June 5th, 2009
1 in every 3 students in the US is a dropout, not because they are dumb but because they are bored and schooling expects them to adapt their learning to a curriculum and not vice versa.
While the curriculum in most cases is a rigid entity, the teachers who are entrusted, legally and professionally, with the communication of that curriculum to the students need not be. Everyday, the teacher should make herself increasingly useless in this equation, empowering the students to be independent learners. The teacher who interacts with the diverse body of learners on an ongoing basis cannot adopt “recipe teaching”. There are resources to help a teacher who wants to bring about differentiation in classroom; but that can only guide her – the final design is her responsibility after considering her class dynamics.
So what does a teacher differentiate in order to optimize all students’ learning? This question needs careful analysis and depending on the students’ needs, a teacher could:
Differentiate the learning environment and materials with which the learners work; for example, in primary grades teachers may sometimes organise students to work at different stations with different resources; or
Differentiate the content; for example, in a math class some students may be working on 2-digit multiplication, while other with 3-digit multiplication; or
Differentiate the activities designed to understand the content or assessment tasks; for example, students are given the option to choose from writing an essay or a political cartoon or a parody to demonstrate their understanding of a common historical event or concept.
Students’ needs may vary in readiness, interest or learning profile and differentiation addresses this need. All teachers must differentiate instruction and assessment based on the needs of the learners, to motivate them and to make learning more efficient and accessible. There can be a million reasons for not differentiating instruction and assessment and none of them would be new. In contrast there is one main reason why teachers must differentiate instruction and assessment – respect for students’ and their learning.
Tags: assessment, classroom, Curriculum, Differentiation in Classroom, instruction, learners, learning environment, recipe teaching, teacher
Posted in Differentiated Learning | 4 Comments »
May 23rd, 2009
One challenge for the teachers who dabble in the inquiry-approach is how to assess something that looks so very diverse, open-ended and fluid, in some ways. How does a teacher align the inquiry with standards and expectations, school-wide, provincial or national?
Although student-initiated and teacher-facilitated inquiry process seems to be a highly personalised experience, the teacher can build structure and measurable elements into it. This can be in the form of provocation that the teacher provides during the inquiry or the choice of resources. For instance while doing a unit on accessibility of water; the teacher can bring in resources, human or material, about the journey of water to our homes or those about the accessibility of water to different people in the world, depending on how narrow or broad a focus she wants in the unit. This focus in terms of content can be determined by the standards and expectations while the construction of meaning and understanding for that content can be harnessed by the inquiry approach.
The fair, valid and reliable assessment for inquiries or any aspect of student learning has to be both formative and summative. This ongoing nature of the assessment affords the teacher the opportunity to assess the process as well as the product. The inquiry cycle, for those who use it during the inquiry process, provides ample scope for assessment at almost every step. The feedback provided to the student to shape his learning, the students’ response to that feedback, the teacher using the feedback to inform teaching-learning in the classroom – all this forms crucial and realistic modes of learning.
Unlike a standardised test, inquiries can be best assessed by self, peer or teacher. This makes assessment a holistic and learning experience in itself. Teachers often build reflective tools into the inquiry cycle where the student reflects on the findings so far and next steps. This makes scaffolding not just a teacher regulated process but a deliberate exercise on part of the student. I cannot think of any traditional assessment strategy that, in itself, is so rich and reliable.
The product of inquiries, itself is very varied and complex to merit a simple letter grade or a mark. What helps in that case are descriptors in the form of rubric providing concrete and meaningful insights, to both the teacher and the student, as to what the student has understood and can do and what student hasn’t demonstrated in terms of understanding and skills. Although it sounds rather simplistic, making rubric to assess the outcome of inquiries can be a complex and interactive process. A letter grade or a mark pales in comparison to the complexity of the learning and is ambiguous, incomprehensible and therefore seems arbitrary.
Tags: assessment, formative learning, inquiry approach, inquiry cycle, learning, reflective tools, student, student learning, student-initiated inquiry, summative learning, teacher, teacher-facilitated inquiry
Posted in Assessment, Inquiry Process | No Comments »
May 12th, 2009
‘An e-portfolio is a purposeful aggregation of digital items – ideas, evidence, reflections, feedback etc, which “presents” a selected audience with evidence of a person’s learning and/or ability.’
Sutherland, S. and Powell, A. (2007)
The primary aim of an Electronic portfolio (EP) is to collect evidence for summative assessment, to demonstrate achievement, record progress and set targets – as in records of achievement and individual learning plans (ILPs) – or to nurture a continuing process of personal development and reflective learning. It is an important tool that can be used to support and document student learning as well as the development of educational, personal, and professional skills. EPs support portfolio pedagogy by engaging individuals in deep reflection on their learning and provide evidence of professional and intellectual growth as well as documenting the complex processes involved in learning.
Portfolio creation and management is pedagogically a good practice for both teachers and students. Teachers, while doing their teacher training program need to build up work portfolio which some schools expect them to present at the time of interview so that it gives them an insight into the kind of teacher he/she is. Some teachers continue this practice along with helping their students develop theirs. Many educational programs (including IB and Reggio) have made it a mandatory tool of assessment and reflection.
Although paper portfolios have long been in use as valuable sources of evidence that document an individual’s growth and learning processes, the emergence of Web 2.0 tools and the increasing accessibility of digital technology has prompted many educators and professionals to shift from paper to electronic portfolios. EPs allows for multimodal artefacts, e.g. images, videos, audio files, or programming snippets, along with more traditional rich media files such as Word documents, PowerPoints, spreadsheets etc., to be collected, managed and presented to different audiences as evidence of learning and skills development over time. EPs are much more dynamic, interactive and flexible than their physical counterparts.
An EP, like its paper equivalent, is produced at key points in a learning journey – (when demonstrating the outcomes of learning, the next stage of learning, etc). EPs demonstrate what is important about the individual at a particular point in time – their achievements, reflections on learning and, potentially, a rich and rounded picture of their abilities, aspirations and ambitions.
Note: Some excerpts of this blog have been sourced from a report titled Effective Practice with e-Portfolios, published by JISC
Tags: assessment, digital technology, e-portfolio, Education, educational, electronic portfolio, learning, media files, pedagogy, Web 2.0
Posted in E-Portfolio | No Comments »
May 5th, 2009
Research is an existential attitude and therefore since time immemorial there have been facts established and theories propounded about education in general and learning in particular. This enormous body of research is varied in its scope and orientation.
Over the years, certain pedagogical theories and components of this research have become very acceptable in teacher training courses:
• theories relating to child development primarily from the works of Erik Erikson, Jean Piaget with Freud and Pavlov on the periphery
• theories relating to curriculum development ranging from integrated to concept-driven
• theories about teaching – learning elaborating on learning styles, differentiated instruction, assessment and evaluation
Educationists who learn about this research and established theories in their teacher training courses, find themselves, right at the beginning of their careers, abandoning them and many a times working in contradiction to them. For instance, there is plenty of research available to support differentiated instruction, yet when teachers enter the school where they should ideally be applying and furthering these theories, they find themselves planning and delivering instruction to a class as a whole.
This would not happen in case of other professions like medicine, law etc. Can you imagine a doctor abandoning what he learnt during his training as a doctor as soon as he begins his practice? Certainly not! But not only is it accepted but also expected for a teacher to leave all sound pedagogy that that he/she has learnt about and adopt the schools agenda which usually is narrowed down to test scores. School systems are designed to suffocate the application of these theories which slowly die a forced death by making teachers work in stark contrast with the intended outcome.
I wonder how would our students learning and teachers’ job satisfaction be affected if schools were created and organised on the basis of available research about teaching-learning and as hubs of furthering this research.
Tags: assessment, careers, differentiated instruction, Educationists, Erik Erikson, evaluation, Freud, Jean Piaget, learning styles, Pavlov, pedagogical theories, pedagogy, School systems, teacher, Teacher Training, training
Posted in Teacher Training | No Comments »
