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The Learning-Focused Connections Newsletter is a weekly link to exemplary practice and ideas that will help you as an educator to increase achievement in your classroom and school. Some weeks there will be a mix of articles in the mailer, other weeks we will follow a theme. If there are questions you want answered, or strategies you want to know more about please let us know. We are all working with the same goal in mind, continuous improvement in student achievement.
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Distributed Summarizing's Impact on Progress
by Peggy Corbett
Looking back I have to wonder why I was always surprised when a test would reveal that my students had completely missed the boat. I mean, I asked all the right questions:
"Raise your hand if you don't understand."
"Is everybody with me? Yes? Good, then off we go!" And then I would hit the wall when tests were scored. Sound familiar?
The idea of formative assessments back in the day was to give a quiz and record the score. Our responsibility ended there for a very long time. The responsibility was the students: to study more/harder/longer/better - or not. In today's assessment culture, we no longer have that "luxury." Instead, we know now, despite our initial grumblings, that we do have a responsibility to not only take the "temperature" but to also address the underlying causes when we don't get a good reading. Formative assessments insure that we take stock of student progress in a way that immediately informs our instructional practice.
If we are willing to view the situation from the point of view of a student, we must admit that being found out early is preferable to being found out later. The principle that it is more important that a student learn than when he learns can only be realized when we know whether the student is learning. By making formative assessment a consistent practice in your classroom, you guarantee that if a student is lost, he's not so lost that he can't be recovered. If I allow my students to compress information while it is still in a digestible form, I can add more without worrying that he will reach a cognitive overload before the ideas take hold. If, however, I go on and on and on, building to a level of critical cognitive mass, I can almost be assured that one or more of my students will check out due to frustration.
The student who is near to my heart is the one who has no voice. This student often has ideas or answers but doesn't have the confidence or personality that makes speaking up comfortable. By allowing him to work in a pair, he is empowered to try his ideas on someone in the safety of the pair and, thus, gains the confidence to share when called on as a follow-up.
Oral summarizing through paired heads is a quick way to insure this processing. Teachers who are unaccustomed to pairs working together often try paired heads once or twice and then give up because it doesn't go well. This type of learning is like any other learned academic behavior: it must be taught as a routine just like other skills such as keeping an agenda, how to act in the cafeteria, or how to enter a classroom. It takes practice, practice, practice - for teachers and students. Given that it is in the top 5 strategies for impacting student achievement, it certainly seems to be a thinking routine worth developing.
Consider the following keys to success:
- Use pairs only (never more than 1 group of 3)
- Establish the norms (what are your expectations for noise level, what will your call back to attention be?) These must be taught and practiced.
- What is your accountability policy? How often will students share? In what way? (If you remember to always work in paired heads with a 1 and a 2 it's much easier. I might say, All 2's stand up. I quickly scan the room and I see that I want to hear from Bill (who is wearing a red t-shirt), so I say, "Everyone who is wearing red remain standing; everyone else sits down." The idea is that it may appear random, but seldom is. I can keep narrowing until all but 2 or 3 are sitting down and then I hear from 1 of them, or all of them. The important thing is that they always know I'll hear from someone so it keeps them on task.)
- Include some think-ink-share activities to give the students who think best through writing a chance to use their style.
- Plan your summarizing questions/activities. (What we plan for happens!)
New and veteran teachers are encouraged to begin building in distributed summarizing activities as a way of keeping your finger on the pulse of learning in your classrooms. For additional resources, see your Learning-Focused: Connecting Strategies Planning for Learning Notebook or the Catching Kids Up Book. |
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Question Out the Door
by Carol Brewer
"Question Out the Door" is similar to "Ticket Out the Door" for a summarizing strategy, but it is connected to test taking strategies. It is suggested to create two questions that are based on the focus of the lesson. For example, if you are teaching Main Idea, then create two Main Idea questions with the a,b,c,d multiple choice answers. The teacher will model the first question and the students will complete the second question with the same procedures that have been modeled through the "Think Aloud". This works very well to prepare students for their State Test. It should not be used everyday, but instead every once in a while. Another strategy to use is for the able students to create their own questions. This works well for the high achievers and they seem to be pleased when their questions are used. The following is a suggestion for "Question Out the Door":
The teacher would model the first question for the students.
Main Idea or Lesson Learned
1. Based on the selection, what is the theme of the story?
a. The Tortoise needs to exercise detail
b. The Hare should go to bed earlier detail
c. Slow and steady wins the race main idea
d. The Tortoise is faster than the Hare. detail
The students would work with the second question with the teacher checking for understanding.
2. What is the story mostly about?
a. A fast Hare
b. A slow Tortoise
c. A fast Hare and a slow Tortoise
d. A race between a Tortoise and a Hare
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The Ten Commandments of Learning-Focused
by Laurian Phillips
1. Thou shalt use thy collaborative pairs.
2. Thou shalt help students summarize thy work and thy thinking, also.
3. Thou shalt not wait until the end of thy lesson to summarize. Yea, thou shalt distribute thy summarizing throughout thy lesson.
4. Remember thy review days and allow students to prepare for them wholly.
5. Thou shalt honor the worthiness of using thy vocabulary in context.
6. Thou shalt extend thy students' thinking!
7. Thou shalt help thy students organize thoughts and ideas through the use of graphic organizers.
8. Thou shalt provide advance organizers to thy students and preview thy Student Learning Maps.
9. Thou shalt use mnemonics and other non-verbal representations to help thy students learn.
10. Thou shalt remember thy Learning-Focused training days even unto the days of thy retirement.
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The Writer's Block
 by Brenda Hill
Writing is an effective tool of communication and the goal is for students to be able to express thoughts, feelings, and ideas well in writing. Students write in a variety of ways for many purposes from different perspectives. As students begin to write for different audiences and for different purposes writing becomes a powerful learning tool - deepening understanding of content, aiding in memory and retention, reinforcing skills and concepts learned, and supporting reading and vocabulary development. Sometimes students are asked to write to learn - writing to inform - paper or essays connected to the content. These longer writing assignments are more formal and the audience is usually someone else. Other times students simply write a summary point statement or a brief paragraph about the subject that occurs as part of an acquisition lesson. These shorter writing assignments are embedded in content acquisition lessons and students are asked to write at the beginning, during, or at the end of the lesson. One example of a "beginning" writing assignment for a content lesson might be having students write prediction statements about a topic from a wordsplash. An example of a "during" writing assignment would be having student summarize their learning in one or two sentences up to that point in the lesson - summary point writing. Writing at the "end" of the lesson would have students use the graphic organizer to construct a brief paragraph to answer the lesson essential question.
As we plan for writing lessons based upon state standards we can greatly increase student achievement when we begin to think about students writing across the curriculum. According to D.B. Reaves in his book, Accountability in Action: A Blueprint for Learning Organization, "Teachers in successful 90/90/90 Schools placed a very high emphasis on informative writing. The benefits appear to be two-fold. First, students process information in a much clearer way, and second, teachers have the opportunity to gain rich and complex diagnostic information about students: an emphasis on writing improvement as a significant impact on student test scores in other disciplines."
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Past Connections Articles
Past Connections articles are available through the archive tool of this newsletter. Please click here to view these resources.
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Have an Idea for a Connections Article?
Email us at info@learningfocused.com with your suggestion. Please insert "newsletter article request" in the subject line.
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