Teaching All Children: Planning and Assessment 23 February 2010

How should we respond to Diversity? How can we engage ALL students in learning? Select themes or issues of personal and social relevance that provoke questions that call for investigation Choice and ownership lead to commitment Open ended questions stimulate inquiry, active exploration, and discovery. Collaboration with others generates more ideas Dialogue about results deepens understanding Individual representation (writing, diagramming, etc.) encourages reflection

The Spiral of Learning and Understanding

Focus on an Improvable Object

Teaching for Understanding

The Role of the Teacher The role of the teacher is not to teach per se, but rather to create situations in which students learn - in other words, to ‘engineer’ learning environments. Wiliam, 2004, p. 1.

The Roles of the Teacher

Students learn best in a receptive, nonjudgmental, community environment that encourages inquiry and independence includes a wide variety of materials provides opportunities for practical activities is generally complex connects school experience with the greater world encourages collaboration rather than competition values extended expression of individual understandings and beliefs welcomes the constructive exploration of disagreement

Center for Research on Education, Diversity and Excellence http://www.crede.ucsc.edu/

Communities of Inquirers/Learners The emphasis on establishing communities of … practice builds on the fact that robust knowledge and understandings are socially constructed through talk, activity and interaction around meaningful problems and tools (Vygotsky, 1978). The teacher guides and supports students as they explore problems and define questions that are of interest to them. A community of practice also provides direct cognitive and social support for the efforts of the group’s individual members. Students share the responsibility for thinking and doing: they distribute their intellectual activity so that the burden of managing the whole process does not fall on any one individual. In addition, a community of practice can be a powerful context for constructing [scientific] meanings. In challenging one another’s thoughts and beliefs, students must be explicit about their meanings; they must negotiate conflicts in belief or evidence; and they must share and synthesize their knowledge to achieve understanding. (How People Learn, pp.183-4) Plan for: Classroom Meetings Negotiation of Themes and Inquiries Presentation to Real Audiences Reflective Discussion

Learning for Understanding occurs through: using knowledge to carry out some is shown in: new and challenging activity in order to achieve some desired outcome in a particular situation. Generative Topics: Themes that connect to students’ lives, stimulate inquiry, provoke discussion. Goals for Understanding: “Big ideas”, important concepts, necessary skills, connections and implications. Performances of Understanding : Activities that use knowledge for meaningful purposes, practical and intellectual. Ongoing Assessment: Provide criteria, give feedback and support, encourage reflection. Summative Assessment: A ‘performance of understanding’ that requires students to draw on what they have understood to meet some new challenge. (based on Project Zero Framework)

Designing a Curriculum Unit THEME (A Way of Orienting Curriculum Content to Students’ Lives and Interests e.g. Community, Exploration, Water) “Big Ideas”/”Enduring Understandings” (see Curriculum Standards) Activities (that Allow for Inquiry, Dialogue) Check with Principles Launch-----Questions -----Research Performance of Understanding <---> Assessment Reflection