Draft unit plan for my ESS course

Ok so this is the powerpoint that I'm uploading with my unit that I am doing for my ESS assignment.

Thought I'd pop it in here so I can keep track of it.  My intention is to try and re-jig it into a wiki or weebly for another assignment for my Managing E-Learning course.

Convince Me Draft Unit

Unsure of reasoning processes utilised...

I am trying to answer question 4 of the workbook for topic 2 http://moodle.cqu.edu.au/pluginfile.php/276160/course/section/44076/Dimension_4_workbook.doc

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The question asks me to identify which reasoning process or processes are used in the following rich tasks...

·         Years 4-6 Rich Task # 1 – Travel Itineraries

Students will design alternative itineraries of interest (two, one local/regional and one state/nationwide) that reflect the interests of you and the exchange student, and to be accompanied by an adult.  They will identify a range of issues including transport options, tourist attractions and sites of historical and cultural significance.  They will present costings and reasons for their choices

 

·         Years 4-6 Rich Task # 3 – Personal Health Plan

Students will identify and understand an aspect of their personal health and fitness and, on the basis of this, will develop and implement a plan for improving this aspect.  By collecting, organizing and presenting data, they will evaluate the extent to which the goals have been achieved and the contribution of factors to this improvement

 

·         Years 4-6 Rich Task #6 – Design, Make and Display a Product

Students will design, or improve the design of, a purposeful product.  They will make the product or a working model or prototype.  As part of a public display promoting their product, they will flesh out a (restricted) marketing plan and explore the suitability of materials for manufacture.

I'm struggling with this...so any help would be much appreciated.

At the moment my thoughts are:

Travel Itineraries = Decision Making and/or Invention. 
Personal Health Plan = Decision Making and/or Invention
Design, Make and Display a Product = Invention and/or Systems Analysis

But I'm not sure if I'm missing something????

Reading Inside the Black Box

As I read through the Inside the Black Box reading for this course, I see the recurring issues as being:
http://moodle.cqu.edu.au/pluginfile.php/276160/course/section/44075/blackbox_article.pdf

Learning goals must be specific and communicated explicitly to the student.

Feedback is key

Formative assessment provides the basis for feedback

These ideas are mirrored in Marzano's ASOT framework.  I recently attended a professional development day for the Art and Science of Teaching framework during my prac.  I found the day extremely interesting and I was to see this theory advocated by Black and William (2001).

During the PD, the notion of assessment capable learners was explained this way:

1.  Feed Up: Clarify goal: "Where am I going?"
2.  Feed Back: Response: "How am I going?"
3.  Feed Forward: Modify instruction: "Where to next?"

Sadler (1989, as cited in Black & William, 2001, p. 7) notes the three elements of feedback as:

"the desired goal, the evidence about their present position and some understanding of a way to close the gap between the two."

The PD looked at ways to provide the learning goals to students, and suggested a visual display with the goal as a concise heading with a series of steps (rungs on the ladder) acting as the success criteria to get there.  There was some contention among the teachers in the room about how to show the student on this display (photos would not be allowed), with many noting that parents often dislike seeing their child 'ranked' with other students and see the display as a competition.  I believe this is such a shame, as the competitiveness factor should not be emphasized, only the 'this is where I am' evidence.  Perhaps if the point of the display was communicated sufficiently to students and parents alike, the display would then contribute to a supportive learning environment.

Other methods could be individual goal journals in students' desks etc. 

The point on the whole was that students need to be able to know where they are and predict what they will do next to get there.

Confused, perplexed, puzzled...

Confused...

Are we allowed to change the assessment tasks or not?  My prac school lead me to believe that we were not allowed to alter them.

What if you believe a task to be so outside the realms of students being able to succeed, that the majority would fail?

If their vocabulary knowledge and comprehension ability is below expectation for age group/year level, what do you do? Allow them to fail?

I do have high expectations for students... (sometimes maybe too high) but the C2C assessment I saw at Prac for English: Poetry was in my (and my mentor's) opinion too challenging for the students in our class.  Also the subject matter of the assessment task poem was not relevant to these students.  They don't live in a desert!! They didn't know what incandescent means!! There was so much unknown vocabulary in the poem that the mood and meaning were lost.

Also, as I began to teach the unit on poetry, my mentor seemed puzzled as to my 'teaching to the test'.  I found myself sitting on the fence.  And it's mighty uncomfortable up here!
I noted that yes, in an ideal world we would be 'inadvertently' teaching content that would arise on the assessment task anyway.  But if this is the task they MUST perform, I must give them the skills to perform it.  If you need to find example of 'onomatopoeia in a stanza', you must know what onomatopoeia is...and know what a stanza is.  Otherwise they will FAIL!

In an even more ideal world, the task itself would be relevant to not only the student now, but to the students' future self. 

When have you ever been asked in the 'real world' to find an example of onomatopoeia?  Most adults don't know what the word means... 

Poetry is a wonderful thing and in order to write poetry it can be important to know of the many devices there are to choose from in order to satisfy the audience.  But when I went to school we did this in HIGH SCHOOL grades 9 or 10.  Grade 3???  Come on!

In our classroom, we read lots (and I mean lots) of poems and stories to the kids.  They began to develop an appreciation and occasionally a love for poems.  It extends their vocabulary and their level of reading comprehension.  It teaches them the 'code' of literacy.  This is surely what we need to do, develop a love of literature and literacy through enjoyment. Through enjoyment comes the understanding that poems and of course writing is intended to be read (maybe even enjoyed) by someone and as such it must be understandable.  Thus paving the way for spelling, punctuation and grammar all the way to persuasive texts.

My cogs are starting to turn...

Learning From Mistakes is Not FAILURE!

A comment from a friend on her weebly (http://tofailisnotanoption.weebly.com/my-thoughts-on-the-first-activity.html) "Experiencing failure is seldom positive and as a teacher I do not believe allowing a child to believe they have failed is an option."  started my cogs turning (even this early in the morning )

Failing is ok (don't shoot me yet...).  Deb is so right about not letting the child 'believe' they have failed.  They must be taught and guided to strive for success but they must know that with success we can have failure. 

Learning comes from making mistakes and changing something to succeed next time. 

 

How often have you learnt by getting it right the first time?

Let them know and believe that learning and achieving is a journey...with many pitfalls on the way, and few deviations to the path, and sometimes we even end up at a completely different destination. But so long as they pick up souvenirs on the way (read: knowledge) they are succeeding!!

Thinking outloud on assessment and success

Just some thoughts on an article I'm reading for my course Ensuring Student Success...
Article can be found here...  http://www.ascd.org/publications/educational-leadership/mar05/vol62/num06/No-Choice-But-Success.aspx

On the subject of a student completing the same questions but needing more help to do it... I recently had a similar discussion with my Mentor.  If you have helped a student, how do we grade it? She notes that anything requiring support would not receive over a 'D'.  Will the student (and parent?) see this as a failure.  A 'what's the point' moment?

Is this D the same as the unsupported D?  Should the criteria/assessment rubrics be the same for students that require a high level of support?

My personal thoughts on success are that in order to know success you may need to have known failure.  We can not all succeed all of the time and an important life skill is the knowing how to deal with and recover from failure.  This is the skill of resilience! What doesn't kill us, makes us stronger!

I love the idea of 'all' succeeding, but what if we create a society of people who cannot cope with failure?  I believe that all children can succeed! But it is the tools with which we measure that success that are setting them up to fail. The term 'value adding' springs to mind. One man's success could be another man's failure.

I continue to ponder....