By Mark Heintz
Context
A step back if you will. This year, I have two main focuses. Two driving questions that I have in my mind while making decisions. They are:
- How do I know if my students know?
- How do I get them to know if they know?
Whether that is a skill or content, I want to know if they know it. I no longer think it is acceptable for me to guess or get a feeling on whether or not they know it. Getting the students to know if they know it is down right hard, but I am really attempting to get to a point where the students can recognize their understandings or progress on their skill levels and content knowledge. Therefore, the purpose of this year of reflection is see how I make progress towards these two goals and elicit feedback from staff, students, and hopefully people who follow along in the journey.
Answer the Question
My focus this week was for students to be able to write two different types of short answer responses and learn the essential content of the Neolithic Period and the River Valleys Era. Not only do I want the students to able to do the skills (in this case, write well) and know the content, I want them to be able to know if they know it.
I approached the writing using the ACE acronym that I stole from Freeman-Pedia. I love the simplicity of it. ACE keeps them focused on the task at hand and make connections to how they would be assessed.
Cite Specific Evidence
How do I know that the students know the content and can do the skills? Well, the clip below is one document on the progress towards my goal. To address my week’s focus I prompted the students to write about how their previous academic journey’s would help them or hurt them this year. To do this, they wrote in the way they would be assessed at the end of the week with a new and content-specific short answer response.
Their first responses revealed a lot about their writing, but also their previous journey. To help the students know how they progressing on the skill, I asked them provide feedback to their peers on their work. Linda Ashida captured some of this process and you can watch that video below.
I noted a few timestamps to help with the viewing and citation of evidence.
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0:00
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I used Teamshake to get students into pairs
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1:07
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I explain ACE
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1:38
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I explain how citing evidence needs to be providing specific evidence.
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2:10
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I explain how to explain.
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2:45
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Students give feedback to other students. They are underlining and annotating.
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3:45
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I provide whole class instruction and the cognitive research
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4:36
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Students evaluating each other’s work
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5:25
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Explanation of new context-moving to content specific -Egypt and Mesopotamia
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8:10
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Students reading through information on River Valley Civilizations
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10:00
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Redirect whole class to provide feedback and help with recall
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