3. Objectives
• Examine specifics of
– Student engagement
– Formative assessment
– Critical thinking
• Examine how student engagement, formative
assessment, and critical thinking complement each
other
• Examine how student engagement, formative
assessment, and critical thinking can be
transformative for learners
3
6. Student engagement occurs when “students make a
psychological investment in learning. They try hard
to learn what school offers. They take pride not
simply in earning the formal indicators of success
(grades), but in understanding the material and
incorporating or internalizing it in their lives.”
Newmann, F. (1992) Student Engagement and Achievement in American Secondary
Schools. Teachers College Press.
6
7. Students who are engaged in their work are
energized by four goals—success, curiosity,
originality, and satisfying relationships. How do we
cultivate these drives in the classroom?
Strong, R., Silver, H.F., & Robinson, A. (1995). Strengthening Student Engagement:
What Do Students Want (and what really motivates them)? Educational Leadership,
53(1): 8-12.
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8. Criteria for success
• How do you identify, describe, define, and/or
explain criteria for student success for any lesson
plan?
• How do you articulate how you measure that
success?
• How do you make your expectations clear to your
students?
• What prevents students from understanding your
expectations?
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10. Which of the following describe the purpose or
characteristics of formative assessment?
•Monitor student learning to provide ongoing feedback
•Used by teachers to improve teaching
•Used by students to improve their learning
•Help students identify their strengths and weaknesses
•Help students identify target areas that need work
•Help teachers recognize where students are struggling
to address problems immediately
•Generally low stakes
10
11. Which of the following describe the purpose or
characteristics of formative assessment?
•Monitor student learning to provide ongoing feedback
•Used by teachers to improve teaching
•Used by students to improve their learning
•Help students identify their strengths and
weaknesses
•Help students identify target areas that need
work
•Help teachers recognize where students are struggling
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to address problems immediately
•Generally low stakes
12. Assessment for learning
• Formative assessment serves as practice for students,
including meaningful homework
• Supports learning in two ways
– Teachers can adapt instruction on the basis of
evidence, making changes and improvements that
will yield immediate benefits to student learning.
– Students can use evidence of their current progress
to actively manage and adjust their own learning.
(Stiggins, Arter, Chappuis, & Chappuis, 2006)
• Assessment for learning consists of anything teachers
do to help students answer three questions (Atkin,
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Black, & Coffey, 2001)
13. Where am I going?
• Make sure students have the learning targets and
understand the expectations for success in
accomplishing or reaching each target
• Provide students with models, rubrics, or some sort of
guide to know what success might look like
13
14. Where am I now?
Design activities and formative assessments that enable
students to self-monitor their progress in achieving the
learning targets
Provide opportunities for students to explore beyond the
confines of the specific learning targets
– Hold them accountable for the specific learning targets
– Hold them accountable to explain how their
explorations matter, and why
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15. Where am I now?
Design activities and formative assessments that enable
students to self-monitor their progress in achieving the
learning targets
Provide opportunities for students to explore beyond the
confines of the specific learning targets
– Hold the students accountable for the specific learning
targets
– Hold the students accountable to explain how their
explorations matter, and why
15
16. Where am I now? (continued)
• Provide a mechanism for students to
track their success in reaching the
learning targets; make sure they are
able to explain how they know they
have been successful
• When students struggle to reach
learning targets, help them identify
their strengths as well as where they
need improvement
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17. How can I close the gap?
When students identify their strengths and where they
need improvement, help them create a plan for
improvement in those target areas
Help students use formative (and summative
assessment) feedback to set goals
Enable students to create structures to track or graph
their progress
17
18. How can I close the gap? (continued)
Provide students with opportunities to comment on their
progress as well as their struggles
– What is hard that used to be easy?
– What is easy that used to be hard?
– What is still hard?
– What have they noticed about their learning habits?
– What encourages them and what discourages them?
– What else can they do to try to improve as learners?
– What would they like you to help them do to try to
improve as learners?
I feel happy of myself
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23. In 1899, Wilbur Wright
designed this controllable
kite to test the
aerodynamic control
system he would later use
in gliders and airplanes.
Student engagement
Formative assessment
Critical thinking
23
24. What do student engagement, formative
assessment, and critical thinking have in
common?
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28. Next steps
• Identify your 3 next steps
• Explain why these are your 3 next steps
• Establish a deadline for each of your
steps
• Remember the 80/20 rule
– Of all the tasks performed throughout
the day, only 20 percent really
matter.
– Those tasks in the 20 percent very
likely will produce 80 percent of our
results.
• Discuss with others for accountability
80/20 rule aka Pareto’s Principle
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Notes
Thanks to Steven Covey for reminding us that we need to be thinking of “the end” as we design lessons
We also need to be thinking about the end—how students can be successful in achieving or mastering our learning objectives or learning targets
That thinking informs the choices we make for and about strategies, assessments, student engagement, etc.
Perhaps it should also take into consideration that we don’t want learning to end when the bell rings
Last time we talked about student engagement and what that means, what you hope to see and hear when you visit a classroom
We all need to remember that students to hear and experience something more than once for it to “stick”
Persistence or grit or perseverance matter
Angela Maiers has a nice overview of student engagement based on the alphabet; again, someone worth following on Twitter
Now you might ask why I have sales statistics here but note that only 2% of sales are made on the 1st contact. It takes 5 to 12 contacts to complete 80% of the sales. Sure, the sales rep may wear you down by then, but it may also take that many times for the message to stick, for you to have heard or seen about the concept or product enough times to feel confident in it. Not quite the same as teaching I know, but the concept of stickiness is relevant as we think about the number of times our kids need to be exposed to a new idea, a new concept, a new theorem, a new anything for it to stick, for them to make sense of it, for them to integrate that learning with the rest of their learning
1992. So we’ve been talking about student engagement and what it is for a long time. I wanted to revisit student engagement because it’s not just student behavior, but what drives or motivates them to be engaged.
Do you agree with these goals? Why or why not?
Is “How do we cultivate these drives in the classroom?” the right question?
Read each point or give a summary.
Ask for any responses to the last question: what prevents students from understanding expectations?
Based on answers, see if there is a way to connect back to the student engagement quotes though you may be able to refer forward to formative assessment and/or critical thinking. It’s likely that lack of clarity or lack of specificity or even lack of repetition gets in students’ ways of understanding expectations.
Refer to worksheet. Give them a few minutes to discuss and complete the chart. Ask folks what they might want to highlight.
Refer to handout: have them look at the choices at the bottom of the 1st page and discuss with a colleague.
Then discuss with everyone. You may want to ask them what 3, 4, and 5 might look like, what the experience might be for the students
Then go to the next page of the handout; the next several slides help review those pages
Refer to the handout; this and the next few slides focus on the concept of assessment for learning
Elaborate as you are so inclined on this and the following related slides
So we’re talking about the relationships between these three and how they help inform what we do in the classroom
Look at page 3 of the handout. Lots of ways to talk about these, but remind them that student engagement, formative assessment, and critical thinking are experienced differently in each of the options and that each of the options could have value in a classroom and that, in some cases, both might be necessary for students to demonstrate proficiency
Just show this, perhaps read it
Ask folks to respond to the apparent expectations of this page.
Click to show the chart and ask how they might score (1 to 5 with 1 as lowest and 5 as highest) each of these components based on the apparent expectations of this page.
Not to say this kind of work is bad or wrong because it does have it’s place, but educators need to think about expectations for learning and correlation to standards as well as options for problem solving and critical thinking
Similar questions for the previous slide. It’s important to recognize there are degrees of difficulty here and there is, again, the importance, of being able to complete the fundamental tasks of reading the graph and having the skills and knowledge to write the coordinates of each point
Have folks “score” the degree of each element in the chart, 1-5
Show the first box of the geometric figures. Ask if those seem more complex than the prior slide? What seems to make them more complex, or not?
Then show the 2nd box and ask if and how that makes any difference to the way they view the figures.
Then ask them to think about if and why student engagement or critical thinking might be scored higher than the prior slides and what they might do with the formative assessment component
Ask them to work at their tables to discuss and then share out
Now it’s time for the handouts. Ask them to skim and scan the History of Kites handout
What do they think is the reading level, and why?
What caught their attention as they were skimming, and why?
Have them discuss how this handout might be used at various grade levels and in what ways in could engage students, help them achieve standards, and develop their critical thinking
Have them look at the sled kite handout and review it. Have them comment on and discuss the lesson plan suggestions, how they might amplify those lessons and extend them, perhaps, to other content areas given the other handout
Ask them how doing geometry problems or working with geometric shapes at various grade levels, thinking about the history of kites and working with the sled kite or some other kite might further learning