TeacherTalk.site - Tips, Tricks and Resources for Teachers

Featured

The “so what” of learning

Often teachers spend considerable periods of time devising their own units of work or modifying existing units of work, based on their student needs. After all, we are in the game because we care and we want to see our children grow into active and informed citizens.

We scour through curriculum documents and whole school planning documents to devise these wonderful and engaging units of work for our children to devour and to learn from. Whether we use more traditional direct instruction or more constructivist inquiry learning pedagogies, the purpose is always the same – to enhance student learning!

We may alert our students to the purpose of the learning by posting our learning intentions at the beginning of the lesson or announcing what we want them to be able to do by the end of the lesson and check this off with an exit ticket. We are alerting their brains to what is to come so they can make connections, hopefully, with existing knowledge and what is to come.

Whether it be at the end of a specific lesson or at the end of a unit of work over several days or weeks, at some point the “penny” must drop of “why are we learning this?” Hopefully, as the teacher and creator of learning activities, the intention and applicability to their lives have been built into the learning activities. Hopefully, along the way, they have realised how they can apply these reading skills in their lives. What about applying Pythagoras’s theorem to their lives? Hmm! Well, we can try!!

When creating a unit of work, it is worth considering “Why is this important for my children to learn, to understand or be able to do?” At the end of a unit of work specifically, after a raft of learning activities and the new knowledge and/or skills gained, how will this be of benefit to my students? This is the “so what” of learning. Why have we learned X, Y and Z and how does it impact my life? Will I use this on a regular basis? After all this learning, does it drive or compel me to act in a certain way? Is there a “call to action”?

For example, you have been studying how we celebrate cultural days in Australia (Year 3 ACHASS064) and learned about the important Australian and other cultural days of importance and held a cultural lunch with students and parents. Children can state the important days of celebration in Australia and a few from other countries and the feeling is all warm and fuzzy, especially after that shared cultural lunch. However, “so what” – why did we learn this?

Surely a unit of work on understanding days of significance in Australia not only develops an understanding of ANZAC Day, Christmas Day, etc. but also develops an understanding of other days of significance for cultures represented in our school population. Surely we want the students to develop an understanding of the importance of celebrating important days for ALL people. We want them to develop empathy towards people of all cultures and to respect their days of celebration and commemoration.

So, after the unit of work, apart from the usual PowerPoint of commemorative days around the world and the shared cultural lunch, what is the call to action? Do the Year 3 students note our school calendar only includes Australian days of commemoration? Do they notice we do not have special school assemblies apart from ANZAC Day? How are the other cultural groups represented in our school recognised and their commemorative days celebrated? Perhaps the Year 3s need to write a letter to the Principal encouraging him/her to also include other days of significance on the school calendar. Perhaps the Year 3s could invite the Student Councillors to hear why other days of celebration should be added to the list of assemblies for the year.

It is incumbent upon teachers as creators of learning activities to ensure students know why they are learning this and how it applies to their lives. One way to do this is to think of the “so what” of learning, which may involve a call to action at the completion of the unit of work.

I’m so over a KWL

Recently I have been looking at examples of integrated units of work, mostly from preservice teachers. Unfortunately, most of them commence an inquiry unit with a KWL (Know, Want to know and Learned) chart. Now, don’t get me wrong, there is nothing wrong with the occasional use of a KWL chart as an excellent diagnostic assessment of prior knowledge. If you don’t know where the students are at (their prior knowledge) then you could have to go away and spend more solitary evenings revamping your planned unit of work.

So what are the alternatives to a KWL chart? There are plenty of alternatives out there and I would love to hear from you below to add your favourites. One unit of work was for a Year 5 class about endangered animals and how we can protect them. Instead of a KWL chart, I suggested the following:

I would encourage you to think outside the KWL chart as an initial activity. Instead, could you present the students with a Venn diagram (3 circles) and 3 photos – a koala, a Tasmanian Tiger and an emu and ask them to note the similarities and differences? Hopefully, they will notice the koala is endangered (on the east coast of Australia) and the Tasmanian Tiger is extinct. The pairs/small groups could report back to the larger group and discuss their findings. The Venn diagrams go on display and already you have assessed their prior knowledge and created words for the word wall (endangered, extinct, nocturnal, etc.)

Other teachers use a picture book or an image to arouse interest and commence discussions about the topic. The art is in asking probing questions to ascertain prior knowledge. There is not much point in showing a YouTube video before you assess prior knowledge as you have just contaminated their prior knowledge by presenting the information.

What advice would you give beginning teachers to introduce a unit of work/assess prior knowledge without using a KWL chart?

Teaching Strategies

Despite our number of years teaching, whether a novice or a veteran, we are all lifelong learners. We want to improve our “art” of teaching using the latest brain-based learning research and to expand our repertoire of engaging and effective learning strategies. We also need to be able to improvise and use low-tech learning activities on the go!

Although these learning activities are all effective and engaging, their use needs to be moderated. For example, if you always use a KWL chart at the beginning of a unit, no matter how effective the technique is, it will become stale for the students. So, mix it up a bit and try some of the other assessments of prior knowledge activities.

So, here is a list of suitable teaching/learning activities to try. Some are best suited to the beginning of the lesson, some are for small groups and some are applicable in almost any lesson. Give them a try! If you would like to suggest some more, then please email me.

	WHY?	WHEN?	WHO?
See Think Wonder	Encourages students to make careful observations and thoughtful interpretations	Beginning / middle	Individually, small group or whole class
Think Pair Share	Encourages students to share and discuss ideas around a problem, issue or topic	Anytime	Small group or whole class
Jigsaw	Assign each group a different aspect of a topic which they research, then they report back to their normal group	Middle	Small group or whole class
KWL	Students state what they already know, what they want to know and finally what did they learn (self-assessment)	Beginning and end	Individually
Brainstorming	Useful for generating lots of ideas quickly. Can also be used as a mind-mapping activity	Anytime	Small group or whole class
Chat Stations	Useful to generate small group discussion. Students get to move around.	Beginning / middle	Small group then the whole class
Mindmapping	Useful to help students organise and structure complex and related content	Beginning, but can be added to throughout	Individual or small group
Crumple & Shoot	Useful review strategy for content and to get the students moving	Middle or end	Whole class in small groups
1 Minute Paper	Helps students identify misconceptions and provides a diagnostic tool for teachers	Middle or end of a lesson	Individually

A performance of worth

Have you heard of “death by PowerPoint”? I am sure many of us have sat through a professional development session (or maybe a few) where the lecturer (sage on the stage) thought the most efficient way to promulgate their wealth of knowledge was via a PowerPoint presentation. They probably had way too much text on the screen and read most of the text from the screen. PowerPoint was never designed to be used like this. “Less is more” is certainly true when it comes to PowerPoint presentations. PowerPoint was designed to be a visual clue for the presenter to keep on task and also to provide a scaffold for the learner via minimal text on the screen. If in doubt, have a look at most of the presenters at TED Talks.

How many of us are guilty of inflicting “death by PowerPoint” on our students? At the end of the unit of work on multiculturalism, for example, how many of us have asked for the obligatory PowerPoint presentation for the student to demonstrate their knowledge? Don’t get me wrong, an end of the unit presentation is sometimes the best way to demonstrate knowledge … sometimes! In contemporary schools, there are a plethora of ways children can demonstrate their learning, especially using technology. However, that is the scope for another blog one day!

At the end of a unit of work, apart from all the formative assessment learning activities the students have been involved in, there may be a justifiable reason for a summative assessment such as a culminating activity. No, I am not going to suggest a PowerPoint presentation here! A summative assessment, as the name implies, is an “at end of work” or “summary” of their learning. It could be as simple as the “Learn” column on a KWL chart, or as comprehensive as a website the student has created or a performance through the Arts.

Closely aligned with my previous blogs on the “so what of learning” and a “call to action”, I propose we should consider a “performance of worth”. When designing the unit of work sometimes teachers work backwards and plan from the performance of work (summative assessment activity) through all the learning activities required back to the initial learning activity to pique interest and assess prior knowledge.

If you decide a summative assessment is warranted then let us consider what might be a performance of worth. The performance of worth is a double-edged sword. It has “worth” because it is, generally, an important assessment piece to gauge student learning. Secondly, it is of “worth” to the student as they demonstrate their learning. For example, if you have been studying basic electrical circuits in Science, you could give the children a worksheet where they have to identify circuits that would work or not work. Even better, you could ask them to use an app such as Explain Everything and explain why some circuits would not work and how to make them work. Even better and more engaging would be for the student to make a house with lights and alarms that are activated by pressure pads (aluminium strips to connect the circuit). The students would not only demonstrate their knowledge, but also the application of the knowledge which s a higher-order skill (Bloom’s taxonomy). See for example https://www.instructables.com/Electronic-Cardboard-House/

Again, I have nothing against PowerPoint, is used correctly, however, there are far more engaging and higher-order performances students can utilise to demonstrate their learning.

Tips for New Teachers

I must admit I almost gave up teaching in my first year as the reality of 40 Year4 children in a classroom with me as the only adult in the room was too daunting! I found the balance between classroom management and someone whom the children wanted to learn from a challenge! The real classroom was very different to my highly successful practicum placements when the “real” classroom teacher was in the room with the prac student! On reflection, I always said my first year was about me getting my head together about how to teach and only in the second year did I begin teaching to be effective. Having said that, after four years of teaching Year 4, I was ready to pull my hair out and wanted a change of grade. Fortunately, I was given a Year 6 class and so my learning of the curriculum grew.

I think my initial “sink or swim” introduction to teaching has always stuck with me and may be the main impetus why my Masters of Education thesis was on developing a more effective induction model for beginning teachers.

If you look online there is a plethora of articles and books on advice for first year teachers. “5 Mistakes to avoid as a first year teacher”, “20 things I wish I knew as a first year teacher”, etc. To save you having to glean through all these resources, I have done the job for you and looked for commonalities to make your job easier!

5 Top Tips for First Year Teachers:

Teaching Philosophy: I suggest spending some time writing adjectives that describe the type of teacher you wish to be. Just write them down on a blank piece of A4 paper without categorising them. Leave this aside on your desk for a few days and as new words come to mind, jot them down. (This process relates to Wallas’ 4 step model of creativity and this allows a period of “incubation”). What should appear is a “collage” of who you wish to become as a teacher and will inform your philosophy of teaching. If you now arrange these adjectives into categories, you will have the draft of a philosophy of education – your teaching style. This will inform HOW you will teach, deal with students, and prioritise what is most important to you.
High Expectations: With the above philosophy of teaching in mind, what expectations will you set for your students? The sage advice would be to keep your expectations high, especially at the beginning of the year. By practising procedures and routines with the children over and over (depending on their age) in the first two weeks of school, you will set the scene for smooth transitions and more effective classroom management. What will your discipline plan be? Is this in concert with the school-wide policy? How will you ensure your classroom management is consistent and fair?
Ask questions: In some schools, you will be assigned a mentor teacher as your “go to” person. You go to them and ask for advice, inquire about procedures, ask about resources in the school, etc. If this is not the case, then you will need to find a teacher whom you respect and would like to emulate and informally have them be your “go to” person. It is the person who you can stick your head into their classroom to ask a question, who can show you how they establish reading groups, or whatever you need to know. Most teachers are caring and sharing people by nature, so this will not be seen as an imposition by them, rather they will be happy to assist.
Organisation is the key: In order to be an effective teacher, you will need to be organised. Not only do you need to have preplanned how children will access all the things they need without having to constantly ask the teacher, but you also need to have all the resources you will need at your fingertips. There are many resources out there for teachers to purchase to help organise their planning documents and similarly, there are plenty of Pinterest pages and blog posts about how to set up your classroom. (This will be a later blog!) You need to have all the things you need to do your job properly at your fingertips – how will you store assessment records? Will you have electronic storage of lessons and plans (e.g. Google Drive)? You will have many tasks to perform and meetings to attend. How will you keep track of all of these – a synced task app/calendar on all your devices?
Be kind to yourself!: There are times when you will experience the highs and the lows of the first year of teaching! Realise you cannot please all the people all the time (including parents). Realise not every lesson needs to be “OTT” (over the top lesson) as this is not sustainable. Similarly, not every piece of student work needs to be marked. When you do spend time planning your teaching program, ensure you have sufficient formative and summative assessment task that relate directly to the assessment of the objectives/outcomes/standards/content descriptors. Being a teacher requires a great deal of “administration” time – whether planning documents at the beginning of each term, marking and grading assessments or writing biannual reports for each child. Set yourself times to work and then reward yourself with mini-breaks as you achieve each small step towards the larget task completion. This might be 5 minutes walking around in the fresh air, or a coffee break, 5 minutes on Facebook or whatever re-energises you! The same applies in each school holiday period – apart from attending to all the home tasks that were not completed during term, you need some downtime as teaching is a physically and emotionally demanding occupation.

You have chosen to enter the teaching profession for all the right reasons and you want this to be a sustainable career so you can make the most difference to the most students in your care.

The push for STEM

In 2015, all Australian education ministers agreed to the National STEM School Education Strategy 2016–2026, which focuses on foundation skills, developing mathematical, scientific and digital literacy, and promoting problem solving, critical analysis and creative thinking skills. The strategy aims to coordinate current activities, and improve STEM education.
https://www.education.gov.au/support-science-technology-engineering-and-mathematics

STEM is an acronym for Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths. Many countries appreciate the necessity to stimulate innovation and to prepare students for an uncertain future where half of the jobs they will be employed in do not even exist yet, using technologies that have not yet been invented. While this quote is often attributed to Richard Riley, Bill Clinton’s Secretary of Education back in 2006, it is still true today, although some authors now believe we have upped the ante to about 65% of the future jobs have not been invented yet!

How do we, as educators address such a contention? We ned to “future proof” our students, hence the push for 21st century skills such as the 4Cs (Collaboration, Communication Creativity and Critical thinking). We need to prepare our students for an uncertain future by equipping them with the skills to adapt to change and to work together to solve problems and find solutions to global issues through creativity and invention.

Many countries, therefore, have tasked educators to highlight the learning areas of STEM. It is through using pedagogical approaches such as inquiry learning or project-based learning. These pedagogies are found in many of the STEM challenges that pervade the Internet ready for teacher download for their class. However, as teachers, we need to scrutinise, as always, what we are downloading to use with our children. Simply “doing” a STEM activity will not necessarily enhance their 21st-century skills or develop their STEM knowledge or skills.

In order to be productive and educative, STEM activities need to:

provide for a “hands-on” inquiry pedagogical approach to solve an authentic problem;
provide opportunities for collaborative work (small groups) and communication;
provide practice in the design/engineering process;
provide a rigorous scaffolded application of Maths/Science principles and concepts; and
provide a climate where mistakes are welcomed and lead to further learning.

The First Year of Teaching

Even though my first year of teaching was over 30 years ago, I am sure some of the problems I encountered will still exist for new teachers in contemporary schools. Even though the technologies have changed, making some tasks much easier, there are still many “grit” tasks that all teachers face.

Firstly, as a walk down memory lane, I began teaching with 42 Year 4 children in an inner suburban religious school. We used either the Gestetner or spirit duplicator to make multiple copies of worksheets as the new fang-dangled photocopiers were slow and expensive! The Gestetner worked on a typed carbon stencil and the ink was squeezed through the stencil at high speed to leave its copy on the paper. A very messy process! The spirit duplicator (hand cranked) used methylated spirits (hence the name “spirit”) and could be smelled rooms away!

When it came time to write reports, they were written by hand and as correction fluid was not allowed, if you made a mistake, you had to start all over again!

So even though technologies have changed, many things remain the same … the professional requirements of teachers, the administrative tasks, the art of teaching 30 plus children each day across a range of subjects (as a primary generalist teacher), the need for classroom management, the need to cater for diverse students and the need to assess and provide feedback on student work.

In recent years the professional demands on teachers have increased (partly due to the rise in the AITSL Professional Standards for Teachers in Australia). I think teachers now face more diversity in their classrooms as immigration has become a global phenomenon and they are required to keep abreast of contemporary pedagogical approaches and the use of ICT.

I feel I have a special affinity with new teachers as my Masters of Education thesis was about proposing an alternative mentorship program for beginning teachers to assist them in the first few years of teaching. Part of the purpose of this blog is to offer advice to new teachers they might find useful to keep them in the teaching profession. You can’t put an old head on new shoulders, but we can share our collective wisdom with each other. It is about working smarter, not harder!

You might like to read the article Tips for New Teachers.

What topics would you like to see covered in this blog?

Formative Assessment

Formative assessment refers to a wide variety of methods that teachers use to conduct in-process evaluations of student comprehension, learning needs, and academic progress during a lesson, unit, or course.
https://www.edglossary.org/formative-assessment/

Formative assessment is the ongoing day to day check of student learning. It can be a simple thumbs up or thumbs down to check understanding or can be more complex and time consuming such as a Kahoot Quiz to check comprehension of the content. It is a checking of the pulse to check on student learning – to see what is understood and what needs to be learned or retaught. Often teachers use formative assessment to see how their teaching is going – did the children understand this concept/process or do I have to reteach it in another way?

However, before we get too carried away, it is important to understand some of the ways you can assess student learning through formative assessment. The following list is not exhaustive:

questioning
work samples
interview
observation
self assessment
peer assessment
journals
etc.

Once you have decided upon the purpose and the type of formative assessment you will conduct, it is important to also decode HOW you will keep and store this data. This is known as a record keeping device. For instance, if you choose to observe how each child is working collaboratively on a small group task, how is it best to record this information? You could use a checklist which has differing levels of agreed statements of what collaboration looks like in a small group. Sure, you could video each child at work and store the video in their portfolio, but you will still have to watch the video at some stage to make an on-balance judgement about the child’s capacity to work collaboratively. Alternatively, you could make the agreed statements on what collaboration looks like with the children and ask the children to complete both self and peer assessments of their collaboration.

Fortunately, many of the time consuming “old-days” formative assessment tasks are being made easier through the use of technology. Apps and software such as Kahoot, Plickers to check understanding and others which allow the student to illustrate their understanding such as Explain Everything, Google Forms or even a Padlet. Through careful planning in the initial stages, the astute teacher will have highlighted in their term planner the learning activities that will be used as a formative assessment so the task does not become onerous and really is an authentic assessment of student learning.

Assessment

In education, the term assessment refers to the wide variety of methods or tools that educators use to evaluate, measure, and document the academic readiness, learning progress, skill acquisition, or educational needs of students.
https://www.edglossary.org/assessment/

Assessment is a word that can drive fear into both students and teachers alike! The word “assessment” originally comes from the Latin words “ad” meaning to or at and “sedere” meaning sit, so the word means “to sit beside”.

Assessment is about the gathering of data to make judgements about student learning. The data can come from the students, teachers or from standardised tests. The purpose of assessment is to primarily gauge student learning. When planning a unit of work, teachers must be cognisant of the ongoing need to assess student learning and to revise their teaching plan accordingly. One of the first tasks in successful planning t is to know your stuents, so the first assessment task might be to assess prior knowledge to gauge “where the children are at” so the planning can be specific and targeted to the children’s needs.

Basically there are three purposes of assessment:

assessment for learning;
assessment as learning and
assessment of learning.

Assessment for learning involves the teacher making inferences about student progress to inform their teaching. The emphasis here is using mini assessment tasks to inform the teaching and to assist the student to learn more. It is about improving teaching and learning, rather than achieving a mark or a score. It can provide feedback to encourage the student to move forward and to improve.

Assessment as learning involves students reflect on their own learning to inform their learning goals. Assessment as learning encourages students to take responsibility for their learning and to be reflective. It requires students to ask questions about their learning, to refcelt and to modify their learning gaols in order to succeed.

Assessment of learning involves teachers using the evidence of student learning to make judgements about student progress towards the standards/outcomes/objectives/content descriptors as mandated by the educational authority.

The two types of assessment are formative assessment and summative assessment. As their names imply, formative assessment is ongoing assessment during the learning process and summative assessment usually occurs at specific periods, especially at the conclusion of a unit of work. Whereas formative assessment is primarily for the student and teacher, summative assessments are usually for external stakeholders, such as parents at report time or for government and educational jurisdictions.

Planning

One of the most arduous tasks for teachers is planning what and how to teach on either a term, month or weekly basis. Planning does not just happen and it requires many hours of careful preparation to know:

the diverse needs of your students
curriculum content
pedagogical approaches
school-based curriculum maps and policies and
classroom management.

Teaching can never be replaced with robots as it is the integral knowledge and application of the above factors that lead to the craft of teaching.

If you do not spend adequate time planning, the students learning will be lessened and you are likely to have more classroom management issues. Well planned lessons that actively engage the students will enhance their learning and keep them on task.

Planning is the first step in the teaching-learning cycle and begins with preparation. A thorough knowledge of the curriculum content is essential as these are the mandated outcomes/objectives/content descriptors you MUST teach and assess. Not only do you need to know the content for your year level (as a primary geberalist teacher), but you also need to know the content the year preceeding and following to allow for differentiation.

Due to an overcrowded curriculum, some teachers try to integrate the curriculum content through the use of big concepts, themes or integrated units of work. You do not have to reinvent the wheel as there are many great units of work available on the internet to be modified for your own class. In addition, teachers can program together with similar year level/subject teachers or in teams.

The time spent in planning, especially in your first few years of teaching, will be rewarded. As a new teacher, run through each lesson for the next day in your head. Try to visualise how each part of the lesson will run. Have all the materials ready for the lesson and think about the movement of students issues to alleviate any possible disruptions.