’s a copy of the chart for the HCE 8 Substance Use PLO we unpacked in the guided practice part of the lesson:

… and here’s a blank template you can use to unpack one or more PLOs that you will work with during your January prac:

The unpacking process can be a bit tricky for new and experienced teachers alike.  Seeing as the process starts with identifiying the Big Ideas – the concepts, themes, issues, debates, problems, challenges, processes, theoriex, paradoxes, assumptions, and perspectives – that lie at the heart of the topic, here’s a short blurb on how to identify the Big Ideas more easily.  This excerpt comes from Tomlinson and McTighe’s book, Integrating Differentiated Instruction + Understanding by Design:

Here’s the complete UBD unit planning template:

We’ll be working with the other sections of it in future classes, namely on Wednesday, 24 November.

The rough draft of your 2-week prac unit is due to your SA and FA on Monday, 6 December 2010.  What we expect you to submit at that point is:

  • a completed unit plan template
  • full lesson plans for the first two lessons of the unit

Bob and I will be meeting with the TCs we supervise to discuss your unit planning ideas on Monday, 29 November.  You will have a chance to set up a meeting time with Bob or in class on Monday, 22 November.  For this meeting, you should have a firm idea of Stage 1 – Desired Results and have considered the sort of assessment you’d like to use to determine if the students understand what you’ve been teaching.

Microteaching & Housekeeping: Update for Monday, 15 November 2010

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Microteaching

Thank you to today’s presenters.  Please take time to view the (HD!) videotape of your presentation and reflect on your performance.  Please use the following questions to guide your reflection:

As is the practice in our 310/316 class, you can present this content information in any format that suits you and that lends itself to a clear and thoughtful exploration of these questions.  The reflections for this week’s presenters are due on Monday, 22 November.  Please email them to me or hand them in during class time.

Administrivia

– Lesson Plan and Reflection: Please remember to send me a copy of a formal lesson plan and a post-lesson reflection (you can use the Microteaching reflection format above, if you wish) for at least one lesson you teach during EDUC 315.

– Teacher Timetable Hand In: If I’m your FA, please submit a copy of your teaching timetable – via email or a hard copy – by Wednesday, 24 November.  I need this to help in the planning of my observations of your teaching.

– Stop. Start. Continue. Survey: I’ve emailed you the link recently and here it is again for your convenience:  EDUC 310/316 – Formative Instructor & Course Assessment

Please take a few minutes to give me your feedback on my practice.  Thanks.

That’s all for today,

– Lawrence