Working with students...
Spring 2012 | Student Work Sample #1 - Ball Don't Lie Group Timeline Activity
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While reading the young adult novel Ball Don’t Lie, I noticed students having trouble keeping track of the order of events occurring in main character Sticky’s life. The book is composed episodically, jumping around to different scenes in Sticky’s past, present, and future, creating a reading experience for students that was engaging yet at times frustratingly difficult to understand. After brainstorming with my cooperating teacher, I decided to do this timeline activity, where students would work in groups to put important events of Sticky’s life in the order in which they occurred to him – which is NOT the order in which the book gives them to us. After placing the 10 Post-Its with the events I selected as important in Sticky’s life, groups had to come up with 2 more events of their own and add them to their timeline.
The activity aided student learning in multiple ways. First, in terms of content, the groups were ultimately able, in most cases with a bit of prompting from the teacher, to place the events in order. Simply due to the nature of the events and the set-up of the story, some events were easier to place on the timeline than others (for example, specific scenes from Sticky’s early life were much easier for students to place than more recent, ongoing events, like Sticky playing basketball at Lincoln Rec). Students had to re-read the text, debate with others in their group, and/or explain their thinking to the teacher in asking for help, meaning that they ultimately came away with a much stronger grasp of the content of the story/Sticky’s life. Also, the nature of the activity allowed for students to physically move around through modifying the timeline, strengthening students’ kinesthetic and spatial intelligences. Finally, the timeline served as a concrete visual representation of Sticky’s life, serving to bolster our verbal discussions by portraying the information in a new way.
Attending to the different groups as they worked through this activity was also enlightening for me as a teacher. I was able to identify where students currently were with their comprehension of Sticky’s life so far. Almost every group was tripped up by later events, most of which were more vague time-wise, which told me students were able to recall the easier events but weren’t being perceptive to the smaller clues in the story telling us where the events occurring currently and/or in the future would be located. Also, from students selecting 2 more events for their timeline, I was able to see which events students found important, telling me what they’re remembering about Sticky’s life – and whether it matches with my lesson plans’ assumptions about what is important to retain from it.
The activity aided student learning in multiple ways. First, in terms of content, the groups were ultimately able, in most cases with a bit of prompting from the teacher, to place the events in order. Simply due to the nature of the events and the set-up of the story, some events were easier to place on the timeline than others (for example, specific scenes from Sticky’s early life were much easier for students to place than more recent, ongoing events, like Sticky playing basketball at Lincoln Rec). Students had to re-read the text, debate with others in their group, and/or explain their thinking to the teacher in asking for help, meaning that they ultimately came away with a much stronger grasp of the content of the story/Sticky’s life. Also, the nature of the activity allowed for students to physically move around through modifying the timeline, strengthening students’ kinesthetic and spatial intelligences. Finally, the timeline served as a concrete visual representation of Sticky’s life, serving to bolster our verbal discussions by portraying the information in a new way.
Attending to the different groups as they worked through this activity was also enlightening for me as a teacher. I was able to identify where students currently were with their comprehension of Sticky’s life so far. Almost every group was tripped up by later events, most of which were more vague time-wise, which told me students were able to recall the easier events but weren’t being perceptive to the smaller clues in the story telling us where the events occurring currently and/or in the future would be located. Also, from students selecting 2 more events for their timeline, I was able to see which events students found important, telling me what they’re remembering about Sticky’s life – and whether it matches with my lesson plans’ assumptions about what is important to retain from it.
Spring 2012 | Student Work Sample #2 - Romeo & Juliet Summative Assessment and Corrections
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The attachments above showcase a student’s improvement in comprehension of Romeo & Juliet via making corrections to work on the R&J final assessment. Through my comments on her work as well as conferencing with me individually, this student raised her grade significantly.
The first attachment shows the rubric for the assessment and the progress the student made in improving her grade. This course uses Standards-Based Grading (SBG), and I (along with the other teachers who administered this test) assessed each of the 3 standards by looking at different sections of the exam (for example, we assessed Standard 1, Read for Key Ideas and Details, through measuring students’ ability to correctly character-match, summarize/describe quotes, and offer a convincing interpretation of the sonnet). Since there’s a lot going on with the rubric, it appears confusing at first glance, but it actually allows me to keep track of exactly where a student’s strengths and weaknesses are, allowing me to give very specific, and therefore valuable, feedback for improvement.
The last 3 attachments focus on just one section of this exam where this student made a marked improvement – Section 3, the Tone Writing portion. In this section, students were asked to read a Shakespearean sonnet that they had never seen before, imagine that Romeo is the speaker, and write a paragraph discussing where these words could fit in Romeo & Juliet and why. Though we scaffolded the exercise by doing this kind of cold reading and interpretation beforehand, many students had difficulty interpreting the sonnet. This student did not fully understand the speaker’s tone either before or after the turn, and so her identification of where Romeo could have logically said these words in R&J was flawed. (Her first attempt = Attachment 2). Once I graded the assessment, she took a second look at the sonnet and attempted to improve her interpretation on her own (Attachment 3). She still had difficulty, indicating to me that her problem was not one of test anxiety but of not comprehending the text. She took me up on my offer to provide extra help, and together we discussed each line of the sonnet, picking out important words and pulling out its meaning. The result of that conference was her final revision (Attachment 4), which proved her gains in understanding and moved her score for Standard 1 up significantly, from a 2.5 to a 3.5.
The first attachment shows the rubric for the assessment and the progress the student made in improving her grade. This course uses Standards-Based Grading (SBG), and I (along with the other teachers who administered this test) assessed each of the 3 standards by looking at different sections of the exam (for example, we assessed Standard 1, Read for Key Ideas and Details, through measuring students’ ability to correctly character-match, summarize/describe quotes, and offer a convincing interpretation of the sonnet). Since there’s a lot going on with the rubric, it appears confusing at first glance, but it actually allows me to keep track of exactly where a student’s strengths and weaknesses are, allowing me to give very specific, and therefore valuable, feedback for improvement.
The last 3 attachments focus on just one section of this exam where this student made a marked improvement – Section 3, the Tone Writing portion. In this section, students were asked to read a Shakespearean sonnet that they had never seen before, imagine that Romeo is the speaker, and write a paragraph discussing where these words could fit in Romeo & Juliet and why. Though we scaffolded the exercise by doing this kind of cold reading and interpretation beforehand, many students had difficulty interpreting the sonnet. This student did not fully understand the speaker’s tone either before or after the turn, and so her identification of where Romeo could have logically said these words in R&J was flawed. (Her first attempt = Attachment 2). Once I graded the assessment, she took a second look at the sonnet and attempted to improve her interpretation on her own (Attachment 3). She still had difficulty, indicating to me that her problem was not one of test anxiety but of not comprehending the text. She took me up on my offer to provide extra help, and together we discussed each line of the sonnet, picking out important words and pulling out its meaning. The result of that conference was her final revision (Attachment 4), which proved her gains in understanding and moved her score for Standard 1 up significantly, from a 2.5 to a 3.5.