November 19, 2018

KARCHER STAFF BLOG

2018-2019 Karcher Calendar

Facebook Page:  https://www.facebook.com/KarcherMiddleSchool/

BASD Staff Blog:  https://basdstaffnews.blogspot.com/

______________________________________________________________________________

Kudos

_____________________________________________________________________________________________________

• Kudos to Briana Varnes and the dance club team for their first performance this week!  Nice work!!!  
• What a great turn out for the 8th grade spagetti dinner fundraiser this past week for Outdoor Education!  Kudos to Mike Jones and all the rest of the 8th grade staff for all of your efforts and time to make it a successful night!  Thank you to Judy Heinz for also staying and assisting the staff as well... it is truly appreciated!  Even the Oelslager girls were excited to help clean the tables!  Nice work everyone!  
• Congrats to Zane Bale as some negotiating took place and he moved from part time to full time status for the district!  His time at Karcher will stay the same but he will increase some time at the high school.  Congrats Zane!  
• And welcome again to our music department Jessica Wagner!  Jessica is a student teacher with Rod Stoughton throughout term 2!  Enjoy your time as it will go fast!!!  

February 2018 | Volume 75 | Number 5 
Measuring What Matters Pages 14-20

Three Key Questions on Measuring Learning

Jay McTighe

To gauge different types of learning, we need a broader collection of measures, with a greater emphasis on authentic, performance-based projects.

Educators, policy makers, parents, and others interested in improving the way we measure learning in today's schools need to examine three essential questions: 1) What really matters in a contemporary education? 2) How should we assess those things that matter? 3) How might our assessments enhance learning that matters, not just measure it?

What Matters in a Contemporary Education?

Any consideration of educational measurement must begin with the desired outcomes to be measured. In our work on the Understanding by Design® framework, the late Grant Wiggins and I described four key types of educational goals—knowledge, basic skills, conceptual understanding, and long-term transfer goals. All of them are essential to a successful education in the 21st century (Wiggins & McTighe, 2011). While these goals are interrelated, their distinctions are important because each type requires different approaches to both teaching and assessment. Let's look at each in turn.

Knowledge

Knowledge goals specify what students should know—factual information (state capitals, multiplication tables), vocabulary terms, and basic concepts (climate, balance). The attainment of knowledge goals can be best gauged through objective test or quiz items and teacher questioning.

Basic Skills

Skill goals state what students should be able to do. Every subject area contains basic skills (addition, handwriting, drawing, dribbling a basketball) that are essential to building competency and mastery. Teachers can assess student proficiency in a particular skill through direct observation of a performance or by examination of an end product that required use of the skill. Unlike with assessments of knowledge, for which there is usually a single, "correct" answer, skill performances can be best tracked along a continuum of proficiency levels from novice to expert.

Understanding

Understanding goals refer to students' grasp of conceptual "big ideas." Such ideas are inherently abstract. They may be in the form of concepts (patriotism), principles (F=ma), themes (friendship), issues (government regulations), or processes (problem solving). Understanding in this context generally cannot be assessed through multiple-choice or fill-in-the-blank test items. Instead, students need to provide explanations, justify conclusions, and support answers with evidence. 

Long-Term Transfer

Long-term transfer goals refer to students' capacity to apply what they've learned to a new situation or different context. Transfer goals are process oriented; they specify what we want students to be able to do with their learning in the long run when confronted by new opportunities and challenges. They tend to be reflected in the anchor standards or framework practices in official academic standards, but they are often transdisciplinary in nature (encompassing complex skills like critical thinking and collabora-tion, or developmental Habits of Mind such as persistence and self-regulation).

Transfer abilities—or qualities inherent in them—are also increasingly valued in the 21st century workplace, in a way that they haven't needed to be in the past (see fig. 1) (National Association of Colleges and Employers, 2016; Darling-Hammond & Adamson, 2013). Indeed, it's not too much to say that the future belongs to those who can apply their learning effectively in new situations.

Transfer abilities can best be measured through authentic, performance-based tasks, with well-developed rubrics for evaluation.

How Should We Assess the Things That Matter?

Assessment is a process by which we make inferences about what students know, understand, and can do. To allow valid inferences to be drawn from the results, an assessment must align with, and provide an appropriate measure of, a given goal. Moreover, because all forms of assessment are susceptible to measurement error, our inferences are more dependable when we consider multiple sources of evidence.

Given that there are different types of learning goals, we need an associated variety of assessment types to gather valid evidence of learning. Think of assessment as analogous to photography. Like the results on a test, a picture can be informative; however, no single photo can provide a complete portrayal of a situation. To continue the analogy, what we need is a photo album of evidence on student learning, not a snapshot—a collection of multiple measures, appropriately aligned to different types of learning outcomes that matter.

This raises a vital question concerning the alignment between assessments and educational goals: Are we currently assessing everything that matters, or only those things that are easiest to test and grade? With respect to large-scale, standardized assessments, the answer is fairly obvious. For example, virtually all current standards in English language arts include listening and speaking skills, which are generally acknowledged as the foundations of literacy. Yet those skills are rarely, if ever, assessed on standardized tests. Similarly, most standardized tests have limited capacity to assess transfer goals, or related complex skills like scientific investigation, historical inquiry, research, argumentation, and creative thinking.

Now for a related question: If some outcomes that matter are slipping through the cracks of standardized testing, are we doing a better job of measuring all valued outcomes through classroom assessments? Studies of classroom assessments raise doubts (Frey & Schmidt, 2010). For one study, a district collected classroom assessments from all K–12 teachers in all subjects during a six-week period (Gibble, 2000). Of the total of 664 assessments collected, 20 percent were identified via a random sample for analysis by a committee of teachers and administrators. Here were two of their findings: 1) The majority of the assessments (75.5 percent) measured the lowest levels of cognition (levels I and II on Bloom's Taxonomy), and 2) assessment items were predominantly (80 percent) in multiple-choice, true-false, matching, or fill-in-the-blank formats.

Although this study is dated, its findings are consistent with patterns that I have observed more recently as "test prep" pressures result in classroom assessments that mimic the formats (generally selected- and brief-constructed-response) of state and national accountability tests (McTighe, 2017). Ask yourself: What would the results be if you replicated this study in your school or district today? Are any of your valued outcomes not being properly assessed?

Given the limitations of large-scale testing and the status of classroom assessments, what changes do we need to make to ensure that we are assessing outcomes that matter? What assessment photos do we need for a composite album of evidence of learning? Traditional types of assessments offer sufficient ways of measuring students' knowledge and basic skills. For example, we can use multiple-choice or fill-in-the-blank test items to gauge students' knowledge of historical or scientific facts. However, to properly assess conceptual understanding, long-term transfer, and other complex skills, we need greater use of authentic, performance-based measures in which students are asked to: 1) apply their learning to a new situation, and 2) explain their thinking, show their reasoning, or justify their conclusion.

Authentic tasks are like the game in athletics. While the players have to possess knowledge (the rules) and specific skills (dribbling), playing the game also involves conceptual understanding (game strategies) and transfer (using skills and strategies to advantage in particular game situations). Assessing what matters must include assessing performance in a "game" in addition to tests of requisite knowledge and skills.

Another dimension of making sure we are assessing things that matter shifts the spotlight from educators to students. A photo album approach to assessment can enable learners to contribute their own personal "photos" as evidence of their accomplishments. They can be invited to propose ways of showing that they are meeting academic standards. Students and parents can be asked to contribute evidence of creativity, persistence, or community contributions accomplished outside of the school day. After all, isn't that what transfer means? Maintaining high standards does not require standardization of all measures.

Involving learners in creating the assessment portfolio builds students' capacity for self-assessment. The ability to honestly appraise one's performance against established criteria and performance standards is a life-long skill and a sign of intellectual maturity.

How Might Assessments Serve Learning?

Which leads us to our third big question: How might assessments become more integral to learning, as opposed to just evaluating it? To say that assessment should serve learning is a nice slogan, but what exactly does it mean? Over the years, Wiggins and I conducted a workshop exercise to explore this question. We asked participants to think of a highly effective learning experience and then identify ways in which the associated assessments contributed to that learning. The responses to the exercise have always been remarkably similar across groups and provide a veritable blueprint to guide teachers' classroom assessment practices. Figure 2 offers a representative list of assessment characteristics that we found contribute to deep and effective learning (McTighe, 2013).

This list explains why I am an advocate for expanding the use of authentic tasks and projects in schools. Such assessments offer more than just another way to measure student achievement. Like the game in sports or the play in theater, authentic performances are motivating to learners. They give relevance and purpose to learning, and they underscore the need for practice.

Authentic tasks also influence teaching. Coaches recognize that their job is not to simply "cover" the playbook play-by-play and teach individual skills. They understand that knowledge and skills are in service of larger ends, and that their role is to prepare players for authentic transfer performance in the game. Performance-oriented teachers in all subjects understand this role as well.

Measuring What We Value

How we answer the three questions posed in this article has significant consequences for educational measurement, instructional practices, and ultimately, student learning. The outcomes we choose to measure, as well as the methods of assessment we use, signal to students, parents, and others what matters. If we claim to value critical thinking, creative problem solving, oral communication, and the ability to work effectively in groups, then we need to teach and assess those outcomes. Otherwise, students will quickly get the message that these goals don't really count. If our assessments consist primarily of "single-correct answer" items, we validate rote learning and formulaic responses.

While there is still a place for traditional measures of knowledge and skills in an assessment photo album, greater attention must be given to gathering evidence of authentic student work through performance tasks and projects. By collecting authentic student work samples in digital portfolios, students can compile a literal "album" of growth and evidence of genuine achievements over their school career. As Wiggins (1998) opined many years ago, "Students should graduate with a resume of accomplishments, not just a transcript of 'seat time' and a GPA." It's time to act on this idea.

Of course, form follows function. The integration of multiple assessment measures, including expanded use of authentic, performance-based assessments, requires major shifts in school structures, including in grading practices and scheduling. Teachers will need time to collaborate on assessment task design, within and across subject areas (especially because many authentic tasks can be naturally interdisciplinary). To make the most of performance-based assessments, teachers will also need built-in opportunities to meet in professional learning communities to examine the student work resulting from those tasks (McTighe, 2008). These activities cannot be properly accomplished during a 30-minute team planning block or during an after-school meeting.

But we know the importance of identifying learning goals that matter, of determining ways to assess all of our valued outcomes, and of designing assessments in ways that can be integrated with learning. What's needed in most schools is the will and a systematic plan to do so.

______________________________________________________________________________

Information/Reminders

__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

• Ready Sub Information (this was the email shared with staff from the DO)
• This is just a reminder that if you find yourself unable to come to work in the morning after 6:30, please do not post the absence in Ready Sub.  Please call Deb Roanhaus at the district office.  She will then work to secure a sub for that day.  This is the best way for us to ensure we will have someone in the classroom.  Subs know this is our process and wait to hear from Deb on these late postings.  
• The number to call the district office is 262-763-0210.
• Referendum Information:  
• PRA Architects is the firm the district is using for the projects.  There will be two "User Group" meetings in regard to the construction of the new middle school.  The first meeting will be the project manager and designer from PRA coming to meet with department or grade level teams on December 11 and December 12.  Each group will meet with them once over the two day span for 45-50 minutes. 
• I am working on a schedule and will get that information out to everyone the week after Thanksgiving.  
• During this meeting time what is important to remember is the difference between need and want when discussing.  Their lens is focusing on curriculum and instructional needs not on individual staff needs as this building will be used for 50+ years... so be mindful of that when discussing with them.  
• The next User Group meeting will then be in late January or early February where groups will see more of an actual design/layout of the building.  
• Should be a fun process!  

November 19 and 20:  

• Monday/Tuesday - Extended Advisory (no iTime)  
• Just a reminder... on Tuesday students will be able to have their free ice cream during lunch for those that participated in the Aramark Survey on November 12. 
• Monday, November 19 - District K-5 Literacy Committee Meeting 
• Tuesday, November 20 - KCB Turkey Hunting in the Gym!  
• Students will be able to go to the gym over the lunch period and use KCBs to "hunt" for a turkey!  Student Council did a GREAT job working on making the costumes and it will be a fun activity for our students!!!  

November 26 - 30:  

• Throughout the whole week... PE and ALL adjustments
• Hans Block and Jon Nelson are wanting to try something different with their health unit and have all students A, B, & C at the same time throughout the week.  They will be using the Auditorium and 21st Century lab spaces throughout the week.  Therefore... A, B, C students will not be in ALL that week.  There will still be students in ALL as we have our resource and study support students still in the ALL setting... those in ALL will just see less students that week.  
• If you have questions please ask Hans Block or Jon Nelson!  
• Monday, November 26 - District MTSS Committee Meeting from 3:45 - 5:15 in the Karcher library.  
• Tuesday, November 27 - Special Education Department Meeting from 2:40 - 3:15 in the small conference room.  
• Wednesday, November 28 - Jon Nelson admin for the day.   
• The district admin team will be attending a conference together, focusing on our Big Three.  
• Therefore, Jon Nelson will be covering any disciplinary needs within the building and Amanda Thate will also be available to help Jon if needed.  As in the past, any time we are out of the building we make arrangements to have other administrators (ex: high school or district office) assist or we pull teaching staff from the building, such as Jon Nelson.
• Thank you Jon and Amanda for assisting!
• Wednesday, November 28 - This PLC is a TWT (teacher work time) PLC!  
• Thursday, November 29 - Orchestra field trip to Chicago Symphony from 8:00 to about 1:30.  
• See Dustan Eckmann with any questions!

Pictures from the week!

Students in Geyso's class identifying strong elaboration within a mentor text.  

Students in choir focusing on a few new pieces of music.

Students in band self-assessing and determining which measures they need to focus on and why for during their time as an ensemble that day!  

Students in Mr. Ferstenou's class competing to break a hieroglyphic code first!

Students witnessing the mummification process with Ferstenou using a Teddy Bear.  

Burlington Boys vs Burlington Boys!

First performance for the Dance Club this year - coached by Briana Varnes!

What a successful spaghetti dinner for the 8th grade Outdoor Education fundraiser!  This year was the most tickets ever sold!!!

Student Council/Leadership JAM Conference!

November 12, 2018

KARCHER STAFF BLOG

2018-2019 Karcher Calendar

Facebook Page:  https://www.facebook.com/KarcherMiddleSchool/

BASD Staff Blog:  https://basdstaffnews.blogspot.com/

______________________________________________________________________________

Kudos

_____________________________________________________________________________________________________

• Kudos to the district on passing the referendum!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!  The initial planning stages will begin soon and the plan is to meet with department teams during the process to talk about the design, etc.  When I know more I will share more :)  
• Kudos to a great first term!  I cannot believe I just said that!  Term 1 is already over!  Thank you all for your efforts in assisting students with feeling safe and secure at school.  For being part of the learning community at Karcher.  
• Thank you to Jack Schmidt and Stephanie Rummler for lining up the guest speaker, Andrew Sireno (high school math teacher) who spoke to students on Thursday this past week about his experience in the US Army and his time over in Iraq and Afghanistan.  What a powerful message he gave and to have one of our own staff members share... it was a great day!  Thanks to Andrew Sireno for his candid and open conversation with students as well.  
• Kudos to 8th grade for two successful trips to Madison this week!  
• Kudos to our academic, special education teachers, and interventionists for a great transition to using our iReady data to develop and form targeted instructional groups during iTime.  When walking around it was great to see the use of the small groups (strategy groups) within the classroom.  Thank you all for taking iTime seriously as this is our time to support students at their skill level.  This is such an important time for students and I truly applaud your efforts.  
• Please welcome Zane Bale to our staff!  Zane has been hired as our new ESL teacher and will be at Karcher from the start of iTime through 2nd hour.  He will be in room 25 in the 7th grade hall during iTime and 1st hour and then will transition to the ALL area in the ULab during 2nd hour.  
• We made some schedule changes for some of our students in order to maximize and meet the needs of our ESL students.  All of the students have been given their new schedules and families have been contacted.  They will start working with Zane on Monday!  
• Welcome to the team Zane!!!  Everyone is more than happy to assist you with your transition!
• After 2nd hour Zane will be going to the high school to assist with our ESL needs at the high school as well.  
• Congrats to our KMS Wrestling team who took first place at the Forest Park Invite this past weekend!!!
• And... here are two pictures of the newest addition to the Parr family... Maddox joins Ashley, Josh, and proud big brother Jameson!  Congrats again to Ashley and her family.  

Formative Assessment Action Plan

by Nancy Frey and Douglas Fisher

Table of Contents

Chapter 1. Creating a Formative Assessment System

"I don't know how you're going to learn this, but it's on the test," said the professor of a graduate class on neuroanatomy that Doug was taking.

The teacher's words clearly articulated one perspective about education: Students should study and learn the content assigned to them. Her statement suggested that the teacher's job is to provide information and the students' job is to learn it, whatever way they can. When his teacher implied that the responsibility for learning rested solely on the students, Doug's confidence plummeted. Having looked at intricate pictures of the human brain, Doug was already questioning how he was going to learn this information. Now his teacher was telling him that she, too, didn't know how he (or any other student in the class) would learn it.

Understand that Doug was highly motivated to learn this content, and understand that his teacher was armed with the latest technology and instructional methods. The teacher was caring and passionate about her subject area, and, further, she had clearly communicated her high expectations at the outset of the course and summarized information weekly. Were these measures enough to ensure that Doug, and the other members of the class, reached high levels of understanding? Simply put, no. Even though high-quality instruction, innovative technology, motivation, high expectations, and passion are important in the teaching and learning process, they are not sufficient to ensure that learning occurs.

What was missing from this scenario—and from the entire class experience— was a formative assessment system. The teacher needed to establish learning goals, check for understanding, provide feedback, and then align future instruction with the students' performance. She needed an instructional framework that allowed her to feed-forward, not just provide feedback.

A Formative Assessment System

Feedback, when used as part of a formative assessment system, is a powerful way to improve student achievement. Feedback by itself, though, is less useful. As John Hattie and Helen Timperley note, "Feedback has no effect in a vacuum; to be powerful in its effect, there must be a learning context to which feedback is addressed" (2007, p. 82).

Hattie and Timperley propose a formative assessment system that has three components: feed-up, feedback, and feed-forward (see Figure 1.1). Feed-up ensures that students understand the purpose of the assignment, task, or lesson, including how they will be assessed. Feedback provides students with information about their successes and needs. Feed-forward guides student learning based on performance data. All three are required if students are to learn at high levels. Each of these three components has a guiding question for teachers and students:

• Where am I going? (feed-up)
• How am I doing? (feedback)
• Where am I going next? (feed-forward)

Imagine Doug's teacher establishing the purpose for one of her classes, perhaps something like this: To use cytoarchitecture to identify locations in the cerebral cortex. She might then check for understanding, maybe through an audience response system, and provide individuals and the class with feedback. For example, she might ask, "Do the various regions of the brain contain the same number of cellular levels?" This dichotomous question has an answer (yes), and students would receive feedback about whether they had answered the question correctly. Based on the number of correct and incorrect responses, the teacher could decide what to feed-forward. The performance data from the class might suggest that the teacher needs to provide additional information and instruction to the whole class. Alternatively, the data might suggest that the teacher needs to ask specific students to elaborate on their answers so that she can determine the source of their misunderstanding. Then again, the data might suggest that the class has a good grasp on this content and is ready to move on.

Figure 1.1. A Formative Assessment System

Source: From Visible learning: A synthesis of over 800 meta-analyses relating to achievement (p. 176), by J. Hattie, 2009, New York: Routledge. Copyright 2009 by Routledge. Adapted with permission.

When all three components of a formative assessment system are present, there is a give-and-take between teachers and students that facilitates learning. The absence of any one component places learning at risk. For example, when students do not understand the purpose of a lesson (feed-up), they are unlikely to demonstrate their best effort. Without a clear purpose, students are not motivated and do not see the relevance of the content they're expected to master. When students are not assessed or do not receive assessment results (feedback), they are unsure about their performance and assume that they are doing just fine. They are unlikely to make mid-course corrections in their learning processes and understanding. When teachers fail to plan instruction based on student performance (feed-forward), misconceptions are reinforced, errors go unaddressed, and gaps in knowledge persist. Teachers march through their pacing guides and continue to "teach" while students passively observe. Unfortunately, when this is the case, teachers remain oblivious to the lack of real learning their students are doing.

Feedback Alone Is Not Enough

We have argued that formative assessment is a system with three inter-related components and that no one component alone is sufficient to ensure student learning. We want to take that one step further and focus on the ways in which feedback by itself is problematic. We have already noted that feedback should not be used in a vacuum. In part, this is because feedback is external to the learner; it is "external regulation," meaning that a student is responding because of something happening to him or her from the outside, rather than responding intrinsically or internally (Ryan & Deci, 2000). Although students may occasionally use external feedback in their internal regulations, it takes more than feedback to ensure that internal regulation occurs.

External regulation is not the only reason that isolated feedback is ineffective. Another reason is that it transfers responsibility for further learning and performance improvement back to the learner. Consider the ubiquitous research paper. Students typically work on these projects for an extended length of time, maybe even getting peer editing and feedback. Finally, the due date arrives, and the teacher takes the stack of papers home to grade. Some days later, the papers are returned with feedback. What do students do with this feedback? Anyone who's been in school knows that students either recycle the paper or, if required, make the noted changes and resubmit the paper for another round of review. The teacher has likely spent a great deal of time writing comments, but this time seems wasted when students throw away their work or simply correct the mistakes the teacher identified for them. They haven't really learned from their mistakes.

The problem bears repeating. Feedback reassigns responsibility back to the learner. Think of a recent project on which you have received feedback. After you received the feedback, did you realize that it was, once again, up to you to figure out the next steps? Were you frustrated with this experience? Did you say to yourself, "Now I have to create another one, only to be judged again? Why can't she just tell me what she wants?" If this has happened to you, you've experienced the abrupt shift of responsibility that we're talking about.

This is not to say that we don't want students to assume increasing responsibility; we do. It's just that increasing responsibility should be planned, based on student confidence and competence. We don't want students to suddenly be responsible for the first time when they make mistakes. Rather, a sophisticated formative assessment system built on a solid instructional framework should be in place from the beginning.

The Gradual Release of Responsibility Framework

A formative assessment system is only as good as the instructional framework on which it rests. No formative assessment system can compensate for poor instruction. Neither does simply having an instructional framework ensure that students will learn; both a framework and a system are required. The instructional framework we recommend is based on a gradual release of responsibility from teachers to students (Fisher & Frey, 2008a; Pearson & Gallagher, 1983) and includes five distinct components (see Figure 1.2).

Figure 1.2. Gradual Release of Responsibility

Source: From Better learning through structured teaching: A framework for the gradual release of responsibility (p. 4), by D. Fisher and N. Frey, 2008, Alexandria, VA: ASCD. Copyright 2008 by ASCD. Reprinted with permission.

Establishing Purpose

Every lesson must have an established purpose. This purpose can be in the form of a goal or objective, provided that the students know what that goal or objective is. The established purpose can have different components, such as content versus language (which will be more fully addressed in Chapter 2). Establishing purpose is important for many reasons, including alerting students to important information and keeping the teacher from getting off topic by discussing tangential information. In a formative assessment system, the purpose drives both feedback and feed-forward. Most people agree that it's not fair to assess or test students on things that haven't been taught. Sometimes students don't get the purpose of the lesson, and, in those cases, it's not fair to assess students on things that haven't been clearly established as important.

Consider these two examples. In one classroom, the teacher has students working on projects, but they don't know why or what is expected of them. There is no learning goal or purpose. In this class, the feedback students receive may be meaningless. In another classroom, the teacher has students working on projects with a clearly communicated purpose: to understand how sonar is used to determine water depths. When the teacher checks for understanding, the feedback is aligned with this purpose and the teacher can provide additional instruction to students who make errors, feeding forward until they understand the content.

Teacher Modeling

School is more than a pile of discrete facts that students have to memorize; it's about thinking, questioning, and reflecting. As apprentices, students need examples of the kinds of thinking that experts do in order to begin to approximate those habits of mind. Thinking is a complex cognitive process that is largely invisible. To make it visible, teachers model through a think-aloud in which they "open up their minds" and let students see how they go about solving the various problems of school, from quadratic equations to decoding a word. As Gerald Duffy points out, "The only way to model thinking is to talk about how to do it. That is, we provide a verbal description of the thinking one does or, more accurately, an approximation of the thinking involved" (2003, p. 11).

In a formative assessment system, teacher modeling serves to highlight the processes that students should use to complete tasks and assignments. It's less about the specific content and more about the ways in which experts in different disciplines go about their work. As we will explore in greater detail, formative assessment systems require attention to more than the correct response. Feedback and feed-forward also focus on the processes that students use as learners and thinkers, as well as their self-regulation and self-monitoring. Teacher modeling, through think-alouds, can provide students with examples of "self-generated thoughts, feelings, and actions that are planned and cyclically adapted to the attainment of personal goals" (Zimmerman, 2000, p. 14) such that students are responding to the feedback and future instruction they receive about learning.

Guided Instruction

In each lesson, the teacher must guide students toward increased understanding. This happens through the systematic use of questions, prompts, and cues. In this phase, questions are used to check for understanding. When a student's response indicates a misconception or an error, the teacher prompts the student. Prompts are cognitive or metacognitive and focus on getting the learner to think. If prompts fail to resolve the misconception or error, the teacher provides a cue. Cues shift the learner's attention to a resource that may help. As we will see in greater detail in Chapter 5, guided instruction is difficult to do in a whole-class format and works better in addressing the needs individual students present as they learn.

In a formative assessment system, guided instruction is an opportune time to provide students with feedback while also providing additional instruction. In this way, guided instruction plays a pivotal role in a formative assessment system as teachers feed-forward instruction based on real-time student responses. Consider the following exchange between a teacher and a small group of students having difficulty with the concept of writing mathematical sentences as inequalities.

Teacher: Tell me more about your answer. Read to me what you've written.

Alexis: The sentence says "Twenty minus the product of four and a number x is less than four." [20 - 4x < 4]

Teacher: Yes, it does. So what did your group write on the chart paper?

Brandon: Right here. [points]

Teacher: Can you read that to me? Not from the projector but from your chart paper?

Justin: We wrote twenty minus four plus x is less than four. [20 - 4 + x < 4]

Teacher: Did that sound the same as when Alexis read it?

All: Yeah?

Teacher: Think about the word product.

Alexis: That's to multiply.

Justin: But we didn't multiply.

Brandon: Where do we multiply?

Alexis: Maybe right here? [points to the minus sign]

Teacher: Be careful. You might want to read it again.

Alexis: Twenty minus the product of four and a number x is less than four. Oh, wait, first we have to write 20 and then minus.

Justin: Then it says product, so we have to multiply. But you can't have multiply next to minus.

Teacher: [Cups her hands around the words "the product of four and a number x."]

Brandon: Wait. Look. It's 4x, not minus four plus x.

Alexis: Oh, it's 20 - 4x < 4. That's right, huh?

Justin: It is, now read it again. It's just like the sentence up there. [points to projected problem set]

This brief exchange allows the teacher to prompt and cue such that students experience success and complete the task. Will they need additional instruction? Probably. That's what formative assessment systems are all about: reducing discrepancies between current understandings and a desired goal (Hattie, 2009). Feedback alone would probably not have resulted in new understanding.

Productive Group Work

Though students stand to learn a lot from and with their teachers, they are unlikely to consolidate that understanding unless they also work alongside peers in creating and producing something. Importantly, creating is now considered the highest-order thinking task in the Bloom's taxonomy revised for the 21st century (see Figure 1.3). Creating something requires that students use their prior knowledge in new ways and that they rally resources to complete the task. As Matthew Crawford argues in Shop Class as Soulcraft (2009), thinking should not be separated from doing. It is the doing that solidifies understanding. Of course, educators have known this for a long time, but group work got a bad reputation because we have all experienced bad examples of this good idea. How many times have we been assigned to a group, just to do all of the work and watch others share the credit for it? That's not the productive group work we're talking about, nor is it the cooperative learning that David Johnson and Roger Johnson (1999) envisioned. The key to productive group work is individual accountability. Each member of the group must produce something based on the group's interaction. It is when students work alongside their peers that they interact, using academic language and argumentation skills.

Figure 1.3. Bloom's Taxonomy in the 21st Century

Source: From Guided instruction. How to develop confident and successful learners (p. 11), by D. Fisher and N. Frey, 2010, Alexandria, VA: ASCD. Copyright 2010 by ASCD. Reprinted with permission.

Figure 1.4 contains an example of a product from a productive group work task in a government class. The example is one of the products from the group; each student produced his or her own notes. In this case, students were reading a text about the importance of writing letters to elected officials. Each student took notes about the reading in the upper left quadrant of the conversation roundtable. Then, as each member of the group discussed the reading, the other members took notes in a corresponding quadrant. When the group completed its reading and discussion, each person wrote a single-sentence summary in the middle of the paper.

Figure 1.4. Conversational Roundtable

In a formative assessment system, the work students create during a productive group session serves as excellent fodder for checking understanding. The instructor reviews these work products against the lesson's purpose to determine which students need additional instruction (as will be described in the subsequent chapters of this book). For example, even a quick review of Eric's conversation roundtable suggests that he understands this content and that the group had a very interesting conversation while creating notes. Following this review, the teacher modeled his own search for his elected officials, examined the officials' perspectives on specific issues, and then chose a topic on which to write a letter to an elected official.

Independent Tasks

The goal of education is to produce lifelong learners who can independently access and use information. Thus, each lesson must include opportunities for students to apply what they have learned on their own. Both in-class and out-of-class independent tasks provide students with opportunities to apply what they have learned.

The key to effective independent work lies in timing. Independent work should be used when students have demonstrated some level of success with content in the presence of their teacher and peers. Here's what doesn't work: homework assigned just after students have been introduced to content. If, for example, students were just introduced to methods for calculating the slope of a line or adding fractions, it is probably best not to assign homework on that content on the same day—because that homework is premature in this instructional cycle. It's not that homework is bad or evil; it's just that it must come when students are ready. In a formative assessment system, independent work allows for practice and application. It can also serve as a review for determining if students have grasped the prerequisite content or if additional instruction is necessary.

The components of a gradual release of responsibility model do not have to occur in a specific order to be effective. Take, for example, a lesson in which the teacher starts with students independently writing a journal entry in response to the question "How are we connected to our environment?" When the timer rings, the teacher has students work in triads to create a visual representation of their collective ideas. As part of this productive group work, each member of the group writes in a different color so the teacher can track each student's contributions. As the groups work, the teacher meets with small groups for guided instruction, asking questions and then prompting and cueing their responses. After meeting with several groups, the teacher identifies an area of need and gains students' attention. In this think-aloud, the teacher models his or her understanding of the word connected and the various ways that things can be connected, both physically and metaphorically. The teacher then establishes the purpose of the lesson and invites students to return to their groups and complete their charts, taking into account the additional information provided.

Again, the order of components is not important. What is important is that the teacher has an instructional framework that allows him or her to identify instructional needs, provide students with feedback, and plan appropriate instruction.

Looking Back, Looking Forward

We've introduced a system for formative assessment that provides teachers with a way to take action on student performance data. This system includes feed-up, feedback, and feed-forward, such that students understand a lesson's purpose and goal, are given information about their successes and needs, and experience high-quality instruction that closes the gap between what they know and can do and what is expected of them.

We do know that there is more information collected about students than ever before and that most of it is not used to make instructional decisions— probably because teachers spend too much time on student feedback and not enough time on feed-up and feed-forward. As we have noted, an exclusive focus on feedback is ineffective because it transfers the responsibility back to students exactly when they are struggling. Instead, we need an instructional framework that allows us to use performance data to make future instructional decisions. Our instructional framework, based on the gradual release of responsibility, provides an intentional way for teachers to increase student responsibility at appropriate times and reassume responsibility as needed.

In the next chapter, we turn our attention to the first part of the system— feed-up. We will explore the ways in which a lesson's purpose can be established and why a clearly communicated purpose is important. We will also investigate the role that motivation plays in student learning as well as how goal-setting can ensure that students become intrinsically motivated and exhibit internal regulation of their learning.

______________________________________________________________________________

Information/Reminders

__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

• Monday, November 12 - Extended Advisory 
• Please have students take the Aramark survey during advisory.  Ryan put the needed link right into the morning announcements.  All students would enter the same link into their chromebooks to complete the survey.  
• Students who complete the survey will receive an ice cream slip to get a free ice cream on November 20th at lunch!  
• Please count the number of students who completed the survey during advisory and email that number to Ryan.  Subject the email:  Food Survey
• Then... it is up to you if you keep the ice cream slips for them and pass them out to those that took the survey on the 20th?  Or if you give them the slips on Monday the 12th and they hold on to them... up to you!  
• Monday, November 12 - Math teachers from Pewaukee Middle School will be coming to observe and learn from Patti Tenhagen and Grace Jorgenson in the morning on Monday as they are working to also infuse mini lessons and strategy groups into their instructional practices.  So awesome to have teachers collaborating with teachers from another district!  
• Monday, November 12 - District Essential Skills Committee in our Karcher library from 3:45 - 5:15 
• Tuesday, November 13 - Special Education department meeting 
• Small conference room 2:40 - 3:15
• Wednesday, November 14 - District Inservice day.  
• 8:00 - 12:00 will be time to work on Essential Skills.  We will all meet in the library and work on our Essential Skills in the library.  We want to be together as we have a few things we want to go over as a group and have the ability to learn from each other throughout the morning time.  
• 1:00 - 4:00 will be teacher work time (TWT)  
• Friday, November 16 - Student Council/Leadership Students - JAM Leadership Conference

Looking ahead... 

• Friday, November 30 - Mark your calendars for the Karcher Holiday Party @ Bubba's Brickyard starting right after school!   
• Appetizers will be provided through the Sunshine Dues!
• Please RSVP the number attending to Barb Berezowitz to assist with food count by November 23.  
• This is an adult only event. You are welcome to bring your significant other or close friend!  
• Hope to see everyone there!

Pictures from the week!  

Students in iTime with Suzanne Dunbar and Karen Gerold.  

Students in iTime with Kailee Smith.  

Students in iTime with Ellen Murphy.  

Students in iTime with Brad Ferstenou...

Katherine Botsford's iTime...

Thursday's presentation in 8th grade Social Studies with Andrew Sireno!

Students in Kailee Smith's class working on adding the setting or actions to their dialogue within their writing.  

 Kailee Smith pulling a strategy group during her ELA class to focus in on locating dialogue within student's writing.  

Kailee Smith pulling students to the front for a mini lesson showing how she expanded her writing around dialogue by adding the setting or actions.  

Students discussing and providing feedback about each other's writing in Kailee's class.  

Donna Sturdevant's iTime group!

8th grade trip to Madison!

TSID math group during iTime!

Students in Patti Tenhagen's math class working collaboratively during the "You do it together" portion of the lesson while she pulled strategy groups.