PEER REVIEWED WORK FOR LANGUAGE ARTS:
Students and other Twitter users delivered opinions via Tweet. The tweets are compiled by twtpoll.com and the data is presented in numeric and graph form.
WHOSE PAPER ARE YOU EDITING? ______________________________________________
INTRO______________________________________________________________________________
______________________________________________________________________________________
BODY_______________________________________________________________________________
______________________________________________________________________________________
CONCLUSION____________________________________________________________________
PERSONAL REVIEW:
WHAT DID I KNOW ABOUT THE TOPIC BEFORE THE ESSAY?
WHAT DID I LEARN ABOUT THE TOPIC AFTER THE ESSAY?
DID I CHANGE ANY MISCONCEPTIONS I HAD ABOUT THE TOPIC?
AFTER GRADING ASSESSMENT: (WHAT CAN I DO TO IMPROVE MY WRITING SKILLS FOR THE NEXT ESSAY?)
Analysis: In devising the assessments, poll and rubric, it was important to start with the end in mind and work backwards. With the understanding that I was working on achieving STANDARDS 1,2,3 (chronology, historical inquiry, and societies are diverse) I addressed each issue with a question. I started with Costa’s level 2 questioning, “How do you gauge your understanding of your students’ culture?” This starts the processing and application of information and the path toward an understanding of its importance.
The Twitter poll was devised to garner real world opinions from my students at Vista Academy. Vista Academy is a hard-to-serve school in Denver Public Schools. Its student body is 60% African American, 38% Hispanic and 2% white (other). This line of questioning is something the students deal with each day in the classroom and I believe I was able to get a true assessment of their feelings about the topic, “Do teachers understand and accept cultural, ethnic, racial, and social classes of their students?” The results (found above) find 58.3% of high school students (age 14-19) responded #Sometimes, 16.7% Tweeted #Absolutely, 16.7% answered #Itnevercrossestheirmind, and 8.3% Tweeted #Rarely. This poll makes it evident students don’t always feel their culture or race is addressed during the lesson planning phase.
When we take the opinion of our students into account during the lesson-planning phase, I believe the students will experience a higher level of success as they are connecting to the material on a constant basis.
The RUBRIC is also based on the STANDARDS with the end result in mind. I took a bit of liberty with the formatting as I have seen hundreds of rubrics written on the spreadsheet format and found it to be less then inviting. I outlined several categories and gave points for each level of proficiency. I took care to make sure the (1) rubric is aligned to unit goals and essential questions, (2) criteria, performance levels, and indicators of expected performance are laid out and easy to decipher, (3) performance levels are distinct yet progressive, and (4) the language is precise.
Finally, I added two other components: A peer editing piece and a personal review. These sections garner feedback and give the student a chance to pare down their understanding before and after the essay. In addition, I felt it was important for the student to write a goal for the next essay and asked the question, “ What can I do to improve my writing skills for the next essay?” The student is expected to write at least one goal based on the grading rubric.
Adding ways to re-engage students every 10 minutes. Objectives In an effort to re-engage students every 10 minutes it is important to lay out the class period in a meaningful way:
This includes: ELEMENTS OF A LESSON, LESSON PLAN, TIME ALLOCATED, TEACHER STRATEGIES, WHAT IS TEACHER ASSESSING?
Launch-Choose 1/day
1) Essential question
2) Challenge Issued
3) Tweet to Vote
4) www.padlet.com
10 min
Grab attention in first few minutes
Setting the stage, pre-assessment, asking, “What I know? What I wish I knew?” about topic
Direct Instruction-Rigor and relevance in learning
Give daily assignment: 1) Explain to students what to do
2) Model what to do (power point)
10-15 minutes
Address standards in lesson, define content language objective, and go over specific skills (writing, inquiry, organization and reading)
WICOR strategies-Are students able to pull important information out of text? Assessed through “Think-Pair-Share” or “Traveling File”
Guided Examples
Check for understanding and increase engagement
10 minutes
Move to “volleyball” technique-instead of teacher responding to every student answer, students respond to each other: “Do you agree?” “Why is that answer correct/incorrect”
Teacher is assessing a level of understanding of assignment and what is required.
Independent Practice
Students begin work
10 minutes
Aggressively monitor in key areas
Key evidence of written response (evidence, argument, context, etc.)
Student self-evaluation
Circulate and mark-up
10 minutes
Start with fastest writers
Check marks for key-take aways, star on page for items that need to be changed or fixed and prompts on how to fix it
Peer-to-peer review
Take notes while checking partners work
5 minutes
Looks for patterns of wrong answers
Start class conversations based on targeting those patterns
Homework
Review problem areas
5 minutes
Develop homework center targeted on specific skills identified in assessments
Re-teaching tool
Exit Ticket
Students write questions they struggled to master
5 minutes
Re-teach tool
Working toward mastery
Activities
• Step Two: Adding at least one opportunity for students to have up to three to five choices to pick from. Adding elements of student choice to lessons is an important aspect of increasing relevance and student buy-in, which contributes to student success. Your text explains this in further detail.
Peer-to-peer support strategies- (students may choose from the following options in peer review portion of class)
1) Have student teach parts of the lesson to small groups of their peers
2) Have students run stations
3) Turn and talk: students turn to partner and explain answers to a question
4) Develop study groups that jigsaw activities and content
5) Share strong papers and have students lead others in identifying how their essays have errors
Peer to peer support has a risk of lowering self-esteem as it pits students against each other if not done with careful consideration for the feelings of the low performing student. Giving students a choice in this aspect of the learning period can ensure they are identifying strengths and weaknesses in a safe environment. In addition, low to medium, and medium to high partners can help ensure students are learning from each other and the gap is not so large to effect self-esteem.
There are many suggestions for peer review sessions on this web site: http://teachingcenter.wustl.edu/strategies/Pages/peer-review-how-to.aspx#.VEk6eijaYXw
Adaptations • Step Three: Identify how you will explicitly align the skill(s) being taught with real-world relevancy.
1) Acquisition-The use of social media and advancing technologies gives students a more authentic, deeper grasp of the material. These technologies need to be sought out and applied.
2) Application-learning by doing. A deeper learning experience can happen with experimentation and action.
3) Assimilation-Access to online research communities give learners a deeper sense of a discipline as a special culture shaped by specific ways of seeing and interpreting the world.
4) Adaptation-Students begin to grasp the subtle, interpersonal, and unwritten knowledge that members in a community of practice use (often unconsciously) on a daily basis.
https://net.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/ELI3009.pdf
Evaluation • Step Four: Add opportunities to interact with students about progress on their personal goals, to engage them and to coach them.
First, educators need to attend to the social and emotional needs of students. It may be just as important if not more important than how they teach content. In addition, teacher will be discrete and respectful about student progress.
Goals for students will focus attention on instructional improvement and measure academic progress on a regular basis.
• The goals are specific (but not to specific)
• The goals are challenging (difficult but reachable)
• Interventions impact directly on the experience of learners.
Student Progress
Timing:
Return assignment the next day
Students get feedback when they are still mindful of the learning target
Give immediate oral responses to questions or facts
Give immediate response to students misconceptions
Provide flashcards for studying facts
Purpose:
Select 2 or 3 main points about paper for comment
Students get feedback on teachable moment points but not overwhelming amount of information
Give feedback on learning targets
Mode: (communicate message in appropriate way)
Written feedback for students who want to see and review material
To communicate in most appropriate manner.
Oral feedback for students who don’t read well
Demonstrate if student needs to see how to do something
Comparison:
Comparing student work to rubric
Compare work with established criteria, his or her own past performance
Encouraging reluctant student who has improved, even if work isn’t high quality yet.
Express what is observed about the work
Identify Progress Toward Mastery
Daily Progress Rubric
Criteria
Promptness and initiative
Fails to Participate
Rarely participates freely
Requires occasional prompting to post
Propels discussion in some meaningful way
Propels conversation by responding to questions that probe reasoning and evidence
Daily Writing
Organization, development, substance of writing prompt are not appropriate. Convention errors are numerous
Organization, development, substance and style are hasty and somewhat appropriate. Convention errors are 4 or more.
Organization, development, substance and style are appropriate. Less than 3 convention errors.
Organization, development, substance and style are appropriate. Less than 2 convention errors.
Organization, development, substance and style are appropriate. No errors in conventions.
Relevance
Fails to convey a perspective on target with the writing prompt or topic
Tries, but fails to convey a perspective on target with writing prompt or topic
Conveys a clear, but little distinction in perspective, yet on target with the discussion prompt.
Conveys a clear and somewhat distinct perspective completely on target with prompt.
Conveys a clear and distinct perspective completely on target with the discussion prompt.
Daily Goal
Daily goal was not attempted
Daily goal was attempted poorly
Daily goal was attempted with some effort
Daily goal was attempted with some mastery
Daily goal was mastered.
**As an aside, I polled my class of 10th graders on 10/28/14 asking which form of feedback they prefer:
Rubric Peer Teacher
1 7 6
While I thought they would prefer a rubric (actual information to guide their class period or writing prompt, it was split between feedback from a peer (IE: peer review) or from their teacher! (Interesting)
Opportunities for students to process every 15 minutes:
a. Stimulating starter for the lesson – 5 mins for the students to get their brains in gear.
b. Essential question is laid out.
c. Once content is presented in 10 minute chunks, I ask students to take the lead. Each student can ask the class to clarify a piece they don’t understand.
d. Because we discuss issues that can be opinion based, we stop every 10-15 minutes and debate the real world implications.
e. Be interactive! Evaluate success, correct errors and move on to next topic.
f. Use of technology as a way to process: interactive whiteboards, podcasts, blogs, virtual learning environments, internet.
g. Ask students to hold up hands, “Do you get it?” 1 through 5 students hold up fingers.
h. Ask, “How would you explain this concept to a child?”
i. Content mapping
References
Ladson-Billings, G. (1995). "But that’s just good teaching! The case for culturally relevant pedagogy." Theory into practice, p 160
University of North Carolina. (2013). Cultural education. Retrieved from http://www.learnnc.org/lp/pages/4474#noteref12
Colorado Department of Education. (2014). Standards. Retrieved from www.cde.edu
Denver Public Schools. (2014). Curriculum and Development. Retrieved from: http://curriculum.dpsk12.org/lang_literacy_cultural/literacy/sec_lit/assessment/rubrics/11-12_NARRATIVE_RUBRIC.pdf
iWall on line survey. (2014). Retrieved from: https://csuglobal.blackboard.com/webapps/portal/frameset.jsp?url=%2Fwebapps%2Fblackboard%2Fexecute%2Flauncher%3Ftype%3DCourse%26id%3D_1901842%26url%3D
Various Authors. (2012). “How to plan and guide in class peer review”. Retrieved from http://teachingcenter.wustl.edu/strategies/Pages/peer-review-how-to.aspx#.VEk6eijaYXw
Lombardi, M. (2013). “Authentic learning for the 21st century” Retrieved from https://net.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/ELI3009.pdf
Brookhart, S. (2008). “How to give effective feedback to your students”. Retrieved from http://www.ascd.org/publications/books/108019/chapters/Types-of-Feedback-and-Their-Purposes.aspx
Students and other Twitter users delivered opinions via Tweet. The tweets are compiled by twtpoll.com and the data is presented in numeric and graph form.
WHOSE PAPER ARE YOU EDITING? ______________________________________________
INTRO______________________________________________________________________________
______________________________________________________________________________________
BODY_______________________________________________________________________________
______________________________________________________________________________________
CONCLUSION____________________________________________________________________
PERSONAL REVIEW:
WHAT DID I KNOW ABOUT THE TOPIC BEFORE THE ESSAY?
WHAT DID I LEARN ABOUT THE TOPIC AFTER THE ESSAY?
DID I CHANGE ANY MISCONCEPTIONS I HAD ABOUT THE TOPIC?
AFTER GRADING ASSESSMENT: (WHAT CAN I DO TO IMPROVE MY WRITING SKILLS FOR THE NEXT ESSAY?)
Analysis: In devising the assessments, poll and rubric, it was important to start with the end in mind and work backwards. With the understanding that I was working on achieving STANDARDS 1,2,3 (chronology, historical inquiry, and societies are diverse) I addressed each issue with a question. I started with Costa’s level 2 questioning, “How do you gauge your understanding of your students’ culture?” This starts the processing and application of information and the path toward an understanding of its importance.
The Twitter poll was devised to garner real world opinions from my students at Vista Academy. Vista Academy is a hard-to-serve school in Denver Public Schools. Its student body is 60% African American, 38% Hispanic and 2% white (other). This line of questioning is something the students deal with each day in the classroom and I believe I was able to get a true assessment of their feelings about the topic, “Do teachers understand and accept cultural, ethnic, racial, and social classes of their students?” The results (found above) find 58.3% of high school students (age 14-19) responded #Sometimes, 16.7% Tweeted #Absolutely, 16.7% answered #Itnevercrossestheirmind, and 8.3% Tweeted #Rarely. This poll makes it evident students don’t always feel their culture or race is addressed during the lesson planning phase.
When we take the opinion of our students into account during the lesson-planning phase, I believe the students will experience a higher level of success as they are connecting to the material on a constant basis.
The RUBRIC is also based on the STANDARDS with the end result in mind. I took a bit of liberty with the formatting as I have seen hundreds of rubrics written on the spreadsheet format and found it to be less then inviting. I outlined several categories and gave points for each level of proficiency. I took care to make sure the (1) rubric is aligned to unit goals and essential questions, (2) criteria, performance levels, and indicators of expected performance are laid out and easy to decipher, (3) performance levels are distinct yet progressive, and (4) the language is precise.
Finally, I added two other components: A peer editing piece and a personal review. These sections garner feedback and give the student a chance to pare down their understanding before and after the essay. In addition, I felt it was important for the student to write a goal for the next essay and asked the question, “ What can I do to improve my writing skills for the next essay?” The student is expected to write at least one goal based on the grading rubric.
Adding ways to re-engage students every 10 minutes. Objectives In an effort to re-engage students every 10 minutes it is important to lay out the class period in a meaningful way:
This includes: ELEMENTS OF A LESSON, LESSON PLAN, TIME ALLOCATED, TEACHER STRATEGIES, WHAT IS TEACHER ASSESSING?
Launch-Choose 1/day
1) Essential question
2) Challenge Issued
3) Tweet to Vote
4) www.padlet.com
10 min
Grab attention in first few minutes
Setting the stage, pre-assessment, asking, “What I know? What I wish I knew?” about topic
Direct Instruction-Rigor and relevance in learning
Give daily assignment: 1) Explain to students what to do
2) Model what to do (power point)
10-15 minutes
Address standards in lesson, define content language objective, and go over specific skills (writing, inquiry, organization and reading)
WICOR strategies-Are students able to pull important information out of text? Assessed through “Think-Pair-Share” or “Traveling File”
Guided Examples
Check for understanding and increase engagement
10 minutes
Move to “volleyball” technique-instead of teacher responding to every student answer, students respond to each other: “Do you agree?” “Why is that answer correct/incorrect”
Teacher is assessing a level of understanding of assignment and what is required.
Independent Practice
Students begin work
10 minutes
Aggressively monitor in key areas
Key evidence of written response (evidence, argument, context, etc.)
Student self-evaluation
Circulate and mark-up
10 minutes
Start with fastest writers
Check marks for key-take aways, star on page for items that need to be changed or fixed and prompts on how to fix it
Peer-to-peer review
Take notes while checking partners work
5 minutes
Looks for patterns of wrong answers
Start class conversations based on targeting those patterns
Homework
Review problem areas
5 minutes
Develop homework center targeted on specific skills identified in assessments
Re-teaching tool
Exit Ticket
Students write questions they struggled to master
5 minutes
Re-teach tool
Working toward mastery
Activities
• Step Two: Adding at least one opportunity for students to have up to three to five choices to pick from. Adding elements of student choice to lessons is an important aspect of increasing relevance and student buy-in, which contributes to student success. Your text explains this in further detail.
Peer-to-peer support strategies- (students may choose from the following options in peer review portion of class)
1) Have student teach parts of the lesson to small groups of their peers
2) Have students run stations
3) Turn and talk: students turn to partner and explain answers to a question
4) Develop study groups that jigsaw activities and content
5) Share strong papers and have students lead others in identifying how their essays have errors
Peer to peer support has a risk of lowering self-esteem as it pits students against each other if not done with careful consideration for the feelings of the low performing student. Giving students a choice in this aspect of the learning period can ensure they are identifying strengths and weaknesses in a safe environment. In addition, low to medium, and medium to high partners can help ensure students are learning from each other and the gap is not so large to effect self-esteem.
There are many suggestions for peer review sessions on this web site: http://teachingcenter.wustl.edu/strategies/Pages/peer-review-how-to.aspx#.VEk6eijaYXw
Adaptations • Step Three: Identify how you will explicitly align the skill(s) being taught with real-world relevancy.
1) Acquisition-The use of social media and advancing technologies gives students a more authentic, deeper grasp of the material. These technologies need to be sought out and applied.
2) Application-learning by doing. A deeper learning experience can happen with experimentation and action.
3) Assimilation-Access to online research communities give learners a deeper sense of a discipline as a special culture shaped by specific ways of seeing and interpreting the world.
4) Adaptation-Students begin to grasp the subtle, interpersonal, and unwritten knowledge that members in a community of practice use (often unconsciously) on a daily basis.
https://net.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/ELI3009.pdf
Evaluation • Step Four: Add opportunities to interact with students about progress on their personal goals, to engage them and to coach them.
First, educators need to attend to the social and emotional needs of students. It may be just as important if not more important than how they teach content. In addition, teacher will be discrete and respectful about student progress.
Goals for students will focus attention on instructional improvement and measure academic progress on a regular basis.
• The goals are specific (but not to specific)
• The goals are challenging (difficult but reachable)
• Interventions impact directly on the experience of learners.
Student Progress
Timing:
Return assignment the next day
Students get feedback when they are still mindful of the learning target
Give immediate oral responses to questions or facts
Give immediate response to students misconceptions
Provide flashcards for studying facts
Purpose:
Select 2 or 3 main points about paper for comment
Students get feedback on teachable moment points but not overwhelming amount of information
Give feedback on learning targets
Mode: (communicate message in appropriate way)
Written feedback for students who want to see and review material
To communicate in most appropriate manner.
Oral feedback for students who don’t read well
Demonstrate if student needs to see how to do something
Comparison:
Comparing student work to rubric
Compare work with established criteria, his or her own past performance
Encouraging reluctant student who has improved, even if work isn’t high quality yet.
Express what is observed about the work
Identify Progress Toward Mastery
Daily Progress Rubric
Criteria
Promptness and initiative
Fails to Participate
Rarely participates freely
Requires occasional prompting to post
Propels discussion in some meaningful way
Propels conversation by responding to questions that probe reasoning and evidence
Daily Writing
Organization, development, substance of writing prompt are not appropriate. Convention errors are numerous
Organization, development, substance and style are hasty and somewhat appropriate. Convention errors are 4 or more.
Organization, development, substance and style are appropriate. Less than 3 convention errors.
Organization, development, substance and style are appropriate. Less than 2 convention errors.
Organization, development, substance and style are appropriate. No errors in conventions.
Relevance
Fails to convey a perspective on target with the writing prompt or topic
Tries, but fails to convey a perspective on target with writing prompt or topic
Conveys a clear, but little distinction in perspective, yet on target with the discussion prompt.
Conveys a clear and somewhat distinct perspective completely on target with prompt.
Conveys a clear and distinct perspective completely on target with the discussion prompt.
Daily Goal
Daily goal was not attempted
Daily goal was attempted poorly
Daily goal was attempted with some effort
Daily goal was attempted with some mastery
Daily goal was mastered.
**As an aside, I polled my class of 10th graders on 10/28/14 asking which form of feedback they prefer:
Rubric Peer Teacher
1 7 6
While I thought they would prefer a rubric (actual information to guide their class period or writing prompt, it was split between feedback from a peer (IE: peer review) or from their teacher! (Interesting)
Opportunities for students to process every 15 minutes:
a. Stimulating starter for the lesson – 5 mins for the students to get their brains in gear.
b. Essential question is laid out.
c. Once content is presented in 10 minute chunks, I ask students to take the lead. Each student can ask the class to clarify a piece they don’t understand.
d. Because we discuss issues that can be opinion based, we stop every 10-15 minutes and debate the real world implications.
e. Be interactive! Evaluate success, correct errors and move on to next topic.
f. Use of technology as a way to process: interactive whiteboards, podcasts, blogs, virtual learning environments, internet.
g. Ask students to hold up hands, “Do you get it?” 1 through 5 students hold up fingers.
h. Ask, “How would you explain this concept to a child?”
i. Content mapping
References
Ladson-Billings, G. (1995). "But that’s just good teaching! The case for culturally relevant pedagogy." Theory into practice, p 160
University of North Carolina. (2013). Cultural education. Retrieved from http://www.learnnc.org/lp/pages/4474#noteref12
Colorado Department of Education. (2014). Standards. Retrieved from www.cde.edu
Denver Public Schools. (2014). Curriculum and Development. Retrieved from: http://curriculum.dpsk12.org/lang_literacy_cultural/literacy/sec_lit/assessment/rubrics/11-12_NARRATIVE_RUBRIC.pdf
iWall on line survey. (2014). Retrieved from: https://csuglobal.blackboard.com/webapps/portal/frameset.jsp?url=%2Fwebapps%2Fblackboard%2Fexecute%2Flauncher%3Ftype%3DCourse%26id%3D_1901842%26url%3D
Various Authors. (2012). “How to plan and guide in class peer review”. Retrieved from http://teachingcenter.wustl.edu/strategies/Pages/peer-review-how-to.aspx#.VEk6eijaYXw
Lombardi, M. (2013). “Authentic learning for the 21st century” Retrieved from https://net.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/ELI3009.pdf
Brookhart, S. (2008). “How to give effective feedback to your students”. Retrieved from http://www.ascd.org/publications/books/108019/chapters/Types-of-Feedback-and-Their-Purposes.aspx