Category Archives: Lesson Updates

LLED 320 – Group Presentations, Day 1: Update for Tuesday, 8 Feb 2011

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Group Presentations

Thanks to all those who presented this afternoon’s engaging presentations.  Here are the titles along with the supporting files.  The handouts should provide a valuable resource during practicum, as you look for ways to engage the learners in your classes:

1. Talk Show – Sarah, Amber, and Tyrel

2. Structured Academic Controversy – Leanne, Christian, and Andrew

3. Brainstorming – Kat K, Sally, and Jennifer

4. Exquisite Corpse – Maria, Lou, and Farisha

5. Find Someone Who (People Search) – Caitlin, Amanda, and Melanie

Unit Planning Conferences

Here’s a copy of the updated schedule (current as of 11:55 pm on Tuesday, 8 Feb 2011):

The goal of this conference is for you to get a chance to talk one-on-one about any ideas, questions, concerns and what not you have with respect to the unit you’ll be planning for the LLED 320 Integrated Unit Plan task.  To get the most out of our meeting time, please have bring the following to the meeting:

  • Subject and topic of your unit (Science & Water systems, for example)
  • Key PLOs related to your topic
  • Desired Results / KUD (Knowledge, Understanding, and Do/Skills) for your unit
  • Rough ideas on assessment for your unit.
  • Ideas on how you might be able to integrate some aspect of LA – writing, representing, reading, viewing, speaking, or listening – into one of the unit’s lessons

In addition, you might want to bring along a resource or two that you plan on using as you teach the unit.

That’s all for today.

– Lawrence

EDUC 310 – Inquiry Project Small Group Meetings: Update for Monday, 7 Feb 2011

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Thanks again to all those who attended this morning’s inquiry project check-in meetings.

The rough draft of your Inquiry Project 1500-word paper will be discussed in a small group meeting on Monday, 14 Feb.  Please make sure that you’ve emailed the draft of your paper to one member of your group a day or two before then so they can read it and prepare some feedback for you to discuss in Monday’s face-to-face meeting.

For Monday’s meeting, you may wish to bring a hard copy of the piece you read with your notes/suggestions on it or you may prefer to make the suggestions on an electronic copy and email that to the author after your discussion.  Whatever suits you and the author.

I didn’t get a chance to run this plan for rough draft revision by the member of the 10:00 – 10:30 am group – Sarah, Caitlin, Leanne, Amanda, and Tyrel – so I’ll catch up with them some time this week.

Also, we’ll take some time in our meetings on Monday, 14 Feb to talk about what the 10-minute multi-media presentation on your project and the one-page synthesis might look like.

Cheers,

– Lawrence

LLED 320 – Unit Plan Conferences, KUD, Performance Tasks & DI: Update for Thursday, 3 Feb 2011

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Well, today’s class didn’t go quite as I’d envisioned.  In my mind, I spent too much time talking and, as a result, we didn’t get done all that I had hoped we would.  Anyway, here’s what we did accomplish:

Writing Tasks In

I’ve collected the pieces and will mark them over the next two weeks or so.  There’s a lot of them!

Assessment Q&A

I took some time to address some of the assessment questions that you had posed on exit slips at the end of a previous class.

Unit Planning: Individual Conferences

I’ve cancelled class on Thursday, 10 Feb 2011 to set aside some time for 15-minute conferences about your unit plans.  Also, to ensure that I had times set aside that suited everybody’s schedule, I also will be holding meetings on Tuesday, 15 Feb and Thursday, 24 Feb.  Here’s the schedule (as of 3 Feb):

In preparation for this meeting, please prepare the following items and bring them along to the conference:

  • Subject and topic of your unit (Science & Water systems, for example)
  • Key PLOs related to your topic
  • Desired Results / KUD (Knowledge, Understanding, and Do/Skills) for your unit
  • Rough ideas on assessment for your unit.
  • Ideas on how you might be able to integrate some aspect of LA – writing, representing, reading, viewing, speaking, or listening – into one of the unit’s lessons

Unit Planning: Goals, Performance Tasks, and Differentiated Instruction

I attended a Pro D Workshop last Friday with Cindy Strickland from ASCD.  She is a Differentiated Instruction guru doing work playing with and extending the DI thinking of Carol Tomlinson.  Seeing as the information I picked up was very relevant to our work on unit planning, I thought I’d share it with you in this class.

Here were my goals:

  • Demonstrate a way to outline a unit’s goals using a KUD framework
  • Show how performance tasks can be developed as a means for students to show their attainment of the KUD
  • Illustrate how performance tasks can be differentiated to better meet the needs of all students
  • Allow you to apply your understanding of performance tasks and differentiation to a unit you’re developing for the long practicum.

After showing a short PPT on clouds – Clouds PPT Slideshow– to get you up to speed with what information the students working on this weather unit had been working with, I showed you an example of three summative performance tasks for the weather unit and asked you to determine, by looking at the tasks, what you thought the KUD of the unit was.  In other words, what did the teacher expect her students to Know, Understand, and Do that was related to clouds?

After that, you thought of other final product scenarios that the students could complete that would show their KUD but tap into different student interests and abilities.  This is where the differentiation piece came in.

How can we, as teachers, provide varied opportunities for students to show us what they know?  As we answer this question, we can start to find ways to differentiate our instruction and our assessment in ways that are responsive to the needs of all students.

Here’s the handout we used in class:

Unit Planning: GRASPS Peformance Tasks

Performance tasks are summative assessments that are:

  • personalized
  • open-ended
  • complex
  • based on real-world work
  • aimed at an identified audience

The Understanding By Design (UBD) unit planning model we’ve been working with in 310 class promotes the design of performance tasks based on the features suggested by the acronym GRASPS:

  • G=goal
  • R=role
  • A=audience
  • S=situation
  • P=product, performance, & purpose
  • S=standards & criteria

We analyzed the cloud unit performance tasks through the lens of the GRASPS aspects and then did one of two things:

  1. Looked at other performance tasks to see how they demonstrated the GRASPS elements
  2. Developed a GRASPS based performance task for a unit you’ll be teaching on the long prac.

Here’s a handout with all sorts of info related to performance tasks, including a handy dandy list of Possible Student Roles and Audiences in addition to Possible Products and Performances:

Haikus Handed In

As a ticket out the door, I collected your 3 haiku poems.  We’ll be revising these in a future lesson seeing as we ran out of time this class.

– Lawrence

LLED 320: Authorfest 2011 on Tuesday, 1 February

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Thanks to all who attended Authorfest.  It was an interesting event with engaging presentations from:

A few organizations that looked interesting were mentioned at the event:

TD Canadian Children’s Book Week April 30- May 7, 2011 The theme is Changing the World, One Child at a Time and will highlight books about children and teens who are doing things to make the world a better place.

– Lawrence

LLED 320 – Housekeeping, Unit Planning Intro, Brainwarming, and Haikuing: Update for Thursday, 27 January 2011

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We started with some housekeeping items:

Temperature Check
Here’s the accompanying Kingpin video clip:

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VUSLiR0ZmbQ[/youtube]

Writing Assessment Task Q & A
This task is due on Thursday, 3 February 2011.  Please submit it in one electronic package via email or as a complete paper copy.

Authorfest Info

Class is cancelled on Tuesday, 1 February to encourage you to attend Authorfest from 4:00 – 5:30 in Wood 2.  I handed out a bibliography of the attending authors.  It’s also available here:

Integrated Unit Planning Task

I handed out the task sheet for the LLED 320 Unit Plan task due on Tuesday, 8 March 2011.  You can find the handout here:

Also, here’s the resource evaluation sheet you’ll need:

To get a visual sense of what’s expected, here’s a sample from a few years ago:

Writing in the Elementary / Middle Classroom

I had some guiding principles for the teaching of writing to share but, before then, I wanted to play with a pre-writing / warm up strategy.  Here’s the info

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 last 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:

  • Your favourite word
  • Power Words
  • Power Triplets
  • A 5-Winute Write
  • Writing quickly
  • Harnessing the power of the creative right brain
  • Supporting the diversity of learners –  from Gifted to LD – in your classroom

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:

12 Guiding Principles For An Effective Writing Program

We used the Ranking Ladder strategy followed up with Inside / Outside Circles to process 12 guiding principles related to writing instruction.   The conversation was vigourous.  Here’s the handout:

Engaging in 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 elementary & middle school poetry classes.  We started to follow the Writing Process (as envisioned by writing teacher Diana Cruchley.  I took a workshop from her 2 years ago) –

A Writing Process

and, to that end, 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]

Criteria Development

The haiku criteria we developed were almost bang on with the criteria outlined in the text I took this lesson from, Wordplaygrounds by John S. O’Connor.  His criteria are as follows:

Haiku poems…

  • Are short

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

  • Have a Twist (Internal Comparison / Juxtaposition)

Most haiku have two images, one on either side of a break in the poem.

  • Have a “Haiku” moment in time

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.

  • Focus on nature, including human nature, shown concretely

Haiku avoid figurative language (similes, metaphors, personfication and the like) in favour of direct and specific descriptions of the world around us.

  • Are 5 senses specific

Powerful haikus are based on vivid imagery based on the five senses.

Pre-Writing

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

Drafting Based on an Image Pool

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 and many examples were shared with the class.  Unfortunately, I neglected to collect any of the Halloween haiku for publication on the blog.  If you have yours handy, please feel free to write a comment containing your three lines.

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:

  1. Go on a nature walk
  2. Gather 5 sense information on the back of your Sample Haiku handout
  3. Write 3 haikus that fit with the key features of haiku that we explored in class
  4. Bring your 3 haikus to class on Thursday,  3 February 2011.

See you on Tuesday at Authorfest. Please remenber that our regularly scheduled class is cancelled so you can attend this event.

– Lawrence

EDUC 310 – Inquiry Project Proposal 5-Minute Meetings: Update for Wednesday, 26 January 2011

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Thanks to everyone for dropping by to discuss your Inquiry Project proposal.

I’ll see you on Monday, 31 January during one of the small group get togethers. Please bring along 2-3 ideas related to your project in writing to discuss and get feedback on during the meeting.  I’ll keep the writing as a way for me to stay up to date on the evolution of your question and of the task itself.

Look forward to seeing you on Monday.

Cheers,

– Lawrence

EDUC 310: Conducting Research Ethically

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As a follow up to our recent in-class conversation related to the ethics of classroom research, Jenna has sent me some info and I’m passing it along to you.  Thanks, Jenna.

Here’s the link to the UBC Research Ethics Website page on Behavioural Research Ethics Board Forms and Guidance Notes.

Also, here are the Class Project guidelines:

– Lawrence

LLED 320: Group Presentation Organization & Writing Assessment, Part Two: Update for Tuesday, 25 January 2011

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After s brief presentation from Jenna on FoE Grad Photos by Artona, we got down to the business of LLED.

Group Presentation Organization

We developed the following schedule for the 20-minute presentations:

and here’s the task handout and the rubric for easy reference:

Writing Assessment Task, Part 2

As an intro, I mentioned that some goals for this task were to:

  • Introduce you to the Performance Standards
  • Encourage you to engage in professional conversations about assessment
  • Increase the reliability (repeatability of your measurement) and validity (were you right?) of your writing assessment
  • Examine how to determine weaknesses in writing and consider strategies to address these areas of need

Next, we did a Carousel Brainstorming / Graffiti activity aimed at listing strategies to address weaknesses in student writing.  Here’s how I structured the activity:

  • Each TC received a bullet point from the Not Yet Meeting column of the Grade 8 Writing Personal Essays and Opinions Quick Scale Here’s the list of all 10 bullet points: Gr 8 Writing PE & O QS NYM Bullet Points
  • Find others with your bullet point and get a piece of chart paper and a pen
  • Write your bullet point as the title on your paper
  • Brainstorm a list of ideas you could use in classroom instruction to address bullet point – the weakness in the student’s writing – for 2 minutes.
  • Move to a different paper when given the signal.
  • Add your ideas to the paper you’ve arrived at.
  • Repeat the “move and add” process.
  • When asked to stop moving, highlight the 2 or 3 best ideas on the page you have in front of you.
  • Report those ideas out to the class.

Asessing Your Writing Samples

At last, we got down to the assessment of the writing samples you’d brought to class.  Here’s the process we followed:

Your In-Class Writing Sample Assessment Task is due on Thursday, 3 February 2011.  You may choose to hand me a hard copy of the task in class or you may mail it to me (You’ll need to scan the writing samples into PDFs, I suppose).  Here’s the task handout for your reference:

Here are the parts that you must include when submitting the task:

  • The Task Write Up
    • Part 1: Analysis:
    • Part 2: Reflection
  • The Generic Rubric Sheet that shows your marking of the highest and lowest rated pieces.  Here’s a .doc file of that sheet: Writing Quick Scale Generic Rubric
  • The actual Quick Scale Rubric from the Performance Standard that you used to assessed the pieces
  • The writing samples themselves

Here’s an example of a task that you can look at to see a exactly what each piece of the puzzle should look like and how it should be put together.

I’ll set aside some time in class on Thursday, 27 Jan for assessment task-related questions, if you have them.

Assessment and Reporting Resources

While the assessment process is a complex one, there are many resources available to help you out.  One excellent source of information is the BC Ministry of Education website’s page on Classroom Assessment and Student Reporting.  On this page, you will find the following info:

Key Links and Resources

Other Related Resources

I reckon that’s enough for today.

Cheers,

– Lawrence

EDUC 310: Inquiry Project Criteria & Calendar

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Today we focused on:

  1. Assessment of the Inquiry Project
  2. How we’d spend our class time to facilitate the completion of the task.

Inquiry Project Assessment Criteria

We used a Jigsaw-ish strategy to think and talk about the I.P. criteria.  These four criteria are the same ones I’ll use in the assessment of the projects that are submitted to me.  For  your reference, here they are:

Inquiry Project Class Schedule

Here’s the schedule that I ran up the flag pole and that you saluted:

Also, here’s the list of the times for Wednesday’s 5-Min Inquiry Proposal Approval Meeting (Thanks Tyrel for typing this up – LH):

Finally, here’s a list with two more bits of important info (Thanks Leanne for typing these  up – LH):

  1. The groups and times for the IP Check-In Meetings on Monday, 31 Jan and Monday, 7 Feb
  2. The IP Multi-Media Presentation Schedule

I think that covers it.

– Lawrence

BUSTED! Melanie Outs the Grade 8 Writing Sample As An Example of Plagiarism

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After class on Thursday, 20 January, Melanie approached me about the possibility that the writing piece – the speech on the fear of public speaking (here’s the handout: Grade 8 Writing Sample – Fear of Public Speaking) we assessed in class might have been plagiarized to some degree.

Sure enough, after a bit of checking, Melanie discovered that much of it was online and pointed me to two websites:

This brings to mind a whole slew of interesting questions:

  • What constitutes plagiarism?
  • How to you find out if a student has plagiarized?
  • How did this piece make it through the exemplar selection process without anyone noticing the plagiarism?
  • How does the fact the the piece is plagiarized affect your assessment of it?
  • How do you approach a student who you think might have plagiarized a piece?
  • What steps can teachers take to reduce instances of plagiarism by their students?

Food for thought for an upcoming LLED class, perhaps.

Check out this video of another guy busted for his irresponsibility:

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r2ZXLS_TvXM&feature=fvst[/youtube]

– Lawrence