Reflect after reading Chapters 12-14:
How do we check for understanding in a thinking classroom? What might formative assessment look like?
Consider the following questions:
- What is resonating with you from the reading?
- What caused you to pause and think during this section?
This reading brought up some interesting questions about developing and evaluating competencies, and the ways in which we provide opportunities for students to demonstrate perseverance, collaborating, and willingness to take risks. The conversation reminded me of our Habits of Mind, and the “looks like/sounds like” T-charts we co-created with students as part of our integrated units. Over the years, this has evolved to include GLAD strategies, PBIS, rubrics, accountable talk, and an emphasis on supporting students’ ability to self-reflect and evaluate their own progress. My takeaway is that sometimes it’s best to go back to basics. When we invite students to be part of the process of generating a T-chart of observables and creating rubrics that reflect what we value, they are more willing to take ownership of their learning & make progress toward meeting their goals. This success is based on thoughtful communication with students that enables us (and them) to identify both what they know and what they don’t know “yet”…and that information can be communicate in a lot of different ways. I’m eager to begin the work of co-creating expectations for the competencies we value as a classroom community in third grade.
ReplyDeleteI agree with inviting the kids to be a part of the process. I truly do believe that the kids get excited and eager in their learning. In class, you can see their eyes and hands come up all the time and that sometimes kids can take it a little to far but you get so excited when they get excited!
DeleteChapter 12 was a pause and think chapter. It made me automatically think about the rubrics we use to grade the kids writing. In class, I think that many teachers including myself use T-charts for many activities but I never really thought about using it to evaluate what we value in class. I use it for the beginning of the year of what we see and hear using the Cub Code but this made me think that I want to try this with my kids in class for math. I love the idea of keeping the language to a minimum and to assess one competency at a time. I really enjoyed the K-1 collaborative rubric . I found it very easy to read with minimal words and the pictures helped a lot. I can't wait to try some of these strategies for next year.
ReplyDeleteA whole lot to unfold in this chapter. The most intriguing to me was what we choose to evaluate in a thinking classroom. I really loved the line, “what we choose to evaluate tells our students what we value”. I would love to use the rubric outline in the chapter for collaboration, perseverance and risk-taking, especially as we focus on vertical surface questions and what it looks like to be a mathematician. I love that these rubrics are used in the moment and that they are student friendly. I notice that certain rubrics either stress students out or don’t matter to students. I think this is a great way to have students involved in the rubric making process and then use it authentically. I think it is so important that these rubrics show students where they are and not who they are as we focus big time in 5th grade on our growth mindset in math! I also really liked the idea of having students self-evaluate how they persevere that day. I think it would be great to have students share strategies on what helped them stay motivated and show perseverance through a difficult task with the class afterwards! This section really made me think about the value of rubrics in math when done in a beneficial and user-friendly way for our students!
ReplyDeleteThe three competencies highlighted in Chapter 12 are competencies that I would love to see shine within each of my mathematicians: perseverance, willingness to take risks, and collaboration. I also appreciated the call to action for designing tools to measure the competencies that we value most. Rubric design is a logical approach, and with simple updates we are able to collaboratively design rubrics that make sense and are relevant to our students. Creating a reference for examples and non-examples helps students to clearly carve out the goals and look-fors. My students always enjoy putting their teacher hats on to grade exemplars.
ReplyDeleteChapter 13 really reached me, as we know that student feedback is a high-yield strategy for student impact and learning. When we design assessments in such a way that a bridge is built to facilitate communication about outcomes and goals, we are making a significant impact in the lives of our students. Figure 13.6 stuck out to me as being very user-friendly for both my students and I in 4th grade land. I made similar reflection logs based on standards assessed and also have students fix-up any items missed on the assessment - noting the error type. This process helps my students to gain a deeper understanding of their areas of strength and goals for the future. Students are then able to use data rather than their opinion of themselves as a mathematician to draw meaningful conclusions.
A mic drop moment for me in Chapter 14 was: we differentiate instruction we should be differentiating assessment. While we can’t always control the content of student assessments, HOW they are assessed is where a degree of flexibility lies. I have some students, especially those with unique abilities related to executive function and demand avoidance, complete their assessments on vertical surfaces and that simple change made all the difference in their attitude towards the assessment and their accomplishments. I have also segmented assessments into manageable pieces for each learner. I also like the strategies discussed: placing basic questions at the beginning of the test, and encouraging students to choose the portion of the assessment that they complete for a given day. These shifts may sound overwhelming or like they absorb a lot of instructional time, they may, or they may inspire you to use time more flexibly. The best part for me is that I know my students more deeply and individually as mathematicians and they know themselves in the same light, there's also the underlying assurance that each child was given the accommodations they needed to show their best thinking.
Yes!! I loved the part about differentiating assessments. It sounds like you have a lot of great ideas for ways to accommodate student needs, your students are lucky to have you!
DeleteThe three competencies listed in chapter 12, perseverance, willingness to take risks, and ability to collaborate, are 3 qualities I would love to see develop in each of my students in everything they did! I loved how they gave a K-3 example for introducing competencies first as t-charts and then with rubrics. That feels very doable and seems very powerful! I love how it brings in the self-assessment piece by having student highlight where they fall on the rubric at the end of the activity.
ReplyDeleteIn chapter 14, this quote really stood out to me, "If learning days are now full of collaboration, and if learning days are rehearsal for tests, then why are tests still done individually" (253). Collaboration is a big part of my math classroom and this is something I have never thought about before but makes so much sense! I am piloting our new IM math curriculum and it incorporates even more opportunities for collaboration. While I am still not quite sure how to make this happen, it has got me thinking about how I can change or tweak my testing process.
Assessment and the use of feedback, both teacher-generated and student-generated, were major areas of emphasis in my professional growth over the past two years. Partnering with my instructional coach, we collaborated to develop feedback guides and reflection activities to authentically engage my students in the practice of self-analysis and goal-setting. We began with math and tracked trends of student errors and achievements over the course of a unit as well as basic practices of a mathematician (e.g. engaging with peers, timely completion of assignments, willingness to ask for help, quality of work, and so on). What emerged from this shift toward reflection and emphasis on interacting and acting on feedback was a much more open and conversation-based class and a stronger thread of communication amongst students and I. Students who had performed poorly before used to crumple their tests in the trash. Soon, they began to use our feedback reflection sessions as a means to assess the errors in their thinking path and readdress misconceptions before progressing to the next unit. These students were far more willing to talk to me and others and less shameful of their performance. They began to see that the unit test was not the "end-all be-all". As the author suggested, the rubrics we used in our feedback sessions were co-created with students and reflect language familiar to them. They could articulate what it meant to progress from a Level 3 to a Level 4. I now want to incorporate visual cues, as we saw on p. 216 and devote time the first week(s) of school to generating t-charts, especially for collaboration expectations, that can be translated into self-assessment rubrics. I have seen examples of teachers using actual pictures of their students participating in group work as anchor charts to display around the room which I find to be a fantastic means of visualizing the expectations of the rubric and highlighting good behaviors. The same could be done with individual tasks and assessments.
ReplyDeleteA resource that has largely informed my thinking around the progression of standards and student-learning across grade levels in mathematics is the Coherence Map from Achieve the Core (https://achievethecore.org/coherence-map/). Though it is designed for educators to use, I think it would serve my students well to see how previous years of math instruction have informed the learning taking place now and how this translates into future learning. I liked the idea of simple navigation instruments with one problem per level and tracking their performance on each problem with coded symbols. This would serve as an excellent review tool prior to assessments or as a mid-unit check.
The last chapter gave me quite a lot to chew on, especially with regards of selecting different assessment measures and data sources for each student. As I work with my students to prepare them for double-accelerated courses in sixth grade, I am cognizant of the amount of data I need to have prior to making my recommendation for their placement. I wonder about our district unit tests and how we might shift our testing practices toward group tests or allowing those students demonstrated advanced levels of mastery to opt out. I am eager to discuss improvements to testing practices and evaluation with my team this year.
Wow, Erin...I would love to see/learn more about your feedback guides and reflection activities. Sounds so amazing! Maybe I could pop in sometime to see it in action. Thanks for sharing!
DeleteI really liked the idea of breaking down broad mathematical topics into subtopics in order for students to see the "whole picture" of what they're learning. While I've communicated to my students the content they're learning that day or week, I'm not sure I've ever presented them with the whole scope and sequence of a unit, so that they can compare what they're learning now to what they need to know next. I want them to be able to know what they can do and what they cannot yet do, so I will try to incorporate some of the rubrics listed as examples in Chapter 13. I can see how this would propel many of my students to take responsibility for their own learning. I also thought about the quote at the end of the chapter, "Self-assessment...has largely been based on students' opinions of their abilities." These rubrics, on the other hand, will allow students to self-assess based on data about their abilities. What a complete shift in thinking! I'm hoping it will encourage the students who seem to think they're "just bad at math" to realize that there are things they CAN do, too.
ReplyDeleteIn this chunk of chapters, I really liked when Liljedahl wrote about the power of co-creating the rubrics together and focusing on one competency at a time. This would be easily replicated in my primary classroom. I also feel that the use of arrows across the top as a continuum is much more reflective of the way students grow and interact during work sessions.
ReplyDeleteIn chapter 14, I liked the marking symbols that were suggested on page 260. I've used a system of +, check, - to notate a child's performance on various work. I like that these symbols allow for better clarity on group and independent work as well as silly mistakes. Sometimes the data is skewed because of these specific scenarios and I have been writing notes about it, these new symbols would make for a much simpler system.
These chapters initially reiterated the importance of using GLAD strategies to invite students into the structure of learning though active engagement and involement. The parts that have really been rolling in my mind the past couple of days is the use of learning progressions to help students know where they are and where they're going in math. We have pulled in various elements of this in writing and reading responses, but the power this can have in math and student understanding seems to be just as important. I wish there were already documents created that could help us dilineate this for students as I think this would be so much more powerful than simply giving students a snapshot assessment. We know our students' stories are so much more complex than just coming to school every day - and that quick snapshop test isn't always the best picture of any child.
ReplyDeleteI keep thinking how much I want to have a thinking classroom and just make the magic happen like Liljedahl describes, then I remember that this is a process, a complete shift in thinking and teaching, and I have to give myself grace to start small and add things in as we go. I am excited that IM seems to fit into this way of teaching much easier than ME so at least there is an "easy" start - as easy as a new curriculum can be!
Christel, your whole second paragraph summarizes my thinking this summer as I read through this book, take the math fluency course (much quicker), and prepare to embrace a new curriculum. I totally envision "making the magic happen," but then also remind myself of how large a shift this is... it's a process that will begin slowly but will unfold beautifully. I, too, am excited that our new curriculum lends itself to these mathematical thinking practices/beliefs. I know our students will gain from this!
DeleteChristel - have you looked at the Coherence Map from Achieve the Core that Erin referenced above? I think it will be a valuable tool as we think about progressions: https://achievethecore.org/coherence-map/
DeleteI really enjoyed reading chapter 12, and found myself so aligned with the idea of evaluating competencies such as perseverance, willingness to take risks, and the ability to collaborate. What had me even more enthralled was the idea of a rubric as a continuum, not so much a scale. I am intrigued by the three column rubric with language only in the two end columns because I believe it lends itself to a more growth mindset way of thinking... the "I don't have this YET" piece is so important for our little learners. Using indicators that are more straightforward and approachable to students (and let's me honest, teachers too) makes sense. I've always felt like rubrics with too fancy of language means very little to students. In chapter 14, I was most interested in the idea of using the symbols for collecting and recording student data. I am looking forward to reading the rest of the book. I hope that it helps me to wrap my head around how this all looks in the day to day lives of our classrooms. I want to jump in with both feet... but sometimes toes first is a better fit.
ReplyDeleteThese chapters really made me think about how to make the learning clear for students. It is so important that assessments are not only for the teacher, but also for the student. Learning progressions is such a visual way of making the learning clear for the student and give them clear target to aim for. I cannot wait to talk with my colleagues about so many of the strategies in this book and how they are making them come alive in their classroom.
ReplyDeleteOne thing that I have really enjoyed about this class is the way it promotes student ownership of their own learning. These chapters really showed me more ways I can do that with my students. Chapter 12 really had me thinking of ways I can have students keep track of their own learning. I want to make a chart that has the learning targets and then examples of the problems and then let the kids reflect where they are at in their learning of those skill. This is something I have done before, but I loved the idea of not just listing the learning targets associated with the unit, but also different skilled problems. Students can be responsible for keeping this list in their binders and as we go along in the unit they will be able to see where they are going in their learning. This is exactly what resonated with me in this reading...that students need to see where they are going in order to get there. That makes perfect sense! I can also use this sheet for formative assessments by checking the students progress as we go through the unit. Chapter 14 was a struggle for me. I could not see assessing this way in my room. What I could see was a version of what was talked about in the chapter. I can definitely assess group work for effort scoring but I have a hard time giving a grade for it. Plus it looked incredibly time consuming. What I did take away from this chapter is that one point of assessing is not enough. That students are on their own path and some know different skills than others. It happens every year that if I had just waited a week or two to give the test some of my students that did not do well would do so much better. I'm wondering if I can what it would be like to have them make corrections and then give them that score? So much to think about.
ReplyDeleteChapter 12 emphasizes the need to be evaluating what you value and I like how it highlighted the importance of assessments not just being useful for teachers but for students too. I thought starting with a t-chart and moving to a rubric was a great first grade friendly way to create rubrics as a class. I liked the K-3 example in the summary part of the chapter and thought it would be a great activity to try with my class not only as a math task but to try and create a perseverance rubric together. While reading this chapter it made me think of our school Future Ready skills and how many of them connect to building a thinking classroom. I am looking forward to trying these rubrics with my class!
ReplyDeleteI find myself somewhat late in responding to these chapters, yet reading them at just the right time to relate the concepts more concretely to what is happening in my classroom. I find chapter 12 most helpful in teaching the norms and expectations of my math community. One competency that is especially needed as we roll out Illustrative Math in my classroom is the ability to collaborate. I am finding it crucial to explicitly identify what it looks and sounds like to successfully work with a partner. I am looking forward to having my students notice what works well and what barriers they might have in collaborating; from there we can make a rubric that can be used for self-reflection in addition to teacher evaluation.
ReplyDeleteI think the concepts of creating a navigation instrument for formative assessment and grading based on data are excellent ideas, but are definitely a paradigm shift for which I am not yet ready. However, there are some micro-moves I have used, such as allowing students to choose which parts of tests they will begin with and gathering observational data, that I will continue to use and build upon as I move toward a thinking classroom.
Boy does simplifying rubrics sound like a no brainer. I think about my rubrics I have created with students, and they may be a bit too wordy. And then there is the fact I don't use many rubrics in math at all. Haven't really seen them or considered them with math. I look forward to developing them with students. I love the perseverance rubric on page 220. I have simplified my learning targets this year, but added a Future Ready Skills LT. We are talking about SEL skills (i.e. grit, perseverance, collaboration, engagement) as a class and then adding them to our board.
ReplyDeleteI love the honesty factor talked about in ch. 13. Using formative assessment to determine where students are at, and then using that data to talk with the students is so powerful. Why do teachers get to be the only ones who see the data and why not let students use the data to get better. That conversation surely is a delicate one however.
I really enjoyed these chapters they solidified my thinking and helped organize my thoughts about what I want my students to experience and feel while learning. A few years ago my team chose to focus on 1 or 2 math practices as our student growth goal. We knew what we wanted from students but struggled to identify what growth/progress would look like or sound like. I remember finding a document related to the 8 math practices that broke down each practice and identified “look fors”. This reading got me thinking about that document and how I shouldn’t be the only one with that valuable information. I want to share those measures in kid-friendly language with my students and build a community where all of us are “looking for” and acknowledging those behaviors. I also loved reading about differentiating assessments! In my first years of teaching, if I made a change or accommodated based on what I knew my student needed, I felt like I was cheating or breaking the rules. I feel empowered and know my ‘data’ will be more accurate.
ReplyDeleteI would love for you to share that document with me, Ang! I'd be happy to help your team adjust it to kid-friendly language!
DeleteThere was so much valuable information in Chapter 12 in terms of evaluation. As a new teacher, I did a lot of work over the last two years around student self-reflection, goal setting, and success criteria. Each of these things require students to have a clear expectation of the learning goal, and to know what is expected of them each day. Last year I made co-creating learning targets and success criteria a more regular part of my instructional routines, and it was so effective in fostering engagement and giving students autonomy over their learning. I appreciate the advice in the FAQ section of the chapter and the ways in which it builds upon my past learning. Liljedahl encouraged the cocreation of a rubric whenever there is a behavior that you would like to improve within the room, and I love the freedom this offers. We can keep expanding what collaboration looks like for our students, challenging them to move from simply listening to agreeing and disagreeing and so on, but we can also circle back and reinstill all those skills in between with the help of a rubric. Logistically, it was also a good reminder that numbers and letters go in your gradebook- not on the rubric, and it is useful to know five is the maximum number of indicators you should include on a rubric. I am looking forward to creating a collaboration rubric with my students and seeing the positive effects it has on student discussions and teamwork.
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