The Ongoing Assessment Window

A word cloud showing the content of the blog so far... no wonder why DI is student-centered!!

According to Betty Hollas, ongoing and meaningful assessment should guide our practice, they are the core and heart of DI, they drive our decisions and planning as well as the ways in which we handle content and adapt for specific needs.   Data gathered in assessment defines the way you will design the upcoming learning opportunities.   Providing the students with opportunities to prove what they know in different ways and formats, allows us to have a wider view and perspective on how to accomodate for special needs as we teach and try to reach every student. 

When students are included in the process of assessment, there are real opportunities for them to grow as learners and also obtain better results as we make goals clear and also give them opportunities to reflect upon what they learn. 

Some of the strategies I've used are:

•   The human continuum for pre-assessment.
•   Analogies
•   Evaluating the appropriateness of reading materials
•   Signal cards
• If you know it, show it! (by using thumbs up, standing up, remaining seated, smiley faces, colors, etc)
• Exit cards
• Student self-assessment.
• Three facts and a fib.
• Learning logs and response journals

-----Our Math continuum:  a great tool to develop self-awareness about learning!








Our inquiry board ---

Open-ended question board.

Our Unit board depicting artifacts, a museum and students pre-assessment on time.

The Flexible Grouping Window: Prioritizing interaction to enhance learning

Sometimes I hear people say that the only way to display DI is through small group instruction and by having a thousand centers in our classroom.  It might  sound ideal, but let's be practical, who has all that time for that cumbersome load of work that is needed to put everything together?  I love the idea of incorporating varied settings for group work in which students could gain understanding, a strong feeling of belonging and still construct meaning and master concepts and skills.  Betty Hollas sythetizes her third window as follows:

Some aspects to take into account are also:

1.  Group size.

2.  Building students' awarenss on accountability and roles within the groups:  I have incorporated a group checklist after students finish a task.  They know that they will have to self-assess at the end of every project and that gives them a clear view of what I expect from their work.  Prompting and scaffolding is provided along the way, thus developing a sense of increasing independence, something that I love to see in my first graders.
3.  Agree on protocols and norms to make group work a smooth thing to do.
4.  Teachers are coaches and facilitators.

Incorporating flexible grouping within your daily practices for DI makes sre that you approach learning styles, multiple intelligences, skills, interests, readiness etc.  Grouping promotes student achievement and a personal interaction with knowledge that sets the tone for a more meaningful way to learn and also teach!  Flexible grouping also offerss the opportunity of extending student understanding of concepts and content through anchoring, a concept that is closely related to DI and something that we have incorporrated into our daily planning as we teach in Primero B.

Students will soon start understanding and using the language of DI as you develop the awareness of grouping as a powerful tool to  meet each individual's needs.  My students for example, already know there are groups for Language and Math and they've realised that the group setting changes over time. They've also realized that once you master certain skills you are able to move on to another group.  Sometimes we mix students (a yellow, a blue and a red member into one group) in order to add variety to the interaction, and also so that students in the lowest spectrum of skills development are in touch with successful learners and strategies they use to tackle learning opportunities and activities.  The learning they get from this interaction is valuable, and clearly sets the tone for further reflection and awareness in our classroom.

Some practices we've been using in our classroom are:

• Numbered Heads Together:  Grouping students in fours and assign each one of them a number 1 to 4.  Then you pose a question or an issue to be discussed.  The group will then get together, discuss and share their response, and everyone needs to be very attentive and be able to respond if I call them up to share the group's opinion.  Those students to tend to be "wiser" will somehow "teach" the others, while the "lazy" ones need to find a way to contribute as well at least by paying attention because they don't know which number will be called. 
• Discussion Cards for Narrative Text:  Students are given a reading assignment according to their level of readiness and they are assigned a given "job" in order to focus on one element of the reading:  characters, setting, theme, and resolution.  We have included differentiated question prompts for each one of the "jobs" so that students have a clear target as they read and prepare their product.
• 4-6-8:  As a whole class, you could work out the names of 4 characters, 6 settings and 8 events that might happen in a story.  Then you can circle a character, a setting and an event and encourage the students to write a story using these cues.

By clearly stating the roles within the group, this quad of first graders was able to put together a song that tells about our responsibility towards our natural resources.  Careful planning using the guidance of the teachers, and appropriate monitoring and self-assessment at the end, with clear criteria for success made it possible to hear a wonderful product!

THE QUESTIONING WINDOW: How to use questioning to build Student-Centered Instruction

Pace is sharing his findings on "The most polluted places on Earth" based on his own question during class. His inquiry led other classmates into researching polluted rivers, cities and pollution-related issues such as the tree-chopping crime in the Amazon rainforest!

Sometimes we feel trapped in the middle of a monologue when we teach. Avoiding these "lectures" as we teach will put the ball in the right side, giving students the responsibility for developing learning experiences and insights as we move along the curriculum. Such a demanding task is well-supported by our school's flexible use of time and the Program of Inquiry that drives day-to-day instruction. In her book, Betty Hollas reminds us all of the need of having the students as the center of the instruction, "it means the focus is off you an on your students, it means students are doing something,as opposed to just sitting and listening" pg.27. Teaching will become a more effective task if we deveote more time to really think our questions and if we provide enough time for students to develop questioning skills and come up with their own questions. All of these elements will provide a high-quality instruction in which you are aiming at higher-level thinking, students will be more engaged and encouraged to see new perspectives and construct meaning, aspects which related and fit perfectly into the PYP curricular framework. She then moves on and keeps us thinking by asking "Which is more important in your classroom, the question or the answer?". What do you think? How much more can your students learn if you let them drive the questioning? Are students doing self-differentiation when they ask their questions? How far can we go as teachers if we use the well-known Bloom's taxonomy to consciously reach higher levels of thinking in our questions?

Some of the strategies I've been using in my classroom include the following:

• Differentiated Wait time: giving enough time for students to think about what they're going to say. I usually prompt my students after a question to say it in their minds, double check to see if it sounds good, then say it again and then raise their hands. Mrs. Hollas recommends that we have teh students show understanding of what we're teaching every 8 to 10 minutes by pairing up students and share, playing a quick game, etc.
• Question Tic-Tac-Toe / Cubes (using Bloom's taxonomy): a great way to validate elarning styles and readiness in your classroom!
• Question posters: Display a piece of poster paper with a question related to your current unit, then encourage students to add their answers on sticky notes as the lesson moves on. By doing this, my students have been able to propose their own poster questions to be answered by all the class.
• Questions Wall (Adapted from Betty Holla's Questions that Keep going around my head): I created a wall including a photo of each student in a thinking pose, then I added speech bubbles and laminated them. Every time a student asks a relevant question related to our unit of inquiry, or if he/she makes an interesting statement, I record those on the bubble for further study or research. Valuing these questions has promoted a culture of questioning in my classroom that the children enjoy and feel very proud of. We also include an Inquirer of the Week in our weekly homework summary sheet, highlighting the questioning and inquiiry skills of one of our kids and sharing that with the parents of our class. See the attachment for details.
• Give me five! using a graphic organizer depicting a hand, students answer the following questions when we read a book: What mental pictures do I see? (visualization), What does this remind me of? (Connections), What do I know now, even though I wasn't told the information in the text? (inference), What might happen next? (Prediction), What was this mostly about? (Summarization/conclusions)
• But the Answer's not here!: An adaptation to this strategy has led me to work hard with my students on types of questions: right-there questions, questions that need research and thinking, and questions that require that I connect with the text.
• D.E.A.Q (Drop Everything And Question): every other week, we would stop our routine and use question starters to tell the kids to think of questions using these. I collect the questions and use them for further work on ur inquiry or for reading comprehension/homework purposes.

As we are immersed in an inquiry-based program, we should become aware of the need to always be ready in terms of questioning. Betty Hollas suggests a common-sense practice that we might disregard as we plan our instruction: Planning questions as a key aspect of our teaching. By following our goals and indicators, targeting these and translating them into activities that make meaning of the content and constantly monitoring our students' success through ongoing assessment, the questioning comes in handy in order to articulate everything altogether.

I love the image that Mrs. Hollas shares about us teachers being a pitcher in a baseball game, "the pitcher determines what pitches to throw, and he determines the speed and location of the ball. The greater the variety of pitches a pitcher can throw, the more he can influence the success of his team" Pag. 4

Useful Resources I've found:

http://www.readingrockets.org/strategies/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5uKqs3D0Z0M
http://pzweb.harvard.edu/vt/VisibleThinking_html_files/01_VisibleThinkingInAction/01a_VTInAction.html

THE WINDOW FOR STUDENT ENGAGEMENT

Engagement makes sure every student develops the ability to gain a sense of confidence and mastery of content and skills that make it more meaningful and ever-lasting. It completely matches the IB goal of making lifelong learners. When students are able to see clear connections, and use content to explore new ways to approach it, they see learning as an interactive pathway through which they can build meaning and gain ownership. Through these strategies I personally tested in my Primero B class, you will surely gain that engagement needed in our bilingual environment to make key aspects such as vocabulary development, a more vivid and meaningful part of your daily academic routine.

• Appointment Calendar (see attachment)
  In this strategy, students are told to write down appointments for the day. Once there comes a point to discuss during the lesson, you can simply say "meet with your 3:00 pm appointment and discuss why the character is making this decision". This strategy works well with the bodily-kinesthetic learners, it legitimates movement around the classroom. Gives a purpose for moving around, and alliviates the problem of those complaining because you never call them when it's time to participate. You may find yourself creating a variety of pathways to learning to make curriculum accessible to all students, a clear way to use DI in your everyday class routines.
• Timed-Pair Paraphrase
  Students meet with one of their peers on the calendar. The teacher times the interaction in order to make sure everyone gets the same amount of participation. They hear each other and paraphrase what the partner said. By doing this, you are inviting
  every single student into discussion, you’re opening a path to success specially for those who are shy or not as spontaneous to show what they know or think.
  · Carousel your way through a KWL
  This strategy makes the kwl more interactive. Post 3 chart papers around the room and then have students rotate in order to display what they know about a certain topic. Students will check off things they also knew as they rotate. Encourage students to ignore everything that is or sounds wrong. A reporter will give a summary to the class about the information on the chart they started with. Ask if they have any further questions about the topic. When the topic is over, go back to the posters and check what they’ve learned. By doing this, you keep students moving, listening, speaking, discussing,and listing, thus integrating multiple learning styles into an activity that has become quite a bore in regular classroom. By involving movement you also help those bodily kinesthetic get their share and the interactive nature of the strategy makes it more meaningful than the plain sheet of paper filled out by every single kid! My students love the carousel!!
  · Vocabulary on the Move
  Vocabulary instruction needs student engagement in order to have the words stick to the students' long-term memories.
  In order to use this strategy, Make a list of vocabulary words. Write words on sentence strips and make headbands with them. Ask sts to put on a headband without looking at the word. Create a list of questions on the board the goal will be to guess the word on the headband. After so many clues, ask students to think whar they’ve figured out and share why they think they’re right. This active involvement is a key component of differentiated instruction. By engaging students in learning, you are making sure that they will retain whatever you’re teaching them. An awesome adaptation for math also helps with facts, or key concepts to develop as well!
  · Show, don't Tell
  List vocabulary words and have students draw what they mean on index cards, and come up front to share their drawings and act out the meaning of the words. As sts do this, review the words that were given before, as a warm up next day, you could start by showing the cards and have sts act out the words. You’re providing ways to help sts
  keep these words in their long.term memories.
  Showball Fights
  Have students reflect on what they learned in the session today and ask them to write that on a piece of paper. Have sts bring their papers and ask them to sit on circle.
  Ask them to make a ball with the paper and throw it into the center of the circle. Call students to read the snowballs they've got and assess information contained in the snowballs. With wrong information, review and correct. Collect snowballs for assessment purposes. You may want to conference those students who wrote mistaken statements or those who don't show a clear understanding of the concept of content taught. Through thhis strategy, you have used ongoing assessment to drive the curriculum. Ongoing assessment is a key component of DI.
  
  · That's me
• You will say certain statements, and students will say "that’s me" if those apply to them. For example, “I have a pet cat”.. etc. Later during the
  year, you can link this with content material for example, “ I know the
  difference between fiction and non-fiction”…
  By using this strategy, we are giving the students the opportunity to get to know each other, find commonalities and build a strong learning community, a key aspect
  of DI and our IB-PYP curriculum!
  ·
  Vote with your feet and not with your hands
  A differentiated classroom promotes the development of inquiry and thinking skills, and a safe environment to express views and opinions using arguments. Giving the students the opportunity to apporach learning materials in a more personal way, will provide engagement and meaningful insight. You will promote critical thinking and inquiry through this activity. Make a statements that promote discussion such as “homework is not necessary” Tell students to move
  to a specific side of the class if they disagree or agree with the statement and give them time to elaborate their viewpoints and arguments together, then encourage a grand discussion.