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Differentiation Based on Pre-assessment

I created a short quiz desgned to provide information about my students' abilites. The skills I targeted were punctuation, grammar, author's task, purpose, and audience, and vocabulary acquisition and use.

How-to Essay Unit PRE-ASSESSMENT

I work in Asia with ELL students, so I wanted to identify the students who are significantly below grade level with the easiest questions.

At our school, many students who are no longer classified as ELLs remain below grade level in ELA. The questions about paragraph structure were aimed at these students, as well as the questions on author's task, purpose, and audience.

Question 7 was intended to tease out the highest-achieving 10% or so of the class. Students who can both spontaneously define synonym and recall a synonym for task will be a significant minority in this population.

Flow chart showing diffferentiation strategies based on quiz results

Formative Assessment

This post is about planning formative assessments based on learning objectives. Formative assessments shape instruction by helping teachers check student understanding. They can be quite simple and teachers might choose to incorporate more than one in a lesson.

It helped me to think of my formative assessments as part of a lesson. The lesson below would be a 90 minute English Language Arts block, grades 4-6.

Learning Objective: Students will be able to identify author’s purpose in a literary or informational text.

• Materials: 4-5 short texts.Try to let your selections reflect the variety of fiction and nonfiction: a folktale, a poem, an essay, an article.
• Venn diagram printouts

Lesson: Jigsaw. Students are in small groups. Each group gets a different  short text. Tell students each group is going to try to identify why the person who wrote the text did so, in other words, the author’s purpose. Write author’s purpose on the board. Formative Assessment 1 - Check for understanding by asking the author's purpose in familiar books and stories. Have students individually complete a Venn diagram comparing reasons for writing the text they are about to read, in comparison with possible reasons for writing another book or text they have encountered recently. They can complete this during the class and hand it in at the end as their exit ticket.

Allow ample time for students to read the texts carefully. When the groups report back, question them as to what strategies they used to identify  the author’s purpose. Write How to Tell your Author’s Purpose on poster paper and have students come up and fill in the chart when they give a correct answer.

Formative Assessment 2 - On scratch paper, ask each group to brainstorm 3 DOs and 3 DON’Ts for identifying author’s purpose. Example of student response: DO look at the type of writing it is, look at the kinds of details included, and think about what the writer is trying to say. DON’T be too general, take things out of context, or just look at the pictures.

Release students to Daily 5/independent reading. Formative Assessment 3 - When there are 15-20 minutes remaining, ask students to identify the author’s reason for writing what they read today, and why they think so, in their writing journal.

Briefly wrap up by having 2-3 students share from their journals. Discuss author’s purpose as a class.

Remind students to complete their Venn diagrams as their exit ticket.

Understanding and Applying Standards

I must admit I was previously confused about what standards are for and how educators use them. We use the Common Core State Standards at the school where I work, integrating them with our PYP curriculum framework. I didn't usually use them in my lesson planning as my students aren't at grade level in English and I wasn't familiar enough with the standards to want to go back and find a relevant one from an earlier grade level. If I was asked to include a standard in my lesson plan, I would simply search for a standard that seemed to match the lesson I had already planned, and paste it into my lesson plan.

Unpacking Standards

Now I understand how standards are used for goal-based planning. The first stop is breaking the standard down into more useful chunks: skills and big ideas. The nouns in the standard help us identify the big ideas, while the verbs tell us the skills students will need to meet the standard. For example, in this grade 4 reading standard, we can see that students will need to refer, explain, and infer. From the nouns: text, details, examples, inferences, we can figure our big idea is going to be something about how a text is organized logically-how details and examples are used to support larger ideas.

CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RL.4.1
Refer to details and examples in a text when explaining what the text says explicitly and when drawing inferences from the text.

Planning through Backwards Mapping

These skills and big ideas provide objectives for student success in a unit planned around this standard. Working backwards, the teacher can then plan lessons and assessments designed to help students reach the objectives. For one example, we can see that in order to develop the skill of making inferences, students will need to be able to connect ideas within and across texts. Now we have more specific skills to teach and assess.

SMART Objectives

To ensure that our objectives are serving our students, we try to make them Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Targeted.  SMART objectives for the skill above might include describe the development of an idea over the course of a text or compare and contrast two similar ideas from two different texts. Lessons should move students toward higher-order levels of thinking according to Bloom's taxonomy, and the language we use in our planning can help us remember that. If we want students to be able to analyze a text, rather than just remember "details support the main idea", we should use verbs like analyze, break down, compare, contrast, identify, and infer.

Objective-based Planning

Every lesson should have a clear, specific objective. Standards help us identify those objectives, as well as providing their context, giving us both the micro and macro view. Standards aid coherent unit and lesson planning by giving us some idea where we are trying to go and some signs to look for along the way.

Backwards Mapping

CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.W.4.4

Produce clear and coherent writing in which the development and organization are appropriate to task, purpose, and audience.

I chose to work backwards from this grade 4 ELA writing standard. I co-teach ELL students in grades 4 and 5, and they are usually at least two grade levels behind in ELA. If I actually want to teach a unit like this, I might have redo it for a similar grade 2 standard. Anyway, several of the assessments we use regularly in my department use grade-level standards and normative data from U.S. students, so I want to at least see what grade level looks like.

Getting a piece of writing to cohere depends on multiple independent proficiencies. We’re going to start by identifying the proficiencies the students will need to meet the standard.

3 Proficiencies:

• Recognize and write complete sentences. Know the parts of speech needed to make a complete sentence.
• Organize sentences into paragraphs. Recognize themes and topics in others’ writing, as well as their own.
• Identify task, purpose, and audience in others’ writing. Be able to write in a variety of fiction and nonfiction forms. Produce writing that meets restraints/criteria according to directions.

Next, some assessments that will help us determine student development in these proficiencies.

3 Assessments:

• First stating their purpose, audience, topic, and theme, students will write and edit a multi-paragraph essay  on space.
• Peer-edit a classmate’s paper for grammar, mechanics, and paragraph structure.
• Respond to a fiction or nonfiction text in a journal entry that includes an argument for author’s purpose, intended audience, and possible theme.
• 

Finally, 3 learning experiences that will help students develop the proficiencies.

3 learning experiences:

• Read texts that represent a variety of purposes and intended audiences: letters, poems, essays, information reports, editorials, speeches, and others.
• Diagram sentences, learning to distinguish parts of speech. Review with grammar games.
• Create a poster, glog, or presentation that examines a theme in literature or collects writing around a theme.

This is just for starters. Many more activities and assessments would go into such a unit, and teaching fourth graders to write up to the standard would probably take a lot longer than one unit, at least based on my experience. I wonder if a standard like this could be broken up and peppered throughout ELA and science, and social studies unit all year, assessments included, so that students have met the standard by the end of the year?

Managing Student Behavior Next Year- Positive and Negative Reinforcement

It is important to remember to encourage students and “catch them being good”. Especially when students are offered free choice, as in Daily 5, a teacher might only comment on students’ behavior when they are not following the rules. To do so is to miss opportunities for positive reinforcement. When you think about it, it doesn't make a lot of sense to give exact, specific directions, and then provide feedback only when those directions are not followed. It's like grading a test, but only marking the wrong answers, taking the correct ones for granted. The students should get credit for what they do right and acknowledgement from the teacher will reinforce behavior that meets expectations.

Positive behaviors I will look for during Daily 5:

• Choosing a good spot
• Sitting elbow-elbow-knee-knee during read-to-someone
• Getting started right away
• Working the whole time
• Sharing books, computers, and materials
• Collaborating with peers on writing and editing

My ELL students have a standing homework assignment to read books on the subscription service Raz-Kids. The site is quite helpful for ELLs as the books are leveled, and it lets them follow along with a fluent reading of the book, read it themselves, then take a comprehension quiz before moving on. Through the year, I worked to get kids doing 1 hour of raz-kids per week. Eventually, all but a few got there, I think as our relationship developed and the started to see the results of their work with me. Next year I want there to be more consistency, I want to get there faster, and I don’t want low-expectations to squeak by.

I’m going to make a chart where students get a sticker or stamp every week they complete their reading homework. Alternatively, I could just set up a separate Class Dojo for my ELLs and use that. The rewards they earn will mostly be along the lines of special privileges, but I will calculate an appropriate goal to work toward collectively, and reward them with an ELL party at the end of the year if they reach it.

I also want to involve parents more next year. Many of our parents live in other countries and speak no English, but I want to make an effort to establish contact with as many as I can at the start of the year. Their learning English is a main reason kid get sent to our school, but I believe many of the parents are reticent to take part, not having had a Western education themselves. One idea is to have 10 or so messages pre-translated into Chinese. We might not have much of a dialogue, but at least I could ask for help with homework or behavior, and let the students see their teacher and parents at least trying to work together.

Probably a teacher’s greatest advantage in managing student behavior is understanding it. Over the school year, I’ve developed relationships with my students- I know who their friends are, their hobbies and interests, and what they respond to in the classroom both positively and negatively. My colleagues in elementary have been getting to know the same. As we’ve gained experience with this group of personalities, we’ve become increasingly proactive in managing our classrooms. Certain students don’t need to be seated together, other groups work well together. When working with small groups, we know what students and what areas of the room we need to keep in our peripheral vision. Our ability to preempt misbehavior will increase the more we know, and this is why we share information on our students (with such aloof parents, teachers piece together a student’s background from what they let slip). Participation in after-school activities also deepen our understanding of our students as individuals.

I find that students who have spent time in class with me know what kind of behavior I expect, so that looking in their direction, or starting to move towards them, can be enough to stop problematic behavior.  When such behavior persists, particularly if it affects other students’ learning, we will generally take time off their recess. We are careful not to ask them to catch up on missed work or let them read while they are sitting out. We don’t want to create an association between learning and punishment

An in-class time out seat might work better. I liked what it said in the Marzano text about a student on time out “demonstrating their willingness to rejoin the class by attending to the academic activities that are occurring”. This approach gives the student a better chance to correct the behavior promptly, and I think they are less likely to be resentful and defy the rules despite the punishment. I guess you could say it’s more of a rehabilitative than punitive approach.

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High Performance Learning Environments

Roller Coaster Physics

From the roller coaster video, it sounds like the teacher gives them a design goal and lets them experiment. This is fundamentally different from providing a set of instructions on how to build something, and sends a message to students that their teacher believes them capable of solving complex problems. Asking them to design an optimal track, rather than to meet some minimum distance, suggests that the teacher expects great work (this class might get the marble to travel further than last year or the year before).

She encourages them to use the technical vocabulary of physics, and limits materials to constrain students where others might be tempted to make it easier.

Collaborative group work is the norm in this class. The teacher trusts her class to work in teams, and for every student to do their part.

Chiming- the teacher expects students to share responsibility and solve problems as a group.

Self-assessment and peer assessment- the teacher believes students can reflect meaningfully on their own work and others.  

Roller Coaster glog

The teacher sets students up for success by providing examples of completed work and a detailed planner/rubric. Offering up to 120% credit incentivizes students to perform up to and beyond a high standard.

It’s a collaborative project, so the teacher simply expects the students to be working during class time. If this applies equally to every member of every group, I think it qualifies as a high expectation.

The teacher has set high expectations for punctuality and late/make up work. Tying students’ attendance directly to their grade suggests that class time is taken seriously.

Chinese Math

Expectations are high and excuses are not accepted. It looks like the typical Chinese classroom goes by the “one size fits all” approach. This doesn’t look like much fun, but the multiplication tables are something students need to memorize anyway. They start with multiplication early because so much else in math is just faster  once you know it.

Rigid conformity is enforced. Speculatively, the students might have a hard time applying their elite math skills to cross-disciplinary problems, though I teach Chinese nationals and I’ve never noticed this.

The extra hours of weekly practice vis-a-vis the western system undoubtedly make the difference in student performance. For me, the question is: Is being rock-solid in arithmetic worth a two-hour nightly homework regime for every single student?

Whole-Brain Teaching    

WBT sets high expectations for participation. As we know, students learn more when they are involved, and even more when they have to teach someone else.Techniques like teach-ok and switch ensure peer-to-peer learning is part of regular classroom procedure.

“If rules are only posted on your board they are not really a part of your class. You must have the rules running around in your students’ heads for them to be effective.”

• “Five Classroom Rules”, Whole Brain Teaching

Each rule has a gesture to go with it, and teachers are encouraged to rehearse the rules “first thing in the morning, after lunch, and after recess” every day for elementary classes. The students are given to understand that the rules are really important. The rules tightly regulate student movement and classroom procedure: students must signal for permission to speak or leave their seat. The expectation is for an orderly, efficient learning environment.

WBT offers a wide assortment of motivational techniques designed to keep students engaged. The “Scoreboard” provides students with running behavioral feedback. Positive reinforcement and gamification help students to really learn classroom procedure, so it begins to become second nature.

I’d like to incorporate some Whole Brain Teaching techniques into a “free-range” collaborative classroom similar to the “Rollercoaster physics” class.

Students could collaborate in small groups on a video that showcases some element of the English language (past, present, or future tense, pronouns, prepositions, etc.). They could choose from topics already covered that year so they could use their notes and completed work for reference.

As they work together, I will periodically use “class-yes” to refocus class attention. A group member will be selected to “chime” at least daily,  updating the class as a whole on group progress and problems. Aside from work on the video itself, classwork will take the form of peer- and self-assessments and rehearsal of class procedures and good teamwork practices.

I teach elementary ELL students from China, Thailand, and South Korea. It would take very well-rehearsed class procedures and my syllabus for the whole term would have to be well organized and structured to give them enough background on a variety of topics that each group will have a choice, with plenty of resources and previous instruction to draw upon.

The video project will have a detailed rubric, which i will spend class time explicitly teaching so that students know exactly what is expected of them going forward.