Tag: Common Core

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The Reflective Student: A Taxonomy of Reflection (Part 2)

Reflective Student
reflective student

Reflection can be a challenging endeavor. It’s not something that’s fostered in school – typically someone else tells you how you’re doing! At best, students can narrate what they did, but have trouble thinking abstractly about their learning – patterns, connections and progress.

In an effort to help schools become more reflective learning environments, I’ve developed this “Taxonomy of Reflection” – modeled on Bloom’s approach.  It’s posted in four installments:

1.  A Taxonomy of  Reflection
2. The Reflective Student
3. The Reflective Teacher
4. The Reflective Principal 

See my Prezi tour of the Taxonomy

2. The Reflective Student

Each level of reflection is structured to parallel Bloom’s taxonomy. (See installment 1 for more on the model). Assume that a student looked back on a project or assignment they had completed. What sample questions might they ask themselves as they move from lower to higher order reflection? (Note: I’m not suggesting that all questions are asked after every project – feel free to pick a few that work for you.) Remember that each level can be used to support mastery of the new Common Core standards.

taxonomy of reflection
taxonomy of reflection

Bloom’s Remembering: What did I do?
Student Reflection: What was the assignment? When was it due? Did I get it turned in on time?

Bloom’s Understanding: What was important about what I did? Did I meet my goals?
Student Reflection: Do I understand the parts of the assignment and how they connect? Did my response completely cover all parts of the assignment? Do I see where this fits in with what we are studying?

Bloom’s Application: When did I do this before? Where could I use this again?
Student Reflection: How was this assignment similar to other assignments? (in this course or others). Do I see connections in either content, product or process? Are there ways to adapt it to other assignments? Where could I use this (content, product or process) my life?

Bloom’s Analysis: Do I see any patterns or relationships in what I did?
Student Reflection: Were the strategies, skills and procedures I used effective for this assignment? Do I see any patterns in how I approached my work – such as  following an outline, keeping to deadlines? What were the results of the approach I used – was it efficient, or could I have eliminated or reorganized steps?

Bloom’s Evaluation: How well did I do? What worked? What do I need to improve?
Student Reflection: What are we learning and is it important? Did I do an effective job of communicating my learning to others? What have I learned about my strengths and my areas in need of improvement? How am I progressing as a learner?

Bloom’s Creation: What should I do next? What’s my plan / design?
Student Reflection: How can I best use my strengths to improve? What steps should I take or resources should I use to meet my challenges? What suggestions do I have for my teacher or my peers to improve our learning environment? How can I adapt this content or skill to make a difference in my life?

Image credit: flickr/Daveybot

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Homefront America – Engage Students with Document Based Essential Questions

Update: October 2012: While this lesson is still available as a pdf (see original post below) an expanded version – Why We Fight: WWII and the Art of Public Persuasion - is now available at iBookstore It includes 43 historic posters, 13 rare films, plus numerous communiqués, photographs and recordings. Plus student “stop and think” prompts based on CCSS skills. 

Ride-hitler Recently my post: Essential Question: Who is the Teacher in Your Classroom? drew a response from a teacher looking for a more scaffolded approach to document based instruction. Here’s my response …

Homefront America in WW II (PDF) is designed to improve content reading comprehension with an engaging array of source documents – including journals, maps, photos, posters, cartoons, historic data and artifacts. (One of the central goals of the Common Core standards).
I developed it to serve as a model for blending essential questions, higher order thinking and visual interpretation. I intentionally refrained from explaining the documents, to afford students the chance to do the work of historians. A variety of thinking exercises are imbedded in the lesson to support reading comprehension. Graphic organizers support differentiated activities to assist the students in extracting meaning from the documents.

Hopefully this lesson serves as a model of how to infuse support for literacy into the more typical educational goal of content mastery. But more importantly, it is designed to demonstrate how student engagement can be “powered” by an essential question. 

Instead of attempting to teach the American homefront experience during WWII via the memorization of historical facts (like “victory” gardens), this lesson approaches the same subject through a more timeless question “How did Americans change their lives to support the war effort?”

This essential question invites the students into the material as they draw from their life experience to construct a response. Guiding questions direct students to construct comparisons between the American experience in WWII and the Iraq / Afghanistan war. Moreover, since the events of September 11th, the very notion the “homefront” has been redefined by new perceptions of terrorism and homeland security. 

Instruction is not simply an act of telling, it should instead be centered around creating learning experiences that provoke student reflection. In this lesson, source documents and literacy strategies combine to simultaneously teach content and comprehension. But more importantly, an essential question serves as a springboard to engage students in a deeper reflection on the notion of sacrifice in the historical context and in their own lives.

Scaffolding questions include …

Pre Reading / Think Before You Start: 

Before you begin this lesson,think about and discuss in small groups the following questions: 

  • What resources are needed to wage a war? 
  • How could people on the home front help to supply these resources? 
  • What would you be willing to contribute to a war effort? 

Post Reading / The Question Today: 

Civilians have always been impacted by war and they are frequently called upon to contribute to national war efforts. Since the events of September 11, 2001, the United States has fought wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. 

  • How have Americans on the homefront contributed to the effort? What have they sacrificed?
  • How do those efforts compare with the home front in WWII? 
  • How did the attacks of September 11 change the nature of the “homefront?”
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How to Teach Summarizing: A Critical Learning Skill for Students

Close reading (in the Common Core) requires students to consider text (in it’s different forms) through three lenses: what does it say, how does it say it, and what does it mean to me? Summarizing is an essential skill for learning, but too often in school we simply ask students to “guess” what the teacher (or author) thinks is important.

An essential part of a summary is that it needs to be expressed to an audience. In life, we purposefully craft summaries for a specific audience (directions for the out-of-towner, computer how-to for the technophobe). In school, the tacit audience for most summaries is the teacher. Imagine how a student feels when asked to summarize a textbook passage for the teacher. In effect they have been asked to summarize one expert’s writing for delivery to another expert – the teacher.   “…and remember, be sure to use your own words!”

If students are going to learn to summarize they need to be given a chance to genuinely share what they think is important for an audience other than the teacher. Here’s a three step process I followed in a second grade classroom using a popular Currier and Ives print, “Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way.” (1868)   Link to larger image

Source

Step 1: Start with the concrete “right there” observations. 

I projected a digital image on the screen and asked student to talk about the people, things and activities they could identify. They replied, a train, native Americans, a village, people digging, steam from the train, houses, trees, a lake, maybe a harbor, a road, dry grass, covered wagons, poles, mountains, a school house, people working, people waiting for the train, a train track, etc ….

Step 2: Give students a chance to tell what they think is important.

I managed this aspect by asking each student to draw a picture of what they saw in the projected image. The details they included were what they thought was important. Here’s a few samples. Click to enlarge.

West 1
West 2

     

Step 3: Give students a chance to frame their summary into a narrative explanation for another audience. 

I digitally divided the image into multiple sections and photocopied them (in B &W) into packets of  image details. I gave groups of students the packets and asked them to work in teams to assemble the images into children’s “a story book” with a caption under each image.

Detail 1
Detail 2

Here are some of their captions: (spelling corrected) 

  • Water would come from the mountain and fill the lake. You could get fish and drink water. Water is very important
  • People were moving west. They moved by wagon at first, then but train, which is faster.
  • Life was tough. People had to do everything for themselves.
  • It maybe was lonely because people missed their friends back home.
  • The people were building a town. They could get wood from the trees. It was a small town at first.
  • The Indian see the people coming. They knew things were changing. They got sick from the smoke.
  • The school was different from our school. People had different clothes than us.
  • The train split the old life from the new life.

While summarizing has been shown to be one of the most effective strategies for building content knowledge, that gain only applies when students are allowed to make their own judgements about what’s important and frame their summaries for an audience. When we ask them to “learn” the teacher’s summary – they are reduced to memorizing “another fact.”

When we ask our students to create authentic summaries (with audience and purpose) we give students a chance to reflect on their learning. Instead of simply testing them for factual knowledge, students can be asked: 

  • What did I think was important?
  • How did I share that with my audience?
  • Did my summary match audience and purpose?
  • Is my summary accurate? 
  • Did I use my own words and style?
  • What did I learn from the activity?

For more learning strategies see my blog post: 18 Literacy Strategies for Struggling Readers – Defining, Summarizing and Comparing  

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Defining Creativity – Higher Order Thinking for All Students

Sir Ken Robinson was recently interviewed for  the “Teaching for the 21st Century” issue of Educational Leadership. more

The article “Why Creativity Now? A Conversation with Sir Ken Robinson” notes three misconception that people have about creativity.

One is that it’s about special people—that only a few people are really creative. Everybody has tremendous creative capacities. A policy for creativity in education needs to be about everybody, not just a few.

… It’s about special activities. People associate creativity with the arts only. … education for creativity is about the whole curriculum, not just part of it.

… It’s just about letting yourself go… Really, creativity is a disciplined process that requires skill, knowledge, and control. Obviously, it also requires imagination and inspiration…. It’s a disciplined path of daily education.

I agree with Robinson but he defines creativity in a way that I find a bit narrow  ”a process of having original ideas that have value.” I define creating more broadly as “a new combination of old elements.” The distinction between the two definitions is important. As educators we want to move all our students along a full spectrum of Blooms’ Taxonomy. If we want our students to reach the highest level of critical thinking, then we need to be clear on our goals.

Creating requires both a strong foundation in content knowledge and the ability to apply that knowledge in new ways – usually across a variety of disciplines. And it requires using all of Bloom’s skills from remembering through creating. It begins with a firm grasp of the basics and includes analyzing patterns and needs, evaluating alternatives and finally creating something new. When seen as as “a new combination of old elements,” creating is not  limited to the “creative.” It’s something that all students can do, and one of the goals of the new Common Core standrards.

Toy-bath To illustrate the point that all students can create, here’s a photo of my granddaughter, Zoe taken when she was a toddler. I had walked into her room and saw her sitting in a mesh basket used to store her stuffed animals. When I asked her what she was doing, she quickly replied “I have a toy bath.”

Was their “value” in her “creation?”  Probably not.

But don’t try to tell me that this little cutie isn’t creative!

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18 CCSS Literacy Strategies for Struggling Readers – Defining, Summarizing and Comparing

I’ve been working with teachers to develop learning strategies to support the Common Core literacy and comprehension skills that students commonly use across the content areas. This pdf includes 18 lessons organized in two ways: by comprehension strategy – defining, summarizing and comparing and by target reader – non-reader, word caller and turned-off reader.  The lessons are designed as templates which teachers can modify to use in their specific subject areas.

Strategies for Struggling Readers 3MB pdf   

There are two key elements that teachers should keep in mind when working in each skill area.

Defining

  • Before the formal definition has been introduced, students should be asked to make connections between their prior knowledge and the term.
  • After the term has been defined,  students need activities to more deeply process the term.

Summarizing

  • Students should be asked to make their own judgments about what’s important to them (instead of just repeating the details the teacher highlights).
  • Students will be able to more readily summarize, if they are asked to share what they’ve learned with an audience other than the teacher.

Comparing

  • Students should develop the comparison, not simply repeat the model that we present to them.
  • Student should be asked to share what they learned from the comparison.