Tag Archives: Unit Planning

LLED 320 – Reassessing Assessment, WHERETO, and Lit Circles: Update for Thursday, 23 February 2012

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Learning Intentions

By the end of you lesson I hope that you can…

  • Get answers to some of your assessment questions
  • Understand the WHERETO elements in a unit’s lesson sequence
  • Experience one way to teach the Say Something strategy
  • Participate in a Lit Circle discussion group
  • Start your final 320 task – the Lit Circles Journal
  • Experience Six Thinking Hats approach to content analysis
  • Critically consider the pedagogy of Whole Class Novel studies

As it turns out, we didn’t get to the last two.  We should be able to wedge those in during our next session.  Here’s what we did fit in:

Reassessing Assessment

I took some time to answer some assessment-related questions you had about in a previous lesson and questions related to your writing assessment tasks.  In my responses, I referenced Ministry of Education documents that can be found on the Ministry’s Classroom Assessment and Student Reporting page.  In particular, I mentioned ideas in these two documents:

There’s a lot more good stuff here.  Don’t be shy and wait until your summer assessment course to dip into this material 🙂

Unit Planning Call Back

The UBD unit planning template I’m suggesting you use for your LLED 320 Integrated Unit Plan mentions the acronym WHERETO in Stage 3 – Learning Plan.  Today we took some time to unpack the elements of WHERETO – in essence, “the key elements that should be found in your learning plan” (Understanding By Design Professional Development Workbook, p. 214).  Here’s a summary:

and here’s the package we worked with in class:

We used a moving tableau strategy to process the material.  Here’s how it worked:

  1. Form a group of 4
  2. Randomly choose a WHERETO letter
  3. Read the information relating to your chosen letter
  4. Come up with 2 or 3 key ideas related to your section.   Ask yourself, what do my classmates really need to know about this WHERETO letter?
  5. Design and rehearse a scene involving tableau and movement – but NO speaking – to visually represent the key ideas from the section
  6. Present and explain your movement piece.

Here are a few shots to summarize your take on the WHERETO elements (Thanks to John and Eric M.):

Reading Fiction – Literature Circles

The Lit Circles model is based on research on what helps students improve as readers:

Here’s how we engaged in the Lit Circles process.  The approach we’re using is the one advocated by Faye Brownlie in the Student Diversity text.  You can get more details in her book Grand Conversations, Thoughtful Responses: A Unique Approach to Literature Circles and in a webcast hosted by the BC Ministry of Education – the same webcast I showed clips from in class today.

Reading Time

I gave you some time to read, exchange books, and find a passage to “sticky note” for sharing in your discussion group.

Getting Started: Learning the Say Something Strategy

Left to their own devices, the students will not spontaneously have great conversations about the texts they are reading.  They must be equipped (Hello, WHERETO!) with the skills for conducting thoughtful conversations.

A great way to develop these skills – a way that has the added benefit of getting students excited about a new box of thematic books –  is to read and consider a poem on the theme.  I modeled that by using the Story Behind the Poem strategy to analyze the poem Invictus by William Ernest Henley.

Here’s the recipe for the Story Behind the Poem strategy I used:

Here’s the handout for the poem.  It’s set up to accommodate the SBTP sketching:

Below is the scene from the movie Invictus that features the poem prominently.  According to the movie’s production notes:

“In the film, Mandela calls upon Pienaar (the captain of the South African national rugby team, the Sprinboks, in 1995) to lead his team to greatness, citing a poem that was a source of inspiration and strength to him during his years in prison.  It is later revealed that the poem is “Invictus,” by William Ernest Henley.  The title is translated to mean “unconquered,” which, Eastwood (film director, Clint Eastwood) says, “doesn’t represent any one character element of the story.  It takes on a broader meaning over the course of the film.”

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

When you’d had time to gather your thoughts on the poem, I asked a few of you  to Say Something – your connections, questions, imrages that emerge – about the poem.

Say Something is an easy, fun, and interesting strategy that should support effective discussions in the book-based discussion groups. [OK, we didn’t actually do this part because we were short on time but this is what it could look like in a middle school classroom – LH]

Brownlie suggests reminding students of the criteria for effective group discussions at the start of the Say Something and reviewing the criteria again at the end:

  • all voices must be included
  • all students must feel included
  • all students must have their ideas respected
  • the discussion should move us to new understandings

Lit Circle Discussion Group

I modeled a Lit Circle conversation with the members of The Holes reading group and utilizing a Fishbowl strategy.  After a quick debrief, I asked each reading group to meet and engage in a similar conversation.  The discussions were lively and could have run much longer than the time we had left in class.  They used a modified First Turn / Last Turn process that worked like this:

  • Group members mentioned how far they’d read in the book (to make it less likely that one speaker would “spill the beans”)
  • One participant read a sticky note and explained their choice
  • Group members took turns speaking with NO cross talk
  • When everyone had had a go speaking, it was time for free-for-all conversation
  • The process was repeated with a new person reading one of their sticky notes.

Lit Circles: Double-Entry Journal Task

One During-Reading activity that really promotes thoughtful engagement with lit circle books is journaling.  In an effort to model this process with you, I’m asking you to keep a Double-Entry Journal as a means to consider the Lit Circle activities we’re engaging in during class time.  The task will be completed in class and it’s due on Thursday, 1 March 2012.  Here’s the handout:

To this point you had experienced:

  • Book Talks
  • Wide Variety of Books
  • Time to Read (in class and at home)
  • Sticky Notes
  • The Story Behind the Poem
  • Say Something
  • Discussion Groups

I asked you to choose two of those ideas and to give me your thoughts on them in the My Thinking side of the journal.  We took 10 or so minutes in class to do this.

We didn’t have time to get to our Six Hats Thinking on Chapter 6: The Whole Class Novel so that conversation will have to wait until next week.

Cheers,

– Lawrence

Inquiry One-Pager, Administrivia, and Unit Planning: Update for Wednesday, 23 November 2011

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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

  • EDUC 315 TC Feedback Form: Please complete this form (found in the Get Yer Forms! post below) and submit it to your FA by Friday, 25 November 2011.
  • SRL Consent Forms: Please complete this form and submit it to your FA by Monday, 28 November 2011.
  • LLED 320 Timetable: We agreed to shift the time of our LLED 320 class.  Thanks for your input.
  • LLED 320 Writing Samples: I asked you to grab 4 or 5 samples of student writing that you can use for a writing assessment task in LLED 320 class.  The best pieces for this task are paragraphs, essays, poems, short stories, or any other piece that involves students writing half a page or more.  Please gather these samples from work you do on your 2-week prac or from work your SA does (of has done).   Please bring these pieces to our first LLED 320 class in the third week of January 2012.

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

Little u & BIG U Understandings and Assessment: Update for Wednesday, 16 November 2011

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Administrivia


  • LLED 320 Timetable (Term 2): I proposed an alteration to the LLED 320 timetable.  I’ll confirm that it works for you in next Wednesday’s class
  • 2-Week Prac Unit Plan Conference Schedule: We passed around the sign up sheet.  Conferences are held with your FA.  The goal of this meeting is to help you get your head around your upcoming unit by clarifying your KUD and possible assessment.  Please bring your completed KUD table and any ideas you have on how to assess the degree to which your students grasp the KUD
  • 2-Week Prac Unit Plan Template: Here is a copy of the unit plan template Dave and I suggest that you use: UBD Unit Plan Template – Nov 11

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:

  1. Looked over the handout: KUD, Performance Tasks, and Differentiating Instruction found here: KUD, Performance Tasks, and DI Handout.  The example related to a Science unit on weather.
  2. Considered what KUD students would need to have worked with in order to complete the assessment task.
  3. Designed another task based on the same KUD that used a different scenario

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

Lesson Planning Suggestions, Sims Inquiry Questions & an Intro to UBD Unit Planning: Update for Monday, 7 November 2011

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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:

  • to consider the types of topics inquiry questions can deal with
  • to examine how questions can evolve
  • to consider the messy nature of inquiry.

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:

  • Monday, 7 November 2011 = Sims Exit Slip
  • Saturday, 12 November 2011 = Aoki (Reading #5) Entrance Slip
  • Monday, 14 November 2011 = Aoki Exit Slip

’til next time.

– LH

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.

EDUC 315 Info, POT/COM Calendar, and UBD Unit Planning: Update for Wednesday, 3 November 2010

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EDUC 315 Information

– Anecdotal Observation Forms:  I handed out a few triplicate observation forms for use by your SA as she or he observes your lessons.  Most SAs prefer to write up their notes on the computer as the lesson progresses but some observations – namely movement around the classroom – lend themselves almost exclusively to writing by hand.  Please deliver these forms to your SA and, if they want more, let me know so I can deliver them.

– Computer Passwords: You will need an SD43 or SD40 username and password to access district email and other online resources.  The sooner you can get these, the better.  To do so, please see the secretaries in the office.  One of them may be able to do this for you or, at the very least, they will be able to give you the name of the school’s computer site contact.  The site contact should be able to make the request for your usernames and passwords.   Let me know if you run into a snag here.

– Overhead Transparencies: [NOTE: This suggestion was given to my by Jan, the lead secretary at Minnekhada, and I’m passing it on to you at her request.] Unfortunately, acetate sheets used to make overhead transparencies have a bad habit of getting stuck in photocopiers and melting on the machine’s rollers.  This can put a copier out of commission for days.  So, before you attempt to make an overhead, I recommend requesting a quick tutorial.

– Yellow “Preparing For Success in Your Initial Practica” Handout: I urged you to take a look at this document that I passed out during our Pre-Practicum Preparation Seminar in September and make note of what you have already accomplished and what’s left to do.  You needn’t do everything on the list but it does give you a good idea of activites to engage in as the 2nd half of the Tuesdays prac kicks in.

Here’s a copy if yours has gone walkabout:

– End of Practicum Paperwork: You’re keeping informal reflections and your SA is taking informal notes on the lesson(s) you are delivering at this point.  The only formal paperwork that needs to be taken care of is this one-pager to be completed just before the final Tuesday on 23 November.  I recommend bringing a printed copy to school on that day so you can discuss your completed form with your SA.  Your SA should return the favour.  For easy reference, here are the forms.  By the way, they both gather the same information, but the TC one is in the first person:

POT/COM Calendar

There are a few out of the ordinary things taking place over the next few days so I wanted you to have the heads up.  Here goes:

Monday, 8 November 2010

  • 9:30 – 11:00: Communication Needs of Aboriginal Children and Families Lecture – First Nations House of Learning
  • 11:10 – 12:00: eFolio Presentation from eCoaches in SCARFE 1007 – Computer Lab
  • 12:00 – 12:30: Microteaching Preparation Time

Wednesday, 10 November 2010

  • 10:00 – 11:00 – Working with UBD Stage 1 – Desired Results & Discussing the Henderson article (Be sure to have your entrance slip ready to go)

NOTE: Bonus points to anyone who says the author’s name with the same flair as Foster Hewitt does while making this classic call from 1972:

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lMf2fAXPS1Q[/youtube]

UBD Unit Planning

In preparation for today’s look at UBD unit planning, I had you read the article “Put Understanding First” by UBD creators Jay McTighe and Grant Wiggins.  I then had you pull three key words from your entrance slip and write those words down on a slip of paper.  Here’s the list of words that the class wrote down:

impacting challenging exciting transfer cross-curriculum questions scaffolding critical thinking frustration first rung public syllabus meaningful sequence rethink meaningful practical regurgitate meaning purposeful untraditional order focus facilitator meaningful opportunity practice understanding transfer meaning boring stimuli meaningful-sequence questioning political agora transfer meaning acquisition understanding strategies different approaches application-task guided-transfer pressured meaning connections critical thinking unclear-goals make-meaning transfer-learning transfer-ability life-skills connect-to-practical transfer boring captivate connection application inquiry

Amanda kindly entered all these words into the Create page of Wordle.net and we created this image:

According to the website:

“Wordle is a toy for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes. The images you create with Wordle are yours to use however you like. You can print them out, or save them to the Wordle gallery to share with your friends.”

Wordles have many applications in a classroom setting.  I urge you to think about how you can use this software in the work you do with your students on practicum.

The Wordle highlighted several key ideas promoted by McTighe and Wiggins in their UBD unit planning model.  I elaborated on this model in my PPT presentation and we will continue to look at unit planning in subsequent lessons.  Here’s my slideshow:

‘Til Monday.

– Lawrence

Magic Lessons, Conceptions of Teaching, and a Few Bits and Pieces: Update for Monday, 1 November 2010

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Delivery of the Magic Lessons

After considering how an ability to do magic tricks might be useful for a classroom teacher and reviewing the goal of this task – to comprehend and apply the Lesson Design components through the planning and delivery of a lesson, each group taught what they had planned.

The post-conference was structured around answering the questions:

  • What worked? Why?
  • What didn’t work? Why?
  • What next? Why?

When all lessons were delivered and debriefed, we revisited the Lesson Design Anticipation Guide that I used to introduce the topic.  Also, I urged you to use the Lesson Design structure when planning lessons of your own during prac.  It is tried, true and allows for a great deal of flexibility in the way learning experiences are structured.

Here’s a LD lesson planning template for you to use:

In addition, here are a few sample lessons from previous TCs that show you what a completed LD lesson plan might look like:

By the way, here’s an advanced version of Cups and Balls performed by Penn & Teller in Vegas.  Enjoy… but don’t try these tricks on your waterbed!

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

Inquiry Article Processing

We used the Carousel Brainstorming strategy to process the 2 articles – Freire & Danylewycz and Prentice – read for a prior class.  At the end, of this activity, I asked you to complete an exit slip that was a reflection on any new ideas that emerged during your thinking on and talking about the articles.  Overall, the goal was to examine conceptions of teaching – past, present, and yours (… for the moment, at least.)

Here are the three questions that guided our examination of the articles:

  1. What are some present day understandings of teaching and teachers?
  2. What are some historically significant understandings of teaching and teachers?
  3. What understandings do you hold about teaching and teachers?

Instructions for Carousel Brainstorming (Lipton, L., & Wellman, B. (1998).  Patterns and practices in the learning-focused classroom.  Guilford, Vermont: Pathways Publishing.) are below:

Revised EDUC 310/316 Calendar

I wrote the updated calendar on the board.  Here’s an electronic copy:

Permission to Capture Video / Still Images While on Practicum

We will be asking you to videotape at least one lesson on your long practicum and, to do that, you will need permission from the parents of your students.  Most students will have signed some form of consent for photography at the start of the year.  You need to find out who has consented and if the permission given extends to you taking video and still images for your educational purposes, namely for use in your ePortfolio and for the analysis of a videotaped lesson.

Here is a form you should use to get the required permissions, if need be.  Be sure to add in the details where prompted and, before you copy the letter to send home, to proofread the file to make sure it reads in a way you’re comfortable with.  While the gist of the letter should remain the same, you can feel free to make subtle tweaks to the style:

[NOTE:  This is a different form from the one I first posted.  There were some significant concerns with a lack of clarity in the original letter. – LH on 3 Nov 2010]

Print out one, copy as many as you need for the students in your home room, and hand them out.  Set a due date and over the Tuesday visits collect them in.  You have a lot of time on your hands now so you can chase those who have late forms.  Also, this will give you another opportunity to connect with the students in your class.

Looking Ahead to Unit Planning

As per the revised calendar, we will be starting to look at unit planning on Wednesday.  In preparation, I’ve asked you to read the article linked to below and to design an entrance slip – using the same process as the entrance slips you followed for the Inquiry Articles – for use in Wednesday’s lesson. Use this link to the article if you didn’t receive a copy in class.

See you on Wednesday.

– Lawrence