The Evolution of my Teaching

Over the past years I have been re-thinking my approach to teaching.

The focus of my evolution as a teacher is on the shifting of ownership. After all, who is supposed to own the learning?

I am in the process of evolving from having a teacher-centered classroom where I am the provider of knowledge and the designer of assessments to focusing on developing and supporting my students learning autonomy. I strive for a learner-centered environment where students actively participate to construct their knowledge and reflect on their learning process.

As part of my teaching evolutionary process I have taken some elements to focus on each year. Last year I focused on ways to engage my students through connections. You can read my blog posting here: Engage = Connect.

Focus: Assessments
For this school year, my evolution focuses on assessments.

What is the objective of assessments?
Is it how well my students can regurgitate facts or how well they can find the “formula” to solve a problem? What if the day before an assessment a student had a cello recital to prepare for or they had a basketball game and arrived home not until 10:00 pm? How can a grade on a quiz or a test reflect their best?

The word assessment has a Latin root: assidere. It means to sit beside. In an educational context, the process of observing learning; describing, collecting, recording, scoring, and interpreting information about a student's or one's own learning. 

I see assessment as an ongoing process that informs me and my students and gauges the learning progression. I partner with my students to facilitate their learning and they appreciate not being constrained by fixed deadlines and dead-end quiz scores as they have ample opportunities to demonstrate that “they can” accomplish every single one of our Learning Objectives.

Authentic Assessments

I like to offer a variety of authentic assessments in which students are asked to perform real-world tasks that demonstrate meaningful application of essential physics concepts and scientific skills.

The most important feature of authentic assessments is that they provide multiple paths to the students’ demonstration of their learning.

This is an example from our kinematics unit. The students were presented with a Lab Practicum challenge:

‘At what position will two cars moving at different speeds collide if they are released from opposite ends at different times? Cars are 2 meters apart and one car is released 3 seconds after the first one.’

Instead of writing a traditional lab report, students created a video of their lab by engaging in a collaborative approach to the construction of knowledge. Take a look at one of the teams presenting their video as a TV show reporting on a train accident. The team used the experiment as a model to investigate the incident and demonstrated their understanding of kinematics through multiple representations of knowledge:

Another assessment asked the students to pose a question and apply their knowledge of kinematics to answer their question. Within the final product they had room for different modes of expression. Here are a few examples:

Trey's Project: If baseball was played on the moon, how far would a Ian Kinsler home run go?

Hannah's Project: How does my free-throw shot compare to Coach Schroeder's shot? 

Dylan's Project: When the blue bird in Angry Birds splits into three, do the speeds change? 

McKenna's Project: What's the initial velocity at which I was thrown in a cheerleader's cradle?

The class also completed a series of Performance Task Assessments where they were presented with context rich scenarios that required a meaningful application of the concepts. Context-rich tasks discourage the ‘plug and chug’ approach. These multi-step problems are constructed as a short story in which the main character is the student.

Evaluation
At the end of the trimester I gave the class a thorough class evaluation. It was meant to help them look back into the first three months of class and think deeper about their learning.
Selected questions and student responses can be seen below:

So, where are you in your evolution as a teacher?

Credits:

Image Creative Commons license by Stefan 
Image Creative Commons license by toolstop 
Ideas:
Thank you to Kelly O'Shea and John Burke for inspiration in creating the evaluation questions.

Faculty Learning: Scoring a Basket!

What are the barriers that impede teachers growth as learners?

The most common answer is usually a lack of time, unfortunately in some cases I believe that there is also a lack of motivation.

On Monday, we had a Staff Development day and the administration required faculty to attend at least one technology session.

I was thrilled with the opportunity but I realized that some of my colleagues would not have attended otherwise; that left me with several things to consider about professional development.

Among other things I wondered:
1. How do we make the sessions meaningful?
2. What is the best way to present a new digital tool?
3. How do we engage and keep faculty motivated to integrate the tool?

Here is my take at possible answers to the questions:
1. In order to make a session meaningful to teachers it has to be a hands-on session. Teachers should have the opportunity to create during the session. The topic has to be relevant to their subject area and applicable to a lesson.
2. One good way to present a digital tool is to show an application of that tool. I've seen lots of great presentations at SlideShare that show a particular tool with bullet points about possible applications but rarely linked to an actual example. If I am able to show how I integrated a tool into my own curriculum and demonstrate it's usefulness for student learning I am sure that it would be easier to convince teachers to give it a try.

3. Once a teacher is engaged it is very important to follow-up their progress. Sometimes a teacher is willing to try a new tool but when they are alone in their classroom and stumble upon some difficulties they might be tempted to drop it. If the mountain doesn't come to you, you have to go to the mountain!

I like to document ideas that people have shared with me about a particular project and then after a few days  e-mail them or stop by their classroom to ask them about their idea. With this method I've been successful in reigniting the fire.

How did our Staff Development day go?
I think it went really well! We had 8 presenters for a total of 11 sessions. The requirement was to attend one session but 50 out of the 108 teachers attended two and some of them three sessions! All of the sessions were hands-on and the faculty had an opportunity to select which session to attend.
For the past two days we've had requests for installing Google Earth, help with advanced features in Google Sites, troubleshooting Prezis and the best of all: two of our administrators have started their own blogs!

So what is the secret to score a basket with faculty and their own learning?
I don't believe that there is a definitive answer to this question but I will certainly keep trying different strategies!

Learning, learning, learning: Perfect Day!

What a fabulous day of learning!

My day started by checking on Twitter around 4.35 am, it is always unbelievable how many Tweets have been posted overnight! I posted a couple of good links as I try to become more of an "informer".

At 7 am we had our second PLP Virtual Session. The topic was on Network Literacy. Will introduced three note-taking tools Evernote, Zoho and Zotero. I really liked Evernote as Zoho looks pretty much like Google Apps and Zotero is an add on for Firefox.

I've signed up for an Evernote account and will be ready to give it a try.

We had a small group discussion on Network Literacy and I was in a group with Ohio teachers. Our discussion circled around Effectiveness (so many links to click, so little time!) and Ethical uses (copyright and safety).

The last part of the session had to do with our Research Project. Sheryl walked us through the steps of the project and showed us a few samples. As a good multitasker I created a Site for our project (PLP Research Project) and send out invitations to the team for a meeting tomorrow before school.

I was very proud of our Parish team as they were engaged in the conversation!

Had a great day at school, was able to help Dave Monaco set his students as collaborators and then create their own blogs. I was relieved that everything went well and we didn't have any technical issues. I will be 'teaching' his class on Thursday so I need to be prepared!

At home I was enjoying reading Twitter when Alec Couros posted a link for an Elluminate session.
Wow! that was phenomenal! It was called The Power of Sharing and was lead by Dean Shareski. I learned even more! For example, I was able to add my Delicious Network to my Google Reader!! I didn't know that you could do that, now I can keep up with new bookmarks more efficiently!

All in all, just a PERFECT DAY!

I created the Wordle with words that resonate with my understanding of Network Literacy

wordle.net