Good news! The due date of the EDUC 310 Interpretive Paper has been extended. You may now turn this assignment in anytime between Monday, 1 March and Monday, 8 March.
Speaking of good news, here’s a video for the song “Float On” by Modest Mouse. It’s off their album “Good News For People Who Love Bad News”:
[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CTAud5O7Qqk[/youtube]
– Lawrence
Thanks to this morning’s presenters. The more you can interact with the content of the course – the lectures, text, and TED talks – the more prepared you should be to write the 250-word interpretive paper that’s due on Monday, 1 March 2010.
Speaking of the paper, I hope you found the Q&A session helpful. Here is the link to Lissa’s blog that gives further illumination on the assignment.
Wendy Carr, Coordinator for EDUC 310, notes that, with respect to this task:
“except in rare cases, ALL students have passed the assignment. Even those who do not meet expectations the first time do so once they have conversed with Lissa or Steven and resubmitted.”
We will take some time in Wednesday’s inquiry session to take up questions you have about the task.
If you need something to take your mind off the pressures of your classwork, check out this clip of Neil Diamond singing Adam Sandler’s “The Chanukah Song”:
[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BOegH4uYe-c[/youtube]
Remenber, to quote Bob (Bill Murray) in the comedy classic, What About Bob?:
“The world is divided into two types of people: those who like Neil Diamond and those who don’t. My ex-wife loves him.”
Kirk out.
– Lawrence
Here’s all the update that’s fit to print:
Writing Assessment Task
Today was the due date for the In-Class Writing Sample Assessment Task. Please see previous posts for more details.
Unit Planning Conference Schedule
LLED class on Tuesday, 9 February 2010 is cancelled and, in its place, are 15-minute unit plan conferences on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday of this week. Here’s a copy of the schedule. If you have yet to set up a time, please see or email me to do so:
LLED 320 Unit Plan Conference Schedule
For this conference, please have a general idea of the Desired Results piece – PLOs, Understandings, Essential Questions, Knowledge and Skills – for your unit. Remember, this is an integrated unit – a unit that will incorporate some aspect of Language Arts into at least one of its lessons – and can focus on a topic in ANY subject. Furthermore, if you wish, you can co-plan this unit with another TC who’s interested in planning a unit on the same topic as you.
The Writing Process… Continued
We forged ahead with our work on writing process today.
Guiding Principles for Writing in the Classroom
To put our work with writing in context, I shared a few key principles for writing instruction as found in the Student Diversity text. Here’s the PDF:
Guiding Principles for Writing
Haiku Revision Using Author’s Club
Before we launch in to today’s writing revision activities, here’s a quick refresher on haiku and how to write it courtesy of Mr. U. Tube:
[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rnuBaaw_EZk[/youtube]
At a workshop I took from Diana Cruchley a few years back – Braveheart Writing: 10 secrets of writing success – I picked up a compelling approach to revising written work called Authors’ Club. I thought this format would work well to examine the haiku drafts each class member had brought to this class. Here’s what we did:
I asked for each author to improve 1 or 2 of their haikus and send a final copy to me via email by Thursday, 11 Feb 2010. We can talk in an future class about publishing options.
Here’s the information on the Authors’ Club process, in addition to the haiku criteria we developed and a few other bits and pieces:
Here’s the Haiku Line Breaks and Punctuation PPT I created: Haiku Line Breaks and Punctuation PPT
Designing Integrated Units
After the break, we rearranged the classroom into a circle to facilitate our next activity, Medieval Drama. Before then, however, I touched on the WHERETO acronym as it relates to your unit planning. Here is an image that outlines each element:
Here’s a PPT that gives a little more detail. It’s from the site Slideshare.net, an excellent source of presentations and slideshows on a wide variety of topics. This slideshow cannot be downloaded and posted so you need to go to the site to view it. The WHERETO section I showed in class starts on slide 188.
Here’s a resource package with detailed information on what each letter of WHERETO might look like in an unit plan:
Medieval Drama
There are a myriad of ways to integrate LA into a unit plan. Most commonly, planners think of reading / viewing and writing / representing activities. Please also consider working speaking and listening into your unit plans, as strategies that touch on these domains can provide a fun and engaging break from the ordinary. I wanted to model that today by playing with some drama activities that would fit wonderfully in an introduction to the Middle Ages.
You remember the Middle Ages, don’t you. A time of giant rabbits, flying cows, and knightly flatulence:
[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VxoLXV3qivk[/youtube]
The drama activities we engaged in are outlined in this handout:
Medieval Drama in the Classroom
The required supplies are:
These activities could be adapted to fit many other subjects across the curriculum. They do a wonderful job of meeting the following goals:
One activity we didn’t get a chance to do on account of a shortage of time was Power Writing related to Extreme Environments, a topic of study in Grade 6 Science. I had planned to have you write a piece on Climbing to the Summit of Mt. Everest using the guidelines put forth by Julie Ferguson in her Writing With Power!! book. This handout outlines the process I was more or less going to follow:
Power Writing Across the Curriculum
You could, of course, use this process with all sorts of content.
OH! I almost forgot that I had a closure piece… an exit slip. Thanks for the feedback.
That’s all, folks. Enjoy your weekend.
– Lawrence
Thanks to Richard Zerbe for delivering a practical and thought provoking presentation on Assessment for Learning. The lecture was videotaped and should be posted soon on the UBC on iTunesU page. What is available now, however, is a PDF of his PPT slideshow. The PDF is too large to post directly to the blog, but it is available at the bottom of the page shown below and linked above:
One thing I found interesting in Zerbe’s presentation was that he made references to many ideas, activities, thinkers, and resources we’ve been playing with in our coursework, including such things as:
Were there other items in his presentation that were familiar to you? noteworthy? illuminating?
In next Wednesday’s seminar, we plan to:
Ciao,
– Lawrence
Before I thank today’s presenters…
MindUP Money Collection
Thanks to all those who coughed up the $28 for our upcoming workshop. If you’ve yet to pay, please get your money in to Shep or I at some point this week.
Important Dates For Your Caldendar:
From 10:00 am – 12:00 pm Richard Zerbe will be presenting a lecture on Assessment For Learning in Scarfe 100. His presentation promises to be engaging and full of good ideas. We will attend this presentation in lieu of our regularly scheduled EDUC 310 seminar.
We are adjusting today’s schedule to accommodate a Q & A session on the EDUC 310 Interpretive Paper (Due: Monday, 1 March 2010). Here’s the plan for the day:
– 10:00 am – 11:00 am = Lecture Presentations in Scarfe 1003
– 11:00 am – 12:00 pm = Interpretive Paper Q&A Session with Lissa D’Amour, EDUC 310 TA and Interpretive Paper Assessor
After the Lecture Presentations on this day, Jaime Beck, on behalf of PITA (Provincial Intermediate Teachers Association), will talk about some great support programs for early career teachers. She will speak from 11:30 am – 11:50 am. You can check out the PITA website for more details. This session should help answer some questions about what post-B.Ed life might be like.
Lecture Presentations
Thanks to today’s presenters. Here is a selection of feedback pulled from the exit slips:
Please remember that our next EDUC 310 session will be the Zerbe lecture in Scarfe 100 from 10:00 – Noon on Wednesday.
– Lawrence
Today our goals were to look at:
Here’s what we did to work toward meeting those goals:
Brainwarming
Just as athletes get warm up their bodies before game play or practice, writers need to warm up their brains. To this end, we worked through a Brainwarming activity designed by Julie Ferguson of Beacon Literary Services. As a part of the Hillcrest Middle School staff, I took a workshop with her earlier this year, enjoyed it, and I thought I’d pass along what I’d learned about improving the quality and quantity of the writing students do.
Here’s are some of the key pieces in Brainwarming:
The PowerPoint below is the one I used in class to guide you through the exercise. You can find more info at Julie’s website, if you are interested:
A few of these athletes could have used a better warm up, I reckon:
[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IF9hM6c5-Qg[/youtube]
Planning Instruction Based on Assessment Results
Once we were warmed up, we engaged in some writing of our own. The writing tasks related to a mini-lesson I’d used with Grade 8s to improve their skills of persuasion, namely their ability to create powerful rebuttal. I hoped to model the ideas that:
We lesson sequence went as follows:
A/B Partners
To get you in a persuasive mood we used A/B partners to consider the topic: The Winter Olympics will be good for British Columbia. The A partner took the Pro side and the B partner was the Con. After 10 seconds of think time, the As spoke and then the Bs had the floor (after 10 seconds of think time, of course). To summarize, one convincing A and one persuasive B took the stage and tried to convince their classmates of their position.
Making Arguments Weak Mini-Lesson
After the warm up, we played with the idea of rebuttal and crafted refutation for a series of arguments. We had one group who had prepared a rebuttal for the same argument Face Off against another but abandoned other challenges due to time constraints.
Here’s the handout we used for the mini-lesson:
Making Arguments Weak Handout & Using Gestures in Speeches
This week’s readings – Chapters 3, 4 and 5 of the Student Diversity text – have many more ideas on how you can craft mini-lessons to meet the academic needs of your students. This classes work and the readings should help you as you complete your In-Class Writing Assessment task that’s due on Wednesday, 4 March. More to the point, they should help you on your long practicum as you aim to meet the needs of the learners in your classroom.
The Writing Process
I struggled with the idea of how to present an interactive lesson on entire writing process in just over an hour. In the end, I settled on a lesson that involved the writing of haiku poetry, a form often used in middle school poetry classes. After a quick overview of A Writing Process (as envisioned by writing teacher Diana Cruchley. I took a workshop from her 2 years ago) –
– we engaged in a variety of pre-writing activities. The activities were:
Modeling
We looked over a dozen haiku, determined our favourite, and developed a list of key features for haiku poetry. Here’s the list of poems we looked at:
I also shared a few of my favourite Redneck Haiku. They can be found here. If you’re yearning for more, check out these Zombie Haiku:
[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pd1Ws9QnmZY&feature=PlayList&p=332A297059FDF20E&playnext=1&playnext_from=PL&index=9[/youtube]
or Biff from the Back to the Future Trilogy with some funny haiku songs:
[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pwnqUmmJ-zE[/youtube]
The haiku criteria we developed are as follows:
Haiku poems…
Typically 3 short lines with a maximum of 17 syllables. They may follow a 5-7-5 pattern but need not. Here’s a one line haiku by Lee Gurga:
trying the old pump a mouse pours out
Most haiku have two images, one on either side of a break in the poem.
They capture moments of epiphany or discoveries about the world and our place in it. To best capture the immediacy of the moment, haikus are generally written in the present tense and benefit from an economy of language.
Haiku avoid figurative language (similes, metaphors, personfication and the like) in favour of direct and specific descriptions of the world around us.
Powerful haikus are based on vivid imagery based on the five senses.
In an effort to make those criteria as clear as possible, we engaged in a variety of short writing tasks:
Word Seasons (handout: Word Seasons Word List)
I showed a list of words and asked you to associate each one with a season.
Sandwich Poems (handout: Sandwich Poems Examples)
These are three-line poems in which the first two lines and the second two lines form a different compound word. Here’s an example:
fire
alarm
clock
Image Pools
I gave out the first line of a haiku:
Halloween night —
then asked you to visualize your most memorable Halloween night and share a few images to create a class image pool. After that, you generated a haiku of your own. Here are the first drafts that were written on the board:
Halloween night –
Hands clenching
Crowds fading away
Halloween night —
Sixteen graves to go
Ladies wrapped in skins of the dead
Kurt’s halloween night –
A homemade pumpkin costume
Top looks like penis
We ran out of time for the scheduled nature walk aimed at gathering information for a haiku. So, your homework for next class is as follows:
The haiku activities we worked with in today’s class come from a book called Wordplaygrounds by John S. O’Connor. Here’s Connor’s ideas on writing haiku:
Same Pond, New Splash: Writing Modern English Haiku
See you on Tuesday at Authorfest. Please remenber that our regularly scheduled class is cancelled so you can attend the Authorfest event. Here’s the flyer with all the details:
For more info on the event and general info on how to bring authors into your classroom, please click on the Authorfest link.
Cheers,
– Lawrence
Here’s all the update that’s fit to post:
MindUP Commitment
Shep and I asked for confirmation of your attendance at the MindUP Workshop on Wednesday, 3 March. Seeing as no one spoke to us about not attending, we will be collecting $28 / person in cash during 310 class on Monday, 1 February 2010. These funds will cover expenses for:
Individual Style Survey Analysis
As a prelude to our in-depth examination of classroom management, we took some time to have you reflect on your own personality and consider how it will impact your work as a classroom manager. The tool we used was the Individual Style Survey a tool that, according to the Psychometrics website:
“provides a broad assessment of how people prefer to respond to others and their environment.The ISS assesses an individual’s preferences for one of four major styles: dominant, influencing, harmonious,cautious;and two major orientations: people/task or introspective/interactive. Each individual rates him/herself and has three others rate him/her on the same styles.”
Once each TC had determined their style preference, we utilized a Four Corners strategy to have each group outline:
The presentations were enlightening in many ways…and it was fun to watch the Dominant folks wait ’til the end to take their turn!
Introduction to the Classroom Management Plan
We wrapped by assigning this term’s major project in the Principles of Teaching course – the Inquiry Into Classroom Management. Here’s the task handout:
EDUC 310 Inquiry Into Classroom Management Task
One aspect of the assignment is to look at the work of at least 3 classroom management theorists. To guide your thinking, Shep presented a PowerPoint with some key thinkers and the categories their theories are often placed. Here’s the presentation:
Looking for more info on management? This old chestnut starring Mr. Grimes should provide some useful tips:
[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gHzTUYAOkPM[/youtube]
Your Inquiry Task will be due during your Pre-Practicum FA Conference held on either Wednesday, 17 March or Monday, 22 March 2010.
– Lawrence
Today we continued working on the assessment of student writing. Here’s what happened:
Four Box Synectics
As a means of processing our thoughts and experiences with the writing assessment process to this point, we engaged in a four box synectics activity. The four common household objects we brainstormed to compare with Writing Assessment were:
Four Box Synectics is a great strategy that, as the linked strategy description explains, “promotes fluid and creative thinking by ‘making what is familiar strange,’or comparing two things that would not ordinarily be compared.”
Here’s the handout we used in class – Assessing Writing Four Box Synectics – and a PDF of the purpose, description, and procedure of the strategy – Four Box Synectics Instructional Strategy.
Assessing Student Writing Samples Using the Performance Standards
After some discussion on the complexities of assigning letter grades to student writing and planning instruction based on needs identified during assessment, we took a good chunk of time to assess the student writing samples you’d brought to class. Here’s the process we used:
The In-Class Writing Sample Assessment is due on Thursday, 4 February 2010. Here’s a copy of the task sheet:
LLED 320 In-Class Writing Sample Assessment Task
Please hand in the following 5 items as a part of this assignment:
1. Part 1: Anaysis
2. Part 2: Reflection
3. Generic Rubric for the Writing Performance Standard Quick Scale used to assess the writing pieces
4. Actual Writing Performance Standard Quick Scale used to assess the writing pieces
5. The two Student Writing Samples Analyzed in Part 1: Analysis
Here’s a sample task from last year to show you how each piece of the puzzle fits together:
EXAMPLE of an In-Class Writing Sample Assessment Task
Introduction to the Unit Plan Task
I handed out the assignment sheet for the Integrated Unit Plan. Here it is if you need a copy:
Integrated Unit Plan Assignment
and here’s a suggested UBD template for use in designing your unit plan:
LLED 320 UBD Unit Plan Template with WHERETO
I mentioned that two aspects of this assignment are different from the planning process we’ve already engaged in as per our EDUC 310/316 classes:
You are to evaluate five resources that you would consider using as a part of your unit. The criteria sheet is included in the assignment handout. Here’s a set of resource evaluation sheets from last year to give you an idea of how to approach the task of evaluating resources:
Integrated Unit Plan Resource Evaluation Sheets SAMPLE
This is an acronym that summarizes the key elements to consider when designing an effective and engaging learning plan. We will explore this acronym in a future LLED class.
Group Presentation Work Time
Seeing as the first set of Group Presentations are on the horizon, we took some class time to get them sorted.
That’s all for now.
– Lawrence
Thanks to today’s presenters:
Both presentations allowed the learners to play with the content in active and engaging ways.
For your reference, the Principles of Teaching blog run by Wendy Carr, the EDUC 310 Coordinator, is a treasure trove of resources related to the the course. On it you will find:
Here’s a screenshot to give you visual:
Of particular interest, will be the Close up of “21 things I’m doing/have done” slide found at the bottom of the Lecture notes and related links & documents page. It gives you a list of things Brent is doing in his lectures that could be commented on in the interpretive paper.
Reminder
Please have your ISS completed for class on Wednesday, 27 January. To do this you need to have idefntified your Individual Style after crunching the data gathered using the appraisal forms.
– Lawrence
Introduction to the Group Presentation Assignment
After I modeled the Building From Clues strategy and showed a sample handout, we took time to:
Here’s the task sheet: LLED 320 Group Presentation Task, the assignment rubric: LLED 320 Group Presentation Rubric, and the Building From Clues handout I showed: Building From Clues Handout Sample. It’s from the Prereading Strategies text referenced on the task sheet.
Finally, here’s the topic and presenter schedule: LLED 320 Group Presentation Schedule.
Student Writing Assessment Task
The goal of this task and the work around it is to improve your assessment skills and to develop strategies for using assessment to inform instruction.
After looking at the task itself – here’s the handout: LLED 320 Student Writing Assessment Task – we did the following:
We’ll follow up this class by looking at the connection between the Performance Standard Quick Scales and letter grades and by having you assess samples of the student writing you gathered on practicum.
We’re looking at how rubrics can be useful tools that help guide our assessment. Here’s a short video that raises some interesting questions about the role of rubrics in writing assessment:
[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kH3PSjh2G20[/youtube]
For LLED class on Tuesday, 26 Janurary 2010, please bring:
See you on then.
– Lawrence