End of Year Reflection on ELA, History and Science: 2013-14

July16

What do I know – my weekly assessments, my unit planning

I have been using Understanding by Design planning for over five years. It’s taken me about that long to use it somewhat effectively.  There are things I still need to work on. Here is my planning for last year. I think the connection between my goals (understandings and knowledge) and the assessment (especially the knowledge part) needs tightening. I can see looking back at my plans that not everything gotten to.

The part that I think went well, was meeting the content standards, but this is the part that I have the most concerns about as new Common Core standards roll out. The maps, and plans that I’m seeing are all focused on ELA only, and therefore focus on knowledge and skills rather than understanding. It’s a weakness (and a serious one to my mind) making CCSS like a donut, with skills on the outside, but missing content at the center. I don’t like doing ELA only planning because of this. When you have understandings around ELA, they tend to be large ideas that are too vague tied to themes constructed by the reading text publisher.

What I know I don’t know – thoughts around  assessment

This was a testing holiday in the sense that students answered test questions, but they didn’t do a “full” test, the test did not have some of the bells and whistles that will be added in subsequent years (computer adaptive questions, computer scoring of written responses, etc.), but mostly, there are no scores for students. I’ve had folks expressed some concern about “not knowing where their students are at,” but I tell them, I’ve never found these tests to be useful for telling me that. Who improved? I had a number of students that based on my assessments, and their classwork, either did really well, or made great improvements. The first group are students who would do good no matter what. I really don’t like to take any credit for their good performance because they are so self-motivated, etc. they will do well with just about any teacher, so figuring out “what I did right” from them is not realistic. The next group of students were RSP students who showed a lot of growth in their writing, and comprehension. I think there were things I did that helped them. I gave them modifications, but I also gave them feedback to help them improve. I think they knew I thought they were capable. A couple in particular really brought their “A” game, but was it me, was it them? Part of their improvement may well have been getting older (and wiser) and being at the “top” of the elementary “ladder” may have contributed to that. I support that by talking to them about how things will change in the next year, and trying to scaffold them to more independence, but some of it may just have been them getting older.

What I suspect

This would be things that I don’t have “proof” but intuitively have a feeling about it and some evidence for. The biggest thing that I got from this year is that background is key when giving them primary and other documents that are hard to read. Some versions of reading instruction seem to say that kids should struggle or be left with the text and focus on the that without any outside information to get in the way. One training I went to talked about how focusing on background “privileged” students with more experiences and background. Actually, those kids will bring background to the text whether you bring it up or not. But, kids without background will not have much to bring to the text at all, unless you as a teacher can help them make connections, either by analogy to situations they are likely to be familiar with or giving them background information directly. I’m all for pushing students to thinking, but having them struggle for the sake of struggling, which is what some lesson delivery seems to emphasize is pretty pointless.

What I’ll do next year

I’m still working on this. I know I will keep having students writing online. I haven’t worked out the how and where of it, but I will have much more peer feedback and input. Things I need to figure out are what materials I’ll be using, and what will the activities and pacing of my teaching be. This is scary because I’ve gotten a routine that I’m used to, direct instruction/text reading, followed by independent work time. I’m thinking of making this a more structured workshop model, but I haven’t figured exactly what it will look like.

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