“Starting where students are, not where we’d like them to be”
From remote learning to face-to-face learning: Formative assessment considerations
Almost every educator we know has some version of the last-day-of-holidays jitters or ‘Sunday Scaries’, where you feel like you’ve forgotten everything you ever knew about teaching and are feeling the anticipation of stepping into class tomorrow. This post is to say we see you, and this end-of-lockdown re-entry is one hell of a first week back to contemplate!
While the scale of the changes we’ve had to deal with this year are far from typical to say the least, it can be reassuring to remember that as teachers, we are no strangers to hitting the ‘reset’ button and are not alone in this.
Because there isn’t a lot of research into the unique situation we currently find ourselves in, gathering ongoing information about how students are going and using this to adjust our interactions and the course of learning can help us feel our way through the barrage of changes we’ve had to deal with in a way that’s both thoughtful and responsive. As Professor Emeritus and former classroom teacher Dylan Wiliam highlights in a recent video, “good instruction starts where students are, not where you would like them to be”!
This post is anchored in some considerations for returning to the classroom and will explore some examples of reading, writing, speaking and listening strategies that aim to tap into where students are ‘at’ and create a strong base of information from which to act and venture forward. Once again, our intention is to share these with you as a ‘buffet’ of potential options to consider rather than as a ‘do everything’ guide!
Taking the first steps
Even with the high level of planning, thought and execution that had gone into delivering emergency remote learning, at times, it was easy to feel like we were ‘shouting into the void’ without seeing students’ faces, having spontaneous chats and being able to pick up on the non-verbal cues that provide ‘on the spot’ information about where students are at. After this experience, then, it’s crucial to invite feedback from our students regarding their wellbeing, the nature of their emergency remote learning experiences and to encourage input into what the ‘new normal’ will look like when moving forward. As a teacher, I would like to know:
How students are doing when it comes to their wellbeing
How students are feeling about returning to the classroom
What the remote learning experience was like for them
What they have learned over the past two months
What to reinforce, re-teach or teach next
Questions centred around these things will give me some information about student wellbeing and readiness to learn, while tapping into the last two of Hattie and Timperley’s (2007) three questions that drive effective feedback:
Where am I going? (What are the learning goals?)
How am I going? (How am I progressing toward the learning goals?)
Where to next? (What learning experiences and activities need to be undertaken to improve progress towards the goal?)
There’s also an opportunity here for students to engage in activating and integrating prior knowledge, connecting what they know or have learnt to the new.
But what might the very first steps actually look like in the classroom? What are some useful strategies to enable this? Below is an overview of some ways to explore this through student writing and talk:
Strategies for finding out about students’ wellbeing and their remote learning experiences
Re-entry survey
While this is a fairly obvious suggestion, it’s a good way to find out a broad range of information about where students are currently at. You might think about distributing a re-entry survey prior to having students enter your classroom, or perhaps as something they can complete at some point during the first week back after they’ve settled in and reconnected with their classmates, depending on what you’d like to know and how you’d like to use it. Have a look at the ‘Question Bank’ below which might capture some aspects of what you’d like to find out about your students. You can also take a look at this example of a short re-entry survey here. Once you’ve collected this information, use it to plan learning priorities and to work out which students you will check in with first.
“You might think about distributing a re-entry survey prior to having students enter your classroom, or perhaps as something they can complete at some point during the first week back after they’ve settled in”
Entrance Tickets
If you want to find out about a more targeted aspect of how students have been going, you could distribute some entrance tickets for students to fill out during the first few minutes in class. Entrance ticket prompts can vary from the broad (eg: “In 32 words or less, tell me how you are doing today”), can involve drawing or visuals (eg: “Draw how you are feeling today”, “Draw what being at home feels like compared to what being at school feels like”, “Copy and paste a meme that sums up how you feel about coming back to school.”, etc.) or might be more targeted and specific (“Jot down one thing you did during our time away from the classroom to take care of yourself that you would like to keep doing now that you’re back”, “What are you most concerned about now that we’re back?”, “What are you most looking forward to now that we’re back?”). For more ideas with a wellbeing focus, check out ReachOut’s ‘Wellbeing Fives.’
A twist on the Four-Square Reflection
A familiar template can provide some really surprising results when focused on an unconventional subject. The four-square reflection is a tried-and-true strategy for supporting students to engage in low-stakes-writing and build vocabulary knowledge, but we wondered what it would look like turned towards less conventional content?
With this template we ask students to articulate how they feel about remote learning and returning to face to face learning by asking four different questions that address different dimensions of this. Angela Peery’s ‘Writing Matters in Every Classroom’ (2009) includes a more thorough break-down of Four-Square Reflections.
Strategies for gaining insight into student learning
Connecting students’ experiences to learning concepts
This is a fun way to forge a bridge between students’ prior experiences and their current learning, and can give you a window into how they are going and what they are thinking about particular learning concepts or topics. You can ask students to form small groups or inside/outside discussion circles, and then prompt them to talk about what their experiences over the last few weeks have been like, and to connect it to an aspect/aspects of what they have learnt or are learning. Some targeted ways of doing this might include:
Maths: If your experience of the last few weeks was a 2D shape, what would it be? Be sure to include examples of the properties of each shape in your discussion.
English: Think about your experiences over the last few weeks and connect them to the titles of the short stories in Like a House on Fire (short story collection). What do they have in common?
History: Choose a newspaper headline from the historical time period we are studying and connect it to an issue or concern you have observed or experienced over the past few weeks. How is it connected? (you might give students a selection of 8 newspaper headlines to work with here).
Physical Education: If your experience of the last few weeks was a type of exercise or sport, what would it be and why?
Eg: If my experience was a type of sport it would be curling, the Canadian winter sport where you furiously polish ice in order to make a stone slide fairly slowly in a direction that you have limited control over
Bear in mind you might need to give an example of how this works first.
Entrance ticket - because it’s worth mentioning twice
We know we have this one listed above under ‘Finding Out about Student Wellbeing and Remote Learning Experiences’, but we have listed it here because it’s just as useful a tool when it comes to finding out about what aspects of learning students are demonstrating understanding of, and what aspects they need more support with.
While there’s a time and place for prompting students with a broad question involving recall (Eg: “List everything you know about…”), we’ve found it can also be useful to include more specific questions on an entrance ticket to inquire into student understanding of a more targeted topic that is most relevant to the learning goals at the time. Rather than simply recalling information, you might ask students to:
Compare and contrast concepts. Eg: “What is the difference between aerobic and anaerobic respiration?”
Relate concepts to other instances in the subject studied, other subjects or personal experiences. Eg: “If you could be a type of rock, what kind of rock would you be and why? Make sure you list the properties of the rock in your answer.”
Transfer their knowledge to other settings. Eg: “How might you use what you learnt today about exponential functions in the real world? How might it be useful to us?”
Answer ‘what if?’ questions. Eg: “What if Darwin had not been bombed in 1942?”
Give examples Eg: “Give examples of current health campaigns in Australia”
Engage in ‘how’ questions that involve outlining processes. Eg: “Looking at this design brief, what would be the first step you would take to engage in the design process and why?” or
Engage in‘‘why’ questions that involve reasoning Eg: “Why do we make tracks of our thinking as we read? How do you do it?”, “What’s the point of substitution as a method of solving linear equations?”, “Imagine you are a chemist writing instructions for the employees at a chemical warehouse, and it is your job to advise them of chemical combinations to avoid”
Ask questions of their own. Eg: “What questions do you have about different methods to solve quadratic equations?” or “What questions do you have about the musculoskeletal system?”
ABC list
If you teach reluctant writers and are interested in building confidence with new vocabulary, an ABC list is a user-friendly activity to begin with. It can add a fun spark of competition which can be a motivating factor when implemented with this sort of low-risk writing strategy.
This is an example from Year 9 Media where the activity was completed in pairs with the challenge to ‘get more words than the teacher’ who still can’t think of film terminology starting with X as we write this now. This is a low-stakes activity that can be implemented at the beginning, middle or as revision at the end of a unit of learning. Start with a topic and a worksheet marked with the alphabet. Students attempt to brainstorm words related to the topic that start with each letter. Although maybe most suited to younger students we’ve definitely delivered this activity to tired Year 12s as an energiser or ‘Do Now’ at the beginning of a lesson to re/establish terminology for a more involved activity.
Anticipation Guide
If you’re wanting to gain some insight into students’ ideas about a complex topic while creating a springboard for modifying beliefs and addressing misconceptions, you might want to try an Anticipation Guide.
If you’re wanting to gain some insight into students’ ideas about a complex topic while creating a springboard for modifying beliefs and addressing misconceptions, you might want to try an Anticipation Guide. This could be particularly relevant to check and clarify student understanding of key concepts in relation to student learning that occurred during the remote learning period, or perhaps when introducing a new topic.
[SOURCE: Douglas Fisher & Nancy Frey, Improving Adolescent Literacy, Content Area Strategies That Work, p.31]
To create one, identify the major concepts about a learning topic. Then, create statements that capture common misconceptions, question beliefs and opinions or challenge what students might know about these concepts. You can access a template for this by clicking on the image below.
To introduce it in the classroom, briefly explain statements to students and have them mark their responses of agreement or disagreement in the ‘Before’ column, giving reasons for their responses.. Next, engage students in a learning experience related to the topic (eg: reading, collaborative research, video, experiment, problem-solving application task, etc.) and ask them to indicate agreement or disagreement in the ‘After’ column, giving reasons why. Ask students to compare columns and reflect in writing or discussion about whether they changed their minds, built on their existing ideas or if their beliefs were reinforced, and why.
Vote with your sticky dots
If you’re after some insight into how students feel they understand learning concepts they engaged with during remote learning, you might want to try this strategy. How it works:
Make a table or a list of key learning goals/topics that were addressed during remote learning and display it on a large piece of chart paper on the wall
Give out three different coloured sticky dots to students (red, yellow and green)
Tell students each sticky dot represents how they feel about their learning. Eg: Green: I can teach this to someone else, Yellow: I understand but need more practice, Red: I don’t understand this yet and need more practice
Ask students to first jot down their initials on the sticky dot, followed by placing a sticky dot next to each learning goal that indicates how well they feel they understand it
Collect the chart at the end of class to gain a snapshot of learning goals/topics to revisit or re-teach
Reflective Carousel
This involves displaying a number of open-ended questions or topic words/phrases related to learning across the room on separate sheets of chart paper (or if you want to do this digitally, on a separate Google slide or Doc page). Students rotate around the room in small groups of 3-5 and stop at each chart, discussing the question, adding contributions, responding to the ideas that previous students have written down and then move on to the next station. Each group is given a different-coloured texta to track group contributions. This could be timed or untimed. Once every group has worked on every chart, responses are discussed, clarified and built upon as a class.
Final thoughts
We chose these strategies due to the deep thinking and surprising responses that they elicit, they are not intended a prescriptive or exhaustive list. These strategies are curated as a series of possibilities that use literate practices to answer the questions we want to know from our students in our first sessions back with them after a very odd few months. As we write this, we know that many teachers have already been back at school in the thick of it. We would love to hear from you —how have you met your students where they are this week?
By Nicole Marie and Laura Newman
References:
Daniels, H., Zemelman, S & Steineke, N. (2007). Content-Area Writing: Every Teacher’s Guide. Portsmouth: Heinemann.
Fisher, D. & Frey, N (2012). Improving Adolescent Literacy: Content Area Strategies At Work. Boston: Pearson.
Hattie, J. & Timperley, H. (2007). ‘The Power of Feedback’, Review of Educational Research 77 (1), pp. 81--112.
Peery, A. (2009). Writing in Every Classroom. Englewood: Lead + Learn Press.
