Standard 8
Instructional Strategies
The teacher understands and uses a variety of instructional strategies to encourage learners to develop deep understanding of content areas and their connections, and to build skills to apply knowledge in meaningful ways.
Performance
8(e) The teacher provides multiple models and representations of concepts and skills with opportunities for learners to demonstrate their knowledge through a variety of products and performances.
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I selected Unit 2 Challenge of Utopia as one of my pieces of evidence because it provided students with ample opportunities to display their understanding through various mediums. In each activity I have students demonstrate their understanding orally in groups. In other activities, students demonstrated their understanding through artwork, discussion, group work, and individual writing assignments. All these demonstrations of knowledge are formative assessments in which I use to assess student understanding and progress. It is important to provide a wide variety of mediums and opportunities for students to demonstrate understanding because not all students process and explain information the same way.
1. Activity 2.3 Check Your Understanding: Individual essay
In this activity students displayed their understanding by answering a short prompt.
2. Activity 2.4 Check Your Understanding: Artwork
For this activity students created a piece of artwork that displayed life in the society (of the novel they were reading) an the protagonist's place in it. The only requirements on the artwork was a short caption to describe what I was seeing. What they used to create their art was left to them. These are some of the student work I received.
3. Activity 2.6 Socratic Seminar Fishbowl
For this activity, students were divided into two groups, the inner circle and the outer-circle. The inner-circle discussed level 3 questions they created. The outer-circle took notes of the discussion. During the discussion, students from the outer-circle were able to participate in the inner-circle by taping someone who already spoke. They would then switch places. By allowing this opportunity, students who felt comfortable speaking were able to participate in the discussion and those who did not took notes quietly.
Performance
8(f) The teacher engages all learners in developing higher order questioning skills and metacognitive processes
During my students reading of their science fiction books, I began to realize that they were having difficulty making connections. I knew I needed to facilitate a learning activity that would require students to interact with the text. Many of the double-journal entries I had received prior consisted of, "I did that at school" and "This is like the movie I watched." I wanted my students to ask important questions like, "why are books so bad in this society? Have we ever banned books?" or "If we are all the same would that really be better?" I wanted to see them thinking about the concepts presented in their book. I did not want them to focus on superficial facts.
To help build these connections, I decided to facilitate the "Say Something" activity. I presented the activity to the students by introducing the strategy first. I first explained the reason for the strategy and then posted the steps on the ELMO projector. Once I read through the steps, I provided students with examples of sentence frames if they are unsure of what to say during their "say something." Once I went over those procedures, I modeled the strategy. When I modeled the strategy, I stopped to ask a question. I emphasized the importance of questioning but also providing a possible answer as well. Once someone was done with their say something, group members should respond. I also told students that if they said "I agree" they must follow it up with "because..." Once I modeled it, I had students pair up to practice. Once I felt they understood the process through question and feedback in a class discussion, I had students work in their groups.
The activity helped build student questioning skills and metacognitive processes. The double-journals they worked on that week made very strong connections and asked higher level questions.