Incorporating Physical Activity for Greater Learning

With two more days to go and brilliant sunshine outside, your students are undoubtedly squirmy and a bit unfocused.  How can you easily refocus them?  How can you incorporate physical activity into your classroom to make your students more engaged and ready to learn?

Check out the new Tahoma Active Schools website, a project of Tracy Krause, Jeana Haag, and Sara Russell, with website creation by Rick Haag.  Get a wealth of Brain Energizer ideas, and watch videos of Tahoma secondary classroom teachers incorporating physical activity into their classrooms.

Increasing Student Engagement and Rigor with Student Talk

Teachers often feel as though they need to debrief any student talk (pairs, small groups) with the entire class. Consider this for keeping the momentum up in your class.

Rather than calling on students after a pair share or small group discussion, circulate around the room during that discussion time and note the BEST THINKING that you hear.  

You could write on a small whiteboard, and then you could hold it up to show students your notes, or you could write notes on a clipboard and display them using the document camera. When you bring the class back together, share the BEST THINKING and use student names.  

Advantages:

• Everyone hears the BEST THINKING.
• BEST THINKING provides a model for rigorous work for the entire class.
• You elevate student status by naming students who demonstrated good thinking.
• It’s quick—you can share what you heard in a minute or less, and keep the momentum of the class going toward the next activity.
• Listening to pairs/groups provides you with a formative assessment opportunity, and gives you the opportunity to address any misconceptions students may have.
• Shy or introverted students will be less intimidated sharing in a pair or small group, and elevated when you share their good thinking.

Students talk in pairs = 100% of students participate

Teacher calls on 5 students in a class of 32 = 16% of students participate

The power of students setting goals and monitoring progress

In chapter three of Leaders of Their Own Learning, Ron Berger tells us that "Using data with students encompasses classroom practices that build students’ capacity to access, analyze, and use data effectively to reflect, set goals, and document growth." 

What does that mean exactly?  

Using data with students encompasses the following activities:

• Students use their classwork as a source for data, analyzing strengths, weaknesses, and patterns to improve their work.
• Students regularly analyze evidence of their own progress. They track their progress on assessments and assignments, analyze their errors for patterns, and describe what they see in the data about their current level of performance.
• Students use data to set goals and reflect on their progress over time and incorporate data analysis into student-led conferences.

Berger continues by elaborating. "Teachers and school leaders everywhere collect and analyze data to make informed decisions about instruction that will support all students in meeting state and Common Core standards. However, in many schools, the power of data to improve student achievement is not fully leveraged because students are left out of the process. The most powerful determinants of student growth are the mindsets and learning strategies that students themselves bring to their work—how much they care about working hard and learning, how convinced they are that hard work leads to growth, and how capably they have built strategies to focus, organize, remember, and navigate challenges. 

When students themselves identify, analyze, and use data from their learning, they become active agents in their own growth. They set personal goals informed by data they understand, and they own those goals. The framework of student-engaged assessment provides a range of opportunities to involve students in using data to improve their learning.  Using data with students has the potential to build reflective and confident learners with key dispositions of college and career readiness.

The below examples are how teachers in our system are doing just what Berger explains above.  The power and impact is amazing.

Students Reflecting and Setting Goals	Teacher Moves
	In this 2nd grade example, students created their own version of the Units of Study Opinion Writing Checklist with their teacher. Then, they looked at the opinion letter they had previously written, referred to the checklist and set goals to address what was missing or what they could get better at. In order for their goal to be more obvious and to keep the checklist visible, the teacher color coded each possible goal section for students to place their name and goal. This makes it easy for the teacher to see at a quick glance who is working on what component for a check-in on progress during a writing conference.
	This 2nd grade example stems from students reflecting on their most recent piece, comparing their piece to the Units of Study Opinion Writing Checklist, and identifying an area or 2 they want to focus more deliberately on for their next opinion letter.  As students work, they are able to refer to the checklist indicators to assess their progress toward improving in their identified area. The teacher is able to focus conferences around the students goal area, as well as differentiate small group instruction based on goal trends. The students are vested and have a high level of accountability in accomplishing their goal as they assess their writing, determine goals and monitor progress during the unit.
Opinion Writing Goal Setting (clean copy)	Students in this 4th grade class set a goal for improving their opinion essays. Students engaged in a discussion with partners where they explored these questions: Why is it important to set goals? What can having goals do for us? Then, they looked at their pre-assessment with boxes marked on the Units of Study Opinion Writing Checklist by their teacher.  It was explained to students that the marks on the checklist were based on what they should be able to do at the end of all the lessons in the unit. Then students looked at their writing and the checklist, they considered all the examples of good writing that had seen so far. Finally, they decided which goal they thought they could achieve by the end of the next essay.  As a class, they walked through each box on the Writing Goal Setting sheet and completed the boxes based on their reflections and thinking. As often as they can, they come back to this goal setting sheet and add to it so they can  hold themselves accountable for the goal.
	In writing, students use the Checklist that is in our Units of Study Curriculum. They choose something on the checklist that they are working on in their writing for the day. Then they write the goal on a post-it. This strategy makes it easy for the teacher to do a quick check as to who is working on what component. Also, it is easy to see who is working on the same thing, in order to group students based on goals to pull for conferencing. One teacher has even used this chart for building silent reading stamina.  As a class, they set a reading goal in minutes. Then they wrote down their starting and ending page number in their silent reading book to track pages read. This has increased stamina, and seems to keep them focused during silent reading.
Unit Assessment Reflection (clean copy)	This 4th grade goal setting session came about after the teacher noticed her students were particularly challenged at solving word problems.  Because the next unit provided a lot of additional practice solving word problems, she wanted students to focus on this during the unit.  At the conclusion of the previous unit, they talked about flaws and the importance of flaws in the learning process.  When student received their unit assessment back, they were asked to silently look through their assessment focusing on what they do well when solving word problems, primarily with the three identified statements, and complete the Unit Assessment Reflection.  They were also able to add their own thinking if there was an additional trait that they thought better described their work. Then, they found a problem that was answered incorrectly (they needed to write down the problem number so that the teacher could find the problem) and how they solved it.  They then had the opportunity to try to fix the flaw in their solution and identify if they could find the flaw as well as what type of flaw it was (discussed this previously as well). Finally, students were asked to create a goal for the duration of the unit and unit test

Help Your Students Use Formative Assessment Data

This video shares some strategies for helping students to use formative assessment data to assesses their own learning, determine goals, and monitor progress over time (6.5).  These strategies can help students take ownership of their own learning.

If you prefer read a print version, check out this blog post written by Tanner Higgin.

Active Learning Strategies

With a generation of students whose ability to focus seems to diminish yearly, as well as the fact that we have extended periods throughout most of our district, it is essential that teachers have a toolbox filled with active processing strategies. These strategies help maintain student engagement and enable students to transfer their learning into long-term knowledge that can be applied in other situations.

Here are a few favorite active processing strategies, along with a link to the original source if you want to read further.

 Make Snowballs (from http://ww2.kqed.org/mindshift/2016/03/03/20-strategies-for-motivating-reluctant-learners/).

Students write answers to a prompt on a piece of paper. On the count of three, they throw their “snowball” randomly up and away (but not at anyone) and then grab a snowball that near them. This enables students to purposefully pause, reflect, make connections, and consider others’ thinking. Perez, the teacher cited in the source, uses this strategy in all subjects, sometimes asking students to write three new vocabulary words they learned, three successes they had in that lesson, or three questions. “Students love it and it’s inclusionary because it’s anonymous,” Perez said. Students also get to see one another’s thinking in this activity.

Mind Warm-Up (from http://www.edutopia.org/classroom-student-participation-tips)

As a warm-up, ask students to find mistakes purposefully placed in material written on the board. But instead of asking them to work silently and alone, and then debrief in a classic question-and-answer session with one student at a time (while many sit inattentively), use a mix of collaboration and competition to eliminate what could potentially become dead time.

Organize teams of three students and ask them to work together (quietly) and raise their hands when they think they have found all the mistakes. After the first team signals it's done, give a bit more time and then have teams indicate with their fingers -- together on the count of three -- the number of mistakes they found in the work. The team that found the most describes its answers until another team disagrees politely or until they are finished.

Two Truths and a Lie (original source unknown)

Most of us have played Two Truths and a Lie as a party game or ice-breaker.  Make this activity educational, however, by having small groups of students come up with two truths and one lie about the content they are studying. As an example, students studying Macbeth might say: 

1.       The idea to murder King Duncan originated with Lady Macbeth (lie).

2.       Lady Macduff can be viewed as a foil to Lady Macbeth (truth).

3.       Macbeth is ultimately slain by a man who was not “born of woman (truth).”

Either another small group, or the class as a whole, must determine which is the lie, and, most important, WHY it is a lie. This is a great review strategy for a test or upcoming essay.

Checks for Understanding vs. Formative Assessment

What's the difference between a Check for Understanding and a Formative Assessment? One essential factor:

With Formative Assessment, you use the information to inform future instruction. That instruction may occur in the next few minutes, days, or later in the school year, but the teacher uses the information gained from the assessment to adjust instruction to meet student needs. You may find that no adjustments are necessary because your Formative Assessment showed you that your students are right on track.

Click here to see a list of Formative Assessment strategies you can use right now.

Assessment for Learning Strategies

Happy Wednesday!

Looking for an easy way to quickly access formative assessment strategies in one place? Look no further!

This week we have compiled several frequently used and effective formative assessment strategies that teachers are finding helpful to collect data to drive instructional decisions. These strategies are geared toward elementary level students. Ideas shared in previous coach tips have also been added to this document. Click here to access the document in Google Docs, and preview below:

We hope that this will be a helpful tool when lesson planning. As always, let us know how we can be of help!

Smiles,
Kristin, Nicole and Shelly