When I was told that we would be using what is essentially a scripted math curriculum this year, I felt a huge sense of relief. Knowing that this curriculum was pre-planned took away some of my planning for the future anxiety that I was experiencing this summer. I thought that teaching math would be the easier part of my job, because all I would need to do to prep would be to familiarize myself with the lesson and then deliver it. I realized that this wasn't quite the case at the end of the first unit. I taught the first unit of the curriculum with absolute fidelity -- I didn't omit any content or supplement any content. I thought that things were going really well, as students appeared to be grasping the material from my observations in class. However, when we got to the End of Unit Assessment and I discovered that I was quite wrong. In fact, the average on the test was only a 63%. Data-driven instruction is a process by which teachers modify their teaching based off of feedback they receive from their students' formative assessments. The low test scores I experienced during my first unit test in math made me realize that I needed to implement more data-driven instruction into my classroom, even though at the time I didn't know what that meant. I ended up doing substantial re-teaching and offered a re-test, and many students got their grade up. However, I knew that whole-class re-testing couldn't be an option for every test this year. I decided I needed to do something differently in my unit 2 for math. For Unit 2, I really analyzed what the End of Unit Assessment was testing kids on. Unlike the first test, which I just assumed they would be prepared for, I looked at specific questions that I knew students would find challenging and made sure to address them in class. I designed and gave numerous exit tickets outside of the prescribed exit tickets in this curriculum and used these exit tickets to help me figure out what to re-teach. I made my own differentiated practice problems, based off of the test questions, that were separated by challenge level -- so that kids could decide what they needed to practice during our math review time. We spent about an entire week doing this process of exit tickets followed by re-teaching of all of the concepts students identified as challenging for them in this unit, and today was our re-test. First glance at the students test indicates that following this data-driven instruction process has resulted in increased understanding for my students and improved test scores. Interestingly, students were more apprehensive for this test than the first one, but they actually performed better on this test. I think part of this might be due to the fact that they didn't know precisely what to expect on that first test, but on this test, thanks to the data-driven instruction, they actually knew what they were being tested on and what their strengths and struggles were with this particular content. There are many things I really like about this math curriculum, but this process has taught me that I can't take it for granted at face value. I need to dive into this curriculum and make it my own just as much as if I were making all of my lessons from scratch, in order to best serve my students.
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The role of the teacher in the classroom can seem pretty straight forward -- make sure the kids know what they need to know, right? However, when viewing that role through the ISTE Standard 6, "Facilitator," we notice a few distinct differences from the more old school teacher expectation. Rather than simply delivering necessary information, today's teachers actually have a greater and more meaningful responsibility. According to this standard, the deeper responsibility of a teacher is actually to encourage students to take ownership over their own learning and create challenging learning opportunities that require and encourage creativity. According to the Office of Educational Technology, teachers "should be expected to model how to leverage available tools to engage content with curiosity," not just tell students what they need to know.
Veritasium echoes and expands upon this thought in the video "This Will Revolutionize Education." Teacher as facilitator means so much more than teacher as distributer of knowledge. Facilitators set the foundation for true learning to flourish, by encouraging students to be the drivers of their own learning. As stated in the video, "We are not limited by the experiences we can give to students. What limits learning is what can happen inside the student's head." So, how can technology help teachers become better facilitators? It's important to remember that technology is only as powerful as the curriculum it is being used in. In their article "Technology alone won’t transform teacher to facilitator," Monica Martinez and Dennis McGrath explain that teachers must first reflect on the effectiveness of their curriculum before considering how to incorporate more technology into it. Teachers must ensure that they are providing their students with engaging learning experiences and asking them to complete challenging assessments that require higher-order skills and problem-solving. Incorporating more technology into the classroom won't be able to fill the gaps left by poorly designed classroom activities. What it can do, however, is augment the content that a teacher can provide. "No longer the single source of information," explain Martinez and McGrath, "teachers are freed to guide students’ learning, leveraging technology to help students access knowledge, manage their work, collaborate, communicate, and create and produce various products." One such creative product teachers could challenge their students to make is a Spark Video. Spark Videos are an Adobe product that allow students to create high quality educational videos or slide shows with original narration. Students can use their own videos and photos or browse stock photos. They can also add text and icons. The technology is available for free online, and requires only an internet browser to use. I found Spark Video in the Edutopia article, "Putting Learning First With New Tech Tools," by Monica Burns. Spark Video was listed as a great tool to bring more creativity into a teacher's classroom. Something I love about this tech tool is that the interface is actually extremely intuitive and easy to use, so it wouldn't take a lot of front-loading to teach students to use it. Since it's so easy to use, you can focus on more on the content being delivered in the video and less on the process of making it. After just ten minutes of experimenting, I was able to create this video. (Please click the link for full screen if your browser is not displaying video correctly).
I'm super impressed with how professional the product is, and I'm sure it could be even better with more time. I think this tool would be a great piece of technology to bring into my classroom, because when you view it through the lens of TPACK, the content knowledge students will apply in this product is not overshadowed by the technological knowledge students will need in order to operate the tool. I'm really excited to bring this tool into my classroom as I see so many different potential uses for it as a piece of technology that will support my role as facilitator in the classroom, and I think the students will have a lot of fun with it as well.
References Burns, M. (2018). "Putting learning first with new tech tools." Edutopia. Martinez, M. & McGrath, D. (2014). "Technology alone won’t transform teacher to facilitator." The Phi Delta Kappan, (1), 41. Office of Educational Technology. National Education Technology Plan. Section 2: Teaching with technology. US Department of Education. Veritasium. (2014, December 1). This will revolutionize education. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?&v=GEmuEWjHr5c Not every lesson goes as planned. In fact, as we near the mid-way mark of the school year, I am starting to encounter more lessons that don't go as planned than do. Most of the time I consider that a great thing, and I like to leave a little wiggle room in my lesson plans to make space for answering the bizarre questions and free styling student's creative ideas to modify the lesson. Usually, the heart of the lesson is centered around an effective instructional strategy that gets the point across, even if it's not in the way I had originally hoped for. However, there have been a few instructional strategies I've used so far this year that have totally backfired in ways I could never have anticipated. One example is from a few weeks ago, when I had the students build weather instruments for measuring temperature, pressure, wind speed and wind direction, based off of a lesson plan left behind to me from last year's teacher. The concept was brilliant -- using just a few basic materials students would create their own instruments to measure and record the day's weather. They would learn about what instruments scientists use to record weather and the atmospheric processes that affect our weather. I thought we could keep using the student-build instruments throughout the unit to record weather conditions in a classroom weather log, and the students would love them because they built them themselves. Sounds great, right? Well, it would have been, if I had done things just little bit differently... Mistake #1: Skimming through the instructions for how to build each instrument instead of reading them in detail. I assumed these instructions would be easy to follow and intuitive enough that I didn't need to read them in detail when I was prepping for the lesson. I was dead wrong. Students were so confused about what to do and what materials they needed and I wasn't much help since I hadn't really read the instructions. Mistake #2: Giving students the instructions in the first place. The science classroom is all about creativity, testing hypotheses and learning from mistakes! I missed out on an awesome opportunity to let the students be creative by giving them instructions. Thinking back on it, I should have given each table an instrument to build and a pile of materials, and let them figure it out on their own. This would have made the lesson way more collaborative and perhaps led to more study buy-in and maybe even better instrument designs. Mistake #3: Not setting a clear purpose for the activity. I thought the activity could speak for itself, but in retrospect I'm not so sure my kids really understand why we were doing it. They were happy to go outside, and left the classroom that day in good spirits, but I think if I interviewed the students afterward about what they learned that day it would probably be something along the lines of, "Building weather instruments is confusing," or "There wasn't any wind outside today." Both are reasonable conclusions -- but neither was the real goal of my lesson! Next year, I probably will do a lesson similar to this, but I will be sure to change a few things. Instead of giving students instructions, I will give them a task and some materials have them problem-solve it. I will make sure that that task is rooted in a strong learning target, and that students can articulate what that learning target is and how they will meet it. And of course I will be sure to include that wiggle room for when things inevitably turn out a little differently than I planned. |
Emma BooneFirst year 8th grade PBL math/science teacher and graduate student, wondering a bunch and figuring a few things out here and there. Archives
December 2018
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