viernes, 1 de febrero de 2019

February 4, 2019



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Kudos
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  • Kudos to Jon Nelson for filling in these past four weeks for Ryan Heft.  Jon did a great job jumping into the role and assisting with anything and everything that he could.  Thank you again Jon for being a goose!  

Article of the week: 

Guided Instruction ("We do it") 
by Douglas Fisher and Nancy Frey

Questioning to Check for Understanding

Most of us were introduced to the concept of open-ended and closed questions when we were in teacher preparation programs. We were taught that an open-ended question was likely to draw out a longer response than a closed one. By turning a closed question that can be answered with a specific piece of information ("What answer did you get for number 5?") to an open-ended one that allows for more than one response ("How did you get the answer for number 5?"), we can provoke more insightful commentary from students. But open-ended and closed questions describe student response formats. Although these are important considerations for bolstering engagement, they don't fully address the teacher's purpose for asking either question in the first place.
Checking for understanding is foundational to guided instruction, as the student's response provides the teacher with a decision-making point: do I need to further scaffold this learner's understanding? In the next chapters we'll explore how and when to scaffold, but for now let's stay on this point. At various places throughout a lesson, we need to check for understanding so we can plan for future instruction. These periodic checks allow us to determine the following:

  • What the learner knows
  • What the learner doesn't know
  • The extent to which a learner is linking background knowledge with newer concepts
  • Whether there are fundamental misconceptions that are getting in the way of understanding
A core assumption is that the things a learner says and does make perfect sense to the learner, based on what she knows and doesn't know at that moment in time. This is a big assumption, because as teachers we tend to be more comfortable with assessing the rightness or wrongness of an answer, as opposed to its source. Quite frankly, it's easier to simply evaluate whether the student was able to play a game Doug calls "Guess What's in the Teacher's Brain." Embracing an assumption of partial understanding is more difficult, especially because it demands rapid analysis, formulation of a hypothesis, and then creation of a plan for instructional response. In guided instruction, these decisions must occur in seconds in order to provide a prompt or cue.
In his book Blink, Malcolm Gladwell (2005) devotes a chapter to the concept of "thin slicing," the ability "to find patterns in situations and behavior on very narrow slices of experience" (p. 23). He notes that many professions have unique terms for this—in basketball it is called "court sense," and in the military it is referred to as coup d'oeil ("power of the glance"). In teaching, it's called instructional decision making. In many ways, this is the art and science of teaching in that it combines the knowledge that comes from closely observed learning events with the technical tools and research that we use daily in our classrooms. One without the other is not enough.
Much of the information that we gather during guided instruction comes in the form of questioning. It is important to note that the mere existence of a question mark doesn't automatically indicate that the teacher is checking for understanding. As we will describe in more detail throughout this book, it's the intent that matters. A cue or a prompt can be delivered in the form of a question, but it's still a cue or a prompt. However, when checking for understanding, we are posing a question for the purpose of figuring out what students know and don't know. Without the intent to analyze, hypothesize, and respond, the power of the question is unrealized.

Intention in Checking for Understanding

A variety of means are available for checking for understanding, including analysis of student products in written work, spoken language, projects, performances, and assessments (Fisher & Frey, 2007). In guided instruction, questioning is the predominant tool for determining what students know. It is important to recognize that what is done with the question is essential. Consider this exchange:
Teacher: What is a nocturnal animal?
Student: An animal that stays awake at night.
Teacher: Good. What is a diurnal animal?
We would argue that the teacher is quizzing, not questioning. In this case, the teacher is running through a list of technical vocabulary (nocturnal, diurnal) to determine how closely the student's answer matches the book definition. Contrast the preceding exchange with this scenario:
Teacher: What is a nocturnal animal?
Student: An animal that stays awake at night.
Teacher: Tell me more about that. Does a nocturnal animal have special characteristics?
Student: Well, it doesn't sleep a lot.
And so a misconception reveals itself. This student is making a completely reasonable answer, based on what he knows and doesn't know at this time, and incorrectly assumes that nocturnal animals are sleep-deprived. The teacher didn't teach this, but the student believes it nonetheless. It is the follow-up probe that makes the difference. The teacher's intent in using a question is to uncover, not test. And here's where the teacher uses his thin-slicing abilities to make his next instructional decision. He could say the following:
Teacher: I'm thinking of those pictures we saw of the great horned owl and the slow loris in the daytime and at night. Does your answer still work? [a prompt to activate background knowledge]
Alternatively, the teacher might say this:
Teacher: Let's take a look on page 35 and reread the second paragraph. Does the author agree or disagree with you? [a cue to shift the learner's attention to a source of information]
In both cases, the teacher considered what the student knew and did not know and followed up with a prompt or a cue to scaffold the student's understanding. The ability to do this is not innate—we do not believe that some people are "born" teachers. But too often we don't recognize where the learner might get stuck. There's even a name for this phenomenon. It's called the "expert blind spot," and it describes the inability of inexperienced educators to understand the stance of novice learners (their students) in learning a new concept (Nathan & Petrosino, 2003). In particular, experts tend to overestimate the relative ease of a task. That's actually good news for all of us involved in education, because we can turn that expertise into scaffolds for students. The ability to check for understanding, hypothesize, and then follow with a cue or a prompt can be learned through a combination of experience and purposeful attention.

Purposeful Attention to Misconceptions in Guided Instruction

Research on the expert blind spot contains advice on how to move beyond it, and it is no surprise that the advice rests on drawing purposeful attention to the misconception. When teachers are made aware of this phenomenon, and this is further coupled with developmental and pedagogical knowledge, the blind spot grows smaller (Kelley & Jacoby, 1996). This finding is consistent with what is known about the effect of misconceptions on the learning of children and adolescents. When the teacher anticipates the misconception and draws purposeful attention to it, accurate learning can occur (Bereiter & Scardamalia, 1992). Much of this process happens through guided instruction.
Misconceptions have been documented in all content areas but are especially dominant in mathematics and science. For example, many elementary students do not see the relationship between the source of light and the color of an object. Therefore, they do not understand that the appearance of a blue sky is due to the way the light is scattered through the process of dispersion. The underlying misconception is that white light is just one color—white— rather than consisting of a range of colors that travel at different frequencies. This misconception is usually addressed through labs involving glass prisms and rainbows, so that students can witness how the colors of white light can be refracted into the spectrum. Third grade teacher Ms. Wainwright had led her students through several such experiments, but she also knew that this misconception tends to persist. During guided instruction with her students, she had the following conversation. Notice how she uses questions to probe for a misconception:
Ms. Wainwright: We've been studying about light in science. Let's start by talking about what you know so far. I'll write it down on the chart. Rebekah, can you begin? Tell me one thing you know about light.
Rebekah: We learned that the light we see outside comes from the sun.
Ms. Wainwright [writing]: That's a great start. Tell me more about the sun. How would you describe it to someone?
Rebekah: Well, it's big and yellow, and it's in the sky.
Ms. Wainwright: That's an interesting description. Let's take that apart. You said it's yellow. How do you know that?
Rebekah: I can look up and I see it. You can't look at it for long 'cause it'll hurt your eyes.
Ms. Wainwright: Are there other ways you know the sun is yellow?
Rebekah: When you draw a sun you always make it yellow.
Ms. Wainwright: What if an astronaut were drawing a picture of the sun when she was in space? Would she draw it yellow?
Rebekah: Yep, 'cause that's what it looks like.
Ms. Wainwright: So even in space the sun is yellow?
Rebekah: Yep, yellow.
This short exchange unearthed exactly what Ms. Wainwright had anticipated— despite some good instruction, Rebekah persisted in believing that the sun itself was yellow, as opposed to understanding that it appears to be yellow due to the refraction of white light by Earth's atmosphere. Based on Rebekah's responses, as well as similar conversations with other learners, the teacher knew that she would need to do more direct instruction to dispel this misconception. Her next lesson would consist of photographs of the sun taken from Earth and from space, direct explanation about the misconception, and another lab designed to challenge students' reasoning by asking them to investigate why clouds appear to be white, not yellow. "I have to keep asking questions to check for their understanding," Ms. Wainwright later said, "but I'm not looking for them to regurgitate the information. When I ask questions that require them to explain and justify, I find out where their scientific knowledge ends and naïve understandings take over."

What Do You Do with Their Answers?

As Ms. Wainwright demonstrated, asking questions to check for understanding should do more than merely sort right answers from wrong ones. As a matter of intent, questions posed to check on student understanding should feed forward to modify future instruction (Fisher & Frey, 2009b). This is part of a multipronged approach to formative assessment that includes feeding up and feeding back. Feeding up occurs at the onset, with clearly established purposes for learning, including content and language objectives. These purposes are specific to the individual lesson and are not restatements of the standards, which are much broader and usually require multiple experiences. For instance, a content purpose in an 8th grade social studies lesson is to identify examples of religious and class discrimination against Irish workers in the first half of the 19th century, and a language purpose is to use three examples of evidence of such discrimination in a written summary.
The second component of a formative assessment system, feedback, is more familiar and consists of responses to student work. Many times feedback is written, but it can also be achieved verbally. It is important to recognize that the quality of the response affects what a student is able to do next. The ubiquitous "awk" scrawled in red pen in the margin of an essay doesn't provide constructive feedback for a student writer and instead merely critiques the sentence or idea construction as "awkward." Decidedly unhelpful comments like this end up in the trash can, leaving students frustrated with how to proceed and teachers bewildered by their students' unwillingness to make another attempt. Instead, a host of studies on the nature and effectiveness of feedback suggest that it should be—
  • Descriptive, rather than evaluative
  • Focused on the task, rather than the student
  • Improvement-oriented, rather than achievement-oriented (Hattie & Timperley, 2007)
The third element of a formative assessment system is feeding forward. Much of what the teacher does through guided instruction is intended to feed forward to modify future instruction. Some of this feeding forward must occur during subsequent lessons, as when Ms. Wainwright made plans for a new lesson on light based on tightly held misconceptions that persisted. In other cases, feeding forward happens more rapidly, as when the teacher directed his student's attention back to a passage in the book about nocturnal animals. In this last example, the questioning led to the use of a cue. Based on the student's response, he was provided with a cue that shifted his attention to an information source. If the student is then able to construct a correct response, the teacher can move on. If the child still does not realize that many nocturnal animals have unique characteristics such as large eyes that enable them to see in the dark, then the teacher reclaims cognitive control by offering further direct explanation and modeling (see Chapter 5).
Figure 2.1 illustrates a decision-making flowchart for making instructional decisions based on student responses. Questions within guided instruction are a springboard for further questions, prompts, and cues. When these scaffolds are insufficient, it signals to the teacher that further modeling is needed before the learning progression can continue. We recognize that real discussions are far more complex than the illustration suggests, and we are not suggesting that it is a map of classroom discourse. Rather, it is intended to illustrate the many decision points that occur during an exchange between a student and a knowledgeable teacher. These decisions occur in a split second, making the ability to thin-slice critical during guided instruction.

Figure 2.1. Instructional Decision-Making Tree


Source: Frey, N., & Fisher, D. (2010). Identifying instructional moves during guided learning. The Reading Teacher, 64(2). © 2010 by the International Reading Association. Used with permission.
Intent is the first element of questioning, and the purpose should be to determine what a student knows and doesn't know in order to make the next instructional move. You can see why the quality of the question that is posed is so important. A carelessly formed question from the teacher is more likely to result in a constrained response by the student. After all, it's not the student's job to figure out why you posed the question. Therefore, the next section examines the quality indicators of robust questions.
(To be continued next week...)

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Information/Reminders
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Overall reminders:  
  • Employee Portal and Ready Sub reminders as both steps need to be completed for all absences:  
    • The process for an absence is a two-step process.  It appears as though some are still forgetting to go to the employee portal and are going directly to Ready Sub.  Please remember to start with the employee portal and then move on to Ready Sub.
    • When you are directed to Ready Sub through the employee portal, you must still post your absence in Ready Sub.  Being directly linked to Ready Sub does not post your absence automatically.  It simply takes you to the portal where you must then post your absence.
    • We ask that all employees, even those who do not need a sub, to post their absence in Ready Sub.  Individuals who do not need a sub will simply indicate that in the system.  This is very important since we run a daily report from Ready Sub to know who is and isn’t in the building that day.  Head secretaries and administrators rely on this report to know who is out.
    • If you find yourself needing a substitute after 6:30 in the morning, we are asking that you post the absence in both the employee portal and Ready Sub prior to calling Deb Roanhaus at DO.  This might help to expedite the process of securing a sub.  We are finding it difficult to reach individuals in the morning, so posting an absence prior to calling may help.  If nothing else it is reaching a broader pool then our single phone call can reach when we are in a bit of a time crunch.  If it is not picked up, Deb will continue to work on securing a sub.
    • If you need any help with Ready Sub or have other questions, you can contact Teri Bryant (tbryant@basd.k12.wi.us).  She is willing to help anyone who needs assistance.
  • Reminder to Complete... School Safety Threat Reporting: 
    • Please disregard if you have taken this assessment.   
    • Wisconsin Act 143 requires that all school district employees complete the online training on the reporting of threats of school violence.  The DPI has developed the training and it is a powerpoint with some questions to be answered.  The training should take you less than 15 minutes to complete.  Here is the training link: https://media.dpi.wi.gov/sspw/av/school-violence/story_html5.html  
    • Most aides have already completed the training with Kathy Merlo on the last in-service day so if you did this training with Kathy you do not need to do it again.  If you did not do the training please do the online version.
    • After you have completed the training it will ask you where to send the email verifying your completion.  
    • If you have any questions please contact Jeanine or one of your colleagues that have completed the short training.
This week:  
  • Monday, February 4 - BLT Meeting from 2:40 - 3:30 in the large conference room.  
  • Tuesday, February 5 & 6 - PRA Meetings (User Group meetings with the architects)  
    • Click HERE to see the schedule again as to the times and location.  Meetings were tight on time last time so please be on time for your meeting!  
  • Tuesday, February 5 - Strings Festival @ BHS auditorium @ 6:30pm.  
  • Wednesday, February 6 - PLC in the library - focus will be on "We do it" portion of the GRR Model.  
  • Thursday, February 4 - Candygram sales will begin during lunch time!  
    • See Brad Ferstenou or Stephanie Rummler with any questions.  
  • Thursday, February 7 - Morning Assembly Schedule with 8th grade attending in the auditorium and 7th grade has extended advisory.  
    • Here is the Google Document for the Character Awards as we do not want to double up on any students.  Ideally you are also picking students who have not been student's of the week... looking to pick students who always do the right thing, might be your quiet leaders, etc.   
  • Friday, February 8 - Morning Assembly Schedule with 7th grade attending in the auditorium and 8th grade has extended advisory.  
  • Friday, February 8 - Snow Cone Sale during lunches!!!
  • Friday, February 8 - Snoco Dance from 6:00 - 8:00 here at Karcher.  
    • If you are willing to assist please let Stephanie Rummler and Ryan Heft know!  

Looking ahead:  
  • Monday, February 11 - iReady Training for our academic, special education, and interventionists.  Those listed first in the list below please secure a sub for the training (again)... sorry!
    • We will start at 8:10 in the 21st Century lab with 8th grade going first until 11:10.  Then 7th grade will start at 12:00 - 3:00.  Please be on time and have your sub plans set according to this schedule - 8th grade teachers please note, in your plans, where the subs should go after they are done with you.  They will all be taking lunch at 11:24 but then their 5th hour will start at 11:56 in _____ person's room.  
    • Here are the pairings for our subs:  
      • Sturdevant/Hancock
      • S. Rummler/Botsford
      • Geyso/Murphy
      • Jones/Tenhagen
      • Weis/Berezowitz
      • Schmidt/Ferstenou
      • K. Rummler/Smith
      • Stoughton/Jorgenson
      • Riggs/Varnes
        • Riggs.. we will have you attend with 7th in the afternoon
      • Fulton/Thate
      • Ebbers/Zeman
      • Newholm/Bekken
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    Pictures from the week
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    This about sums it up for this week!  












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