- Consolidation should occur at the lowest board, so as to not leave anyone out.
- Ask students: "How could we extend? What could be the next question?" This creates curiosity and students who are automatically open to trying the next thing.
- Students have the freedom to think how they want to think, so those who are generally lower confidence thrive in T.C.
- "Sharing time" at the beginning of Unit Tests -- no pens and pencils.
- Complexity Science
"the more we try to control and pressure learning from without, the more we obstruct the tendencies of students to be actively involved and to participate in their own education." - Stefanou
"Next Stages":
Task Consolidation
- Use student work. As you circle the room, plan the sequence. This is your teaching time.
- Ask students who are not in this group to describe the reasoning/thinking. This improves engagement and removes the ownership of thinking.
- Still keeping them thinking.
- Being able to read someone else's thinking/mathematical work is a great skill to have!
- It's not your ideas you're bringing together, it's their ideas.
- The Fake: "Come to this side of the room! Oh, I made a mistake, actually go to that side."
- Removes the ownership of the board. Group 4 is no longer standing at Board 4.
- Give time for Meaningful Notes and opportunities for Self-Checking.
- Spend a lot of time TALKING about taking meaningful notes.
- Standing vs. sitting -- more engagement happens when standing
Room Organization
- The room tells students a message about what's going to happen during the next class.
- First message you give to your students -- in September and every day after that.
- Get rid of furniture! Kids in thinking classrooms need to be able to move!
- Not just for safety -- this is how ideas move.
- Ideas need to be circulating.
- In order to promote this, there needs to be space.
- If you take the time to change the tables, it changes you.
- Once you make the shift in structure, it'll make a shift in you.
- Bring in extra furniture for the few times you need it.
- De-front the room
- Move around, between the students
- When students enter, teacher sitting at a table, a different table the next day
- Improves student autonomy and the organized chaos
- You need to have SOME CHAOS!
Assessment
- If we want students to value what we value, we need to put value in it in our assessment strategies.
- Place value on what you value!
- Don't be afraid because it's in the curriculum! We can put value on the Curricular Competencies!!
- Learning is messy, assessing should be too.
- Collect data, not points.
- Keep it disaggregated (aggregate only twice/year).
- Try mixing proficiencies, letter grades, and numbers.
- Keeping things in different forms forces reflecting and thinking when you have to aggregate.
- If we think we can know what someone has learned by what they write on the test, we are severely misreading the tests.
- Don't put too much faith in your written assessments.
- Recognize that learning (growth) is paramount. (Equity piece!)
- You can't expect every student in your class to go from A to B from Sept to June.
- You can express everyone to start from where they're starting and progress from there. You can expect growth.
- All tests are retestable, as many times as they want. Students should be able to show that they've learned something!
- Large chunk comes from content, but some comes from curricular competencies.
- Self-assessments (4-5 times/semester): whole idea is for students to make goals; read through characteristics and identify areas where you'd like to see some growth (pulled from the curricular docs) and can realistically do that!
- Combine Chapters into Units, only have 4 unit tests (group by themes)
- Unit tests go over two days. Three parts. (Triathlon)
- Content measuring (test)
- Collaborative testing piece - get a task they've never seen before, but that is related to the topic; assessed on understanding and solving competencies
- Take photos, goes onto your computer, mark on the computer; have to submit one whiteboard
- Grow in ability to mathematically communicate clearly
- Communicating and Representing self-assessment - completed on their own at their desks, based on how they did at the whiteboard
- Reasoning and Modelling Assessment - from "fun" tasks
- two/year, present solutions, marked on rubric
https://www.dropbox.com/sh/oklq6cswnitjqqr/AABZpN3-B1W-g28dlhhZNKxPa?dl=0
bit.ly/PrunerAssess
Grade 9 Hot Tips:
- You're not ready for the group today. You, you, you: work at a table, hopefully tomorrow you'll be ready.
- Lost the privilege of working at the whiteboards.
These notes, and the folder, are gold. I feel like I am there in the room! These are especially exciting for me as this week I tore the plastic off my new set of double whiteboards on the other side of my classroom. I now have two entire walls of whiteboard. I have never had so much fun planning for a week.
ReplyDeleteSome Michael Pruner points that I have sunk my talons into:
-Ideas need to be circulating
-students acting as self-assessors making goals and reflecting.
-working towards a system that is “efficient and effective in informing students where they are and where they are going in their learning.”
-reflection journals are an area of growth for me–I’d like to find a mentor in math journaling–I just haven’t found much success with Grades 4-6 likely due to class length already being to short and due to students being too brief and topical with their reflection.
-the importance of reasoning and modeling - this can begin with the youngest of math learners.
-how Michael specifically includes visualization in his rubrics to speak to the competency of “visualize to explore and illustrate mathematical concepts and relationships”.
-communicating and representing self-assessment - completed on their own at their desks, based on how they did at the whiteboard - this would be interesting data to collect and would inform teachers about where they are feeling they are at.