Why is it important to share and clarify learning intentions and success criteria?

Published May 25, 2015May 25, 2015 by Nick

Dylan Wiliam presents 5 Key Strategies for Assessment for Learning. Clarifying, sharing, and understanding learning intentions and criteria for success is one of these.

The following information is taken from an article titled Learning intentions and criteria and Dylan Wiliam’s Embedding Formative Assessment.

Why is clarifying the learning intention a good idea?

Because students are much more likely to achieve a learning intention they understand, ensuring the learning intention and criteria is very clear are really important.

How might this look?

Provide models and samples so students can really see what this looks like and compare it to other students samples at their own level.
Work together to make a list of what it would look like to meet the learning intention.
Use student friendly language not curriculum (ACARA) language.
There is no one right way to present learning intentions. Wiliam’s even suggests (pg 56 Embedding Formative Assessment) that sometimes it is not beneficial to tell the students what the lesson is about if that impacts on the way students will go about solving a problem, in say maths.

Click HERE to read about how the NSW Education Department suggests teachers go about presenting learning goals to their students.

The positive impact of self assessment

Published May 18, 2015May 18, 2015 by Nick

Dylan Wiliam presents 5 Key Strategies for Assessment for Learning. Activating students as owners of their own learning is one of these. How often do we get our students to reflect on their learning asking them to self assess on a regular basis? How worthwhile is it to do this?

The following information is from a blog post titled Self-Regulation of Learning Leads to Student Performance Improvement written by Kelly Goodrich. This can be read in full here.

For students to become actively engaged with the learning process they need guidelines and opportunities to learn and engage in self-assessment.
Engaging in the process of thinking about and assessing their own learning and then using feedback to improve requires students to take responsibility for their learning.
Students who are provided with regular opportunities and encouragement to engage in self-assessment are more likely to attribute their learning to internal beliefs i.e they feel they can impact on their own learning through effort and study (growth mindset).

Click HERE to see how one teacher scaffolds to help her students to self assess.

Year 3/4 Chickens

Published April 30, 2015April 30, 2015 by Nick

During term 1 our Year 3/4 class looked after and hatched baby chickens in the classroom. This was done through a program called Living Eggs. Jackie organised all the resources required to set up and hatch the eggs through the Living Eggs program. The class was supplied with fertilised eggs, incubator and other materials needed to successfully hatch and look after the chicks.

Living Eggs supplies:

Embryo eggs, 2-3 days from hatching.

The Living Eggs incubators specially designed for classroom hatching.

A brooder box complete with heat light, bedding, feed and waterer is supplied which allows teachers and children easy observation and access to the chicks.

Teachers Resources, including hundreds of activities directly linked to the National Curriculum are supplied on a CD with the kit.

Colourful wall posters are supplied depicting Life Cycles and Embryo Development, depending on your pupils’ ages.

The kids were very excited throughout the whole program particularly when the eggs hatched. Watching the chicks breaking the eggs and coming out was definitely a highlight for the students (and staff) who got to witness it happen. For those of you who missed the chicks hatching there is a video below.

Student Power Point Diary – All students kept a diary from the time the eggs arrived to the time they left the classroom to go to their new homes (lucky students got to keep the chickens).

Photos and Video

Publishing to a world wide audience

Published March 26, 2015May 21, 2015 by Nick

I have wanted to do this with students for a while and finally had the opportunity to do it with my Year 9 ICT class. The Year 9’s have published a book about Port Broughton to Apple’s iBook store. Click HERE to view and download the book.

The book can only be read in the iBooks app on an iPad or Mac computer.

Requirements: To view this book, you must have an iPad with iBooks 3 or later and iOS 5.1 or later, or a Mac with iBooks 1.0 or later and OS X 10.9 or later.

The Year 9 ICT course is all about how students can use their MacBooks more effectively and to show students the possibilities that their MacBooks provide. The book is the end result of students learning how to use the app, iBooks Author.

Prior to the class book being created students developed their understanding of how iBooks Author worked, creating their own books on a country they would like to visit. This allowed me to explicitly teach students how to use iBooks Author.

Once the topic of our class book was decided students were allocated chapters/sections to complete and sent away to collect images and create text for the book. Students completed their work on Word documents and collected images in JPG format. These documents were then Airdropped from their MacBooks to mine. Airdrop is an outstanding feature on the MacBook, iPad and iPhone. It allowed me to easily get multiple photos and Word documents from my 14 students quickly with no USB or cable connection required. The book was put together on my MacBook in iBooks Author with students able show me how they wanted their work formatted.

Once the book was completed the process to publish it from my MacBook to iBooks was reasonably simple. Selecting the Publish function in iBooks Author allows you to enable iTunes Connect and decide if you want to offer your book for free or sell your book. The third step in the process is to download iTunes Producer (through iTunes Connect) and use this to to upload the book to Apple for approval, which took approximately 4 days. My account, which was used to publish the book, is set up book to provide free books only. My understanding is that setting up an account for selling books is a little more complicated.

There are a number of clear benefits to students doing this activity which include:

Publishing to a world wide audience requires a certain level of quality.
- Understanding that family, friends, teachers and the wider public will be able to access their book meant that students spent considerably more time drafting and editing. Three fifty minute lessons were used for drafting the book. Approximately 50% of students were involved in the first two lessons. In the third lesson 100% of the students were involved in editing the book which was projected onto the whiteboard in its final iBook format.
Learning about and understanding copyright.
- We didn’t go into great detail but students very clearly understood that permission had to be granted to use most images and that acknowledgement of sources was important. Students also learnt were to find copyright free images like the State Library of South Australia (online collections). Students contacted the Northern Argus, the Port Broughton Bowling Club and Barunga West Council to get permission to use their images while I approached the local caravan park and South Australia Media Gallery. The S.A. Media Gallery required an account to be set up and a written application applying for use of their images.
Students who are interested in writing as a pass time or future career have been exposed to a legitimate and professional way of publishing a book.
I haven’t asked the students yet but I am assuming there is also a certain feeling of accomplishment having contributed to a book that has been formally published. My intention is to ask the students how they felt about the process and if it was a worthwhile experience.

The following images are of pages from the book in the iBooks Author app prior to being published.

Teaching Spelling

Published March 18, 2015 by Nick

Teaching spelling is certainly not my area of expertise. Having said this and putting all jokes about PE teachers aside I would like to present the following information to get those of you who explicitly teach spelling to think about how you go about teaching spelling and what strategies you use.

Current research literature outlines some instructional approaches that are recommended as being effective for developing students’ spelling, including the integration of multiple spelling strategies and word sort activities (Bear, Templeton, Invernizzi & Johnston, 2008; Fellowes & Oakley, 2010; Kelman & Apel, 2004). These approaches encourage the incorporation of four types of spelling knowledge that can form the base for children becoming competent spellers. These types of knowledge include phonological, visual, morphemic and etymological knowledge (Fellowes & Oakley, 2010). However, as stated, this information is often largely unknown by many teachers. University of Tasmania, Learning to Spell: An Examination of Year 4 Teachers’ Beliefs, Knowledge and Practices for the Teaching of Spelling. Caitlin E. Kennedy (Honours, Bachelor of Education), 2014

Research from The University of Tasmania shows gaps exists between the recommended teaching pedagogies within the research literature and the practices implemented by teachers within the classroom, particularly in the middle primary years.

Read the research paper here: Learning to Spell: An Examination of Year 4 Teachers’ Beliefs, Knowledge and Practices for the Teaching of Spelling

Phonological Knowledge: Refers to “how words sound”. This involves the awareness of words in oral language and the unit of sound that they are formed with, including syllables, onsets and rimes, and phonemes. For example, recognising the separate sounds of /c/, /a/ and /t/ in the word ‘cat’.
Visual Knowledge: Refers to “how words look”. This involves an understanding of the written language, including concepts of print, the alphabet, spelling patterns, and the relationship between letters and sounds.
Morphemic Knowledge: Refers to “how words change form”. This concerns the structure of words, and how morphemes can be composed together to create a word. It requires understanding of morphemes, root words, prefixes and suffixes, compound words, and spelling rules.
Etymological Knowledge: Refers to “where words come from”. It involves an understanding of the origin of words, including those that are derived from other languages.

View the following videos from the Teaching the Australian Curriculum English website. The videos explain aspects of the four types of knowledge that research suggests is required to be a competent speller.

The teachers and students in the videos are very well drilled. Once you get passed the staged nature of some of the videos there is some good information about the explicit teaching of spelling.

View Visual spelling knowledge – Year 2

View Phonological spelling knowledge – Year 2

View Morphemic spelling knowledge – Year 4

View Etymological spelling knowledge – Year 5

View Morphemic spelling – Nominalisation – Year 8

View Etymological spelling knowledge – Year 10

The TFEL Compass Tool – Tutorial Videos

Published February 23, 2015May 21, 2015 by Nick

The Teaching and Learning in South Australia You Tube Channel has posted 3 videos on how to set up and use the TFEL Compass Tool. These videos were produced by the Teaching for Effective Learning Team.

We have discussed the TFEL Compass Tool before at PBAS and some staff have gone on to create surveys. What I like about these videos are the explanations given about the Polar Maps and Quality Tests within the Compass Tool. Both of these allow you to analyse your data. The Tool provides feedback for you based around the feedback you received from the students or observer.

Tutorial 1: Creating a survey

Tutorial 2: Polar Maps

Tutorial 3: Quality Tests

Learning Design – What do my students already know?

Published February 18, 2015 by Nick

Tanya has very kindly allowed me to share her classroom observation which occurred in week 3. Tanya’s focus is around Finding out what students already know. This closely links with the Learning Design process and TFEL.

Domain 4 Personalise and connect learning. Element: 4.1 build on learners’ understandings the teacher identifies students’ prior knowledge and cultural practices as a starting point for curriculum.

I have inserted Tanya’s observational notes based on our new 2015 observational proforma. Please have a read and hopefully it provides some help and inspiration with your own planning in this area.

Learning Design – very quickly, what is it?

One of the 6 areas of Learning Design, What do they bring? requires us to carefully consider the beliefs, misconceptions and experiences students have. “What students bring” should not only be considered in relation to the content being taught but also other experiences students have had that impact on their attitude towards learning and their relationship with the teacher and other students.

To become effective at finding out what our students bring we need strategies to help us elicit this information. I have provided some resources that hopefully give some practical strategies that can easily be used in the classroom to achieve the aim of finding out what students bring to your classroom.

Resource 1: Click on the diagram to go to the Cornell University Centre for Teaching and Excellence website

Resource 2: Strategies to find out what students know

The Shadow Game

Published December 2, 2014March 11, 2017 by Nick

The concept of making something move using a motion path in a Power Point is fairly simple. The concept of projecting it up on a wall and having students interact with it physically, problem solve and share their solutions helps develop basic movement skills and promotes collaboration.

Here is a game given to me by @matulisj who created the Power Point you will see projected on the wall in my video. The second video shows two of his students in October this year using a computer and motion capture technology to create their own game. Pretty cool stuff!

#910DA Health Class

Published November 13, 2014March 11, 2017 by Nick

My Year 9/10 health class are continuing to use Twitter to share and discuss their term 4 topic drugs and alcohol. We have been focusing on the legalisation of medical marijuana over the last few weeks.

For those interested in reading what my students have been tweeting I have embedded the #910DA Twitter feed into the blog (scroll down its on the left hand side).

Students are on a steep learning curve about how to tweet effectively and not all tweets have been accurate! One student account misread an article and their tweet reflected this. They had also not supplied the link to the study they were quoting. When asked they did provide the link and I was able to help them understand what the article actually said. I’ve inserted the conversation below.

It is this type of conversation that has led to face to face conversations in the classroom about being accurate with what we post. For example some of the statements in the image below are flat out lies that falsely promoted a positive view of marijuana i.e. marijuana cures cancer. As a class we were able to view the graphic and talk about what we thought was accurate and what we thought was inaccurate and why. We also discussed how posting something in this way says we agree with the content and if the content is inaccurate it reflects on us.

A benefit to using this method of communication was realised when I was absent from school and missed my weekly 9/10 health class. The lesson I set for the relief teacher involved students responding to links I had sent them via Twitter. I was able to sit at home and see who was engaging in the activity and respond to student tweets, all in real time. I was there without physically being there. Below are some examples of my interactions during this lesson.

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