One Class, and 16 Blog posts later

I think its important to remember how fast time can go when you are learning. It would be too easy to explain how much I was challenged in the course, or even how much I learned from my classmates, how enriching the experience was, I could go on. But I think I would like to reflect on my mindset compared to how I walked into the class for the first time, and now leaving.

Its easy to reflect on your self and to be critical so I do my best to acknowledge the difficulties I struggled with, and been proud of my achievements and growth. I have come so far and made it into a program that I thought was a reward for my endurance to become who I wanted to be, a teacher. But I was wrong, there is so much further for me to go. However, I am no longer feeling as if I was stuck at the bottom of a sand pit crawling up, but instead half way up a tree shrouded by leaves and only a few branches visible above me. It is so strange to think that I have learned and changed so much only flying 1 hour away from my home and it reminded me of a quote from Anthony Bourdain. 





One of the things I accept as a fact is that travel changes you, and no matter how far I believe I have gone, there are environments that I could read all day about but would mean nothing until I experience them. Teaching is starting to feel a lot like traveling, and students are constantly coming and going through the environment I provide them. There will be bad times, but there is something to learn from those situations. Of course there will be good times, and I would like to believe that as a person that wants to see students learn, succeed, and have fun that would be enough for students to appreciate my efforts.

In reference to the inquiry project, I though I would had been able to cover what I wanted to cover but ended up biting off so much more than I could have chewed. The amount of dedication other teachers have committed to helping students is inspiring, there is so much to learn and change. A classroom has so much opportunity to be different while still being an effective learning environment for students.

Inquiry Project: Assessment and progression: How can we change assessment to better a student's motivation towards academics

Assessment and Motivation

Formative assessment techniques to support student motivation and achievement

Kathleen Cauley, James Mcmillan (2010)

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00098650903267784

Assessment effects student motivation. The paper covers five key practices teachers can use to gather information about student understanding providing feedback and enable students to set and attain learning goals. The key parts are a cycle. It can begin from student’s motivation, to student engagement, work, and achievement, to ongoing assessment, feedback, and then instructional correctives by teachers and students. Support is important to keep student’s motivation and goal towards their achievements. Supporting students promotes improvement and progress, which provides students to adopt learning mastery goals.

Classroom Assessment, student motivation, and achievement in high school social studies classes

 Susan Brookhart, Daniel Durkin(2003)

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/248940582_Classroom_Assessment_Student_Motivation_and_Achievement_in_High_School_Social_Studies_Classes

Four assessments in each course from a teacher-researchers teaching load were sampled. Sample sizes was about 96 students. It was found that student performance assessments were connected to productive student’s goal orientations and earning strategies. Students were interviewed and valued the sharing and learning of ideas from their colleagues. Group motivation spurs the idea for team based learning, and group assessment instead of individual assessment.

Standards Based Grading

Grading for Understanding – Standards Based Grading

Tod Zimmerman (2017)

https://eric.ed.gov/?id=EJ1124208

Standards based grading is about “Mastering learning objectives” rather than “earning points”. Mistakes are apart of the learning process, much like how to learn a game is to play, learn, and practice. They should be rewarded for trying to fix their past mistakes, not for attempting it once and accepting their fate. Reassessment is practice, and practice is a form of learning. Grades should be determined by the number of learning objectives completed by the end of the semester.

Questioning points and percentages: Standards-based Grading in Higher Education

 Tom Buckmiller, Randal Peters, Jerrid Kruse

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/87567555.2017.1302919?journalCode=vcol20

Standard based grading (SBG) case used in university. Grading practices in university tend to be traditional and commonly used world wide. Again, students thought of schooling as just earning points like a game and that is the end goal, not to learn course content. Students that worked under an SBG took ownership of their learning. SBG provides an opportunity for students to reflect on their previous knowledge.

The standards for academics’ standards-based assessment practices

 Dennis Alonzo, Negin Mirriahi, and Chris Davison (2018)

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/02602938.2018.1521373?journalCode=caeh20

There has been a need for improving learning and teaching. The paper developed a tool based on evidence from literature. Using their tool and a sample of 410 students who wanted to engage in self assessment, they found a “Six Factor Model” that was “most parsimonious among other models”. The framework is based on Standard based grading, and I think It would be interesting to do a deeper analysis of their paper.

Peer Assessment

Peer Assessment

Kieth J. Topping (2009)

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/234718247_Peer_Assessment

Peer assessment provides evaluation levels from equal status learners. Students can learn different perspectives of mistakes by exploring each others’ understandings. Writing, oral presentations, portfolios, testing performance are all possible methods for students to evaluate. The paper mainly covers formative assessment but also states that assessment could be summative as well, so it does encourage to investigate other assessment methods. Formative assessment using a peer to peer method also helps develop personal and professional skills, as students will find it challenging to verbally explain their understanding. I find it a great learning method to be able to teach your understandings to your colleagues.

Peer Learning and Assessment

David Boud (1999)

To assist with course content, students meeting in groups can help teach a variety of learning outcomes. Collaboration with others can deepen their understanding. Also studying with colleagues can develop their responsibility for their own education. The abstract acknowledges a problem of traditional grading methods, as it values individual achievement, and collaborative efforts is akin to cheating. Inappropriate assessment practices also form competition and prevent a more supportive learning environment, which is what modern educational curriculums are leaning towards.

Peer feedback: the learning element of peer Assessment

Ngar-fun Liu & David Carless (2006)

https://doi.org/10.1080/13562510600680582

Paper investigates the relation of peer feedback and the assessment process. Studying the student rational can be used to enhance student learning. What is most fascinating is students resist peer assessment using grades and rarely assess each other. The paper goes deeper into why students resist the peer assessment process. It also covers strategies for promoting peer feedback and encouraging students to be more engaging with peer to the peer to peer learning experience. However, if the classrooms and learning cultures value individual achievement over collaborative approaches, the peer-to-peer learning and assessment may not be effective. 

Creative thinking, and assessment

"The role of observation is to seed thinking'

During my short practicum I was given the opportunity to teach about endothermic and exothermic reactions. When I made the lab report for the students to follow I only wanted them to observe what happens when the reaction begins. Qualitative observations were the most important part about this lab. To me, the seed is change. What changes are happening that we are able to observe. I think change can have lots of different perspectives and opinions. The thought process of someone that is beginning to learn compared to someone that has a deeper though process is vastly different. Assessment could be based on the growth of an individual, on the dedication students put into the content to learn. Students will change through time and there is such a think as early and late bloomers. If a teacher can facilitate a students interest in change instead of aiming for an answer, it could change the way people approach learning.

"In the early stages. words can kill. They label, making things familiar, and make the world safe again"

Labeling is to name with absolute certainty that they know what an idea is. It is satisfying to say that we know that something is 100%, but that causes a problem, it leaves no room for forward thinking or different ideas. No room for change, or the possibility that it could be something else. I think it is still important to observe the known, and to be curious about it. To experience the same experience other researchers did and draw similar conclusions is to learn. I think it would be analogous to reading about the Grand Canyon and studying it, compared to being there and seeing it. I think its exciting to challenge older theories, or to want to find another method to another solution. There does not always need to be one definitive right method. I think to label early on is to stop any kind of inquiry. This is not to say the process is wrong, but to observe the world requires some creativity at observing it. Nature it self is very creative, and to study and learn it requires a lot of growth. Art can have deeper meaning  and draw emotions of we were to study the brushwork or the paints used and to be able to see what kind of difficulties the artist confronted when making art. I would like to think science does this too.

"Our problems are caused by our efforts to deal with the problem. The more we throw ourselves at it, the worse it gets. "

I think I would have appreciated this quote in my first degree. Approaching difficult things can tunnel vision us into imagining what the problem actually is. At times its simpler then we believe it is, but we tend to want to find that there is something complicated that we are missing. There is a want that the problem is something that we do not know, or something that is difficult that we are missing out on when reality, we may have just wrote the problem down incorrectly. During the practicum I observed many students during tutorials before retesting dates. Most of the time it was silly mistakes such as not noticing the Y axis of the graphs were different, or they copied the problem from the chalk board wrong, or even trying to balance an equation thinking only the products can change. I learned and read into standard based grading, and I would like to think that it is a good solution for students to correct any mistakes they have made in the past. Each quiz/test can be split into standards that should be known for the course. Students can do great in some, but poorly on others. During tutorials, lunch, and after school they can correct the mistakes and retest on those specific areas instead of re writing an entire test. It seems much more accurate as well since students will know what specific area they are getting incorrect.

Inquiry Project Entrance Slip

1) Is there a better way for teachers to assess students to help them feel more of a progression experience in classes, rather than an experience where they feel like if they perform poorly once then the grades are lost forever.

Current assessment methods have not been updated yet society has changed its standards in workplace ethic, performance, and as a social environment. Societal values have changed, yet the way students are accessed have not changed. I think this is a project that can really change the way I view my classroom. It would be ideal to have students not have to feel dread entering my classroom environment the day after an exam.

2) Before I would like to investigate about what different methods of grading, I would like to reiterate some points from my last blog. Academic performance is usually what is measured and what students get anxiety from. This percentage grade is vague and inaccurate as it cannot separate two students with the same/similar grades. There is evidence that a students culture can even effect their grade in class more so than what the grades mean, so really it depends what a teacher wants the grade to mean. So I would like to propose different ways, or maybe suggest a progression kind of grading system. For now, I will look into cooperative learning strategies as cooperative learning is more commonly done in practice during a persons career. Different learning strategies require different grading methods, so I would like to begin there.

A) Team based assessment, iRAT and TRAT: These kinds of quizzing methods still have a large independent section to them. I believe the time between the iRAT and TRAT is where a lot of learning to occur. There are some pros and cons, for example some students forfeiting their view just because someone told them they were sure about one of the answers when really they could be correct.

B) I would like to read more into indigenous learning styles. As Moshie Renert stated in a previous paper, there is such a thing as number sense. Having a gauge of the theoretical allows us physicists to look an our numerical answers and think "this answer sounds reasonable". There are many indigenous learning styles, so I believe there must be a different method of evaluation. It is more framed by a community based participation learning experience. This could harbor a physics classroom with more hands on, when appropriate, experience.

C) Learning by teaching. I am curious if there is a way that a teacher could evaluate classrooms by how well a student can explain or analyze a problem and teach it to their classmates. This could also be similar to a think, pair, share and how well students could teach a problem they completed. Marina introduced to us the idea of  a "Lesson Play", which was a scene that is written by us, the teachers, about how students may approach a problem. If students can explain how a problem can be interpreted incorrectly, then they could have a better understanding then just being able to do the problem. To be able to explain in different angles how problems or theories can be misinterpreted is challenging as it promotes to think outside the box of their regular thinking. If students could be in groups and write different ways they misinterpreted the problem and share how it could be interpreted this way and why it is incorrect, it would be a good way to reflect on themselves and their classmates thought processes.

Exit Slip, are marks accurate?

I do not believe marks are accurate, but I think they could be. Marks are associated with only the success but does not gauge a students work ethic, passion, mentality, ability, or the willingness for that student to try again. So I believe the idea is what should grades indicate as a measure and can this measure affect the performance of the students once it is observed.

Currently, grades are interpreted for academic performance, but nothing else. If two students were to both score 90%, there is no way someone that were to look at this grade would be able to tell the two students apart. It cannot describe whether the student was challenged by the course content, or worked really hard to improve their performance through the year. Personal struggles are not included, socioeconomic struggles cant be measured, and personality traits that society values such as being a great leader or team player does not scale with academic performance either. So in essence, grades are not accurate because they are not really relevant to what society values. A written unit test that is worth 8% of a students overall grade cannot measure improvements.

I think a teacher that helps a student that accidentally reveals that they have not done the work may leave the impression that the student is lazy which may create a bias. Any kinds of biases teachers have affect their academic performance which is partially why I do not believe marks can be accurate.

What I would like to do for the Inquiry project is to study is what could grade indicate as a measure and if this could be effective. If the anxiety and stress to strive for better grades can affect their performance (in negative and positive ways) what can teachers do to ease and change the meaning of grades so students could see it as a form of progression, instead of something that is permanently lost.

grAdes: Entrance slip Oct 16

I do believe grades are really important, but I do not agree with how they are done. I am a strong believer of learning from mistakes and being able to benefit fixing them. Of course, there exists some tests that do not allow for correction (Alberta Diploma Exams), and at some extent I agree with standardized testing when it is important to evaluate students applying internationally. If there is a better way to evaluate a students success for administration to post secondary, I would be completely for it. However, it requires a lot of participation from other countries which I would hope they would agree with. 

Assigning letter grades and percentages are terrifying, and I agree that they do cause a unnecessary stress, but I believe the evaluation process is important. I believe that grades do not indicate a students work ethic, it does not (and should not) dictate any future success. I think most of us teachers would agree that grades do have merit, but we dislike the anxiety and stress that follow. Darrel Bradford states "its like the uncertainty principle in Physics, the act of measuring something can change it", which really resonates with me. Checking grades is a make-or-break moments that can dictate how I approach the week. Grades are too simple to measure the complexity of a being. 

Grades don't show struggle, they don't show diversity, care, personality, or passion. So the next part I follow with is how can we evaluate students without having the emotional stress that comes with it? And if we do evaluate without a grade, how do we ensure that students will care to study for tests or do their own research? If the grade does not matter, why should the student try hard? It would be ideal for students to be motivated to pursue knowledge independently, but I think this motivation has to come from the educators. I am unsure in the method, engagement, or if it is even measurable. But it can come from a teacher that a student enjoys learning from. 

There are different methods of learning and evaluation such as iRAT(Individual Readiness Assurance Test), and the TRAT ( Team Readiness Assurance Test) which I would love to try out. In terms of assessment, oral assessment is what I would value most. In this case, students will write a iRAT, and converse about the questions and rethink the answers. Then, students will be evaluated again as a team with a TRAT. The time between the iRAT and the TRAT is where students get to discuss ideas and be "orally assessed" by their colleagues though an informal debate. 

Testing, testing: How will measurement change in the future of education? | Darrell Bradford

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fDUKyjIR2Hg

Team Based Learning: iRAT and TRAT information! 

http://www.teambasedlearning.org/definition/

Oct 9, Entrance slip

A bodily experience is an experience, so I could definitely be a learning opportunity for a classroom. Using your arms as a gesture for increasing and decreasing sections of a velocity-time graph can help students associate the graph with simulations which builds confidence that the simulations are trustworthy. Today during a presentation, TC's expressed how resistance can be taught by having students jump from point to point with large gaps in between, analogous to a wire with high resistance. They were tired from jumping from point to point, there was difficulty moving down the line. By adding spots in between where  they could jump then resistance is decreased, and they felt less tired when they finished. Students that experience these analogous activities will benefit the most, the more participation the better the comprehension. Other students that do not participate may get confused or not understand the activity, so I could see that this kind of teaching may not be for every student. 

Its interesting that having students sit and cram through problems and lectures is the standard teaching method can change, and activity could be the next level of learning. It requires commitment and dedication, but I believe it could be done. The level of engagement is higher but to learn how to keep the activity and the content relevant is the goal. 

This is a figure I came across a website one day, and I think it could be used as a learning tool for some students. Though it would be out of my comfort zone to teach this kind of material to students, but it would be fun to eventually incorporate it with the right class. During a school visit this week, a student refused to do his physics worksheet and said he would do it at home. He had confidence that he could do it so I asked him to answer a graphing problem by using his arms to explain what happens to the slope of a distance-time graph as the velocity increases and decreases. He laughed, his friends laughed and I was able to see that his kinematics knowledge. We were able to have a conversation through action about his understanding about physics and it will become a memorable teaching moment for me.

PS. As for sensory experiences and taste, even minor events such as Pi day can excite students about math. It just has to begin somewhere