Midterm Conferences & Term Reflection 2.0

Another overdue blog entry! Better late than never.

I wanted to share the new experience with midterm conferences in second semester (as students were more involved with the learning map and I made some tweaks to the reflection they were doing).

Student Reflection

This time around, students were better able to make use of the learning map. Since they had since it since the first week of the course they had a better understanding of what the map meant and how to use it. This meant that student's evaluation of themselves was generally more realistic. It also meant that students were better able to identify what they were doing well, and what they needed to set out as a next step (which meant that the report comments they helped me write were more meaningful).

Student Conference

Conferences were close to student-led conferences. More of them were prepared to show me evidence of their learning and defend their self-evaluation. Some were still under prepared, but there were a lot fewer that needed to go back to do the reflection before re-booking their conference.

Overall there was still some separation between where students believed they were and what I had seen, but it was a lot easier to ask them for evidence of the learning, which led to students doing some reflection in the moment and often realizing that they had not yet shown me something. They were productive conversations and students sometimes expressed they wanted to have more of them (they are time consuming, but I hope to find more and more ways to give students this individual time that they need).

Term Reflection

Some student feedback and personal reflection led me to realize that the reflection I was having students do was not as productive as it needed to be. At midterm I still had students identify a strength and need for each OLG and then evaluating using the learning map. Problem was, they were not engaging enough with the evidence of learning they had identified (and it was a little redundant), So I changed the first chart they were willing in to look like this: (note, you can see the previous version here)

Feel free to borrow and tweak this if you are interested!

Send me a tweet or comment on this blog if you have any other suggestions, ideas, or questions. Would love to hear from you :)

"Gradeless" Math 2.0

Well the blog updates got pushed to the bottom of the to-do list in second semester (not unusual) so this is a tad overdue, but I wanted to share some of the changes that my reflection on first semester lead to.

Some context:
- first semester did not have a learning map with descriptors until after midterm (I did not find I was able to write clear descriptors that I liked until I had evidence of student learning to use to write them)
- the learning map was not clear to students and since they had not engaged with it during the semester having them do final reflections and self-evaluate their course mark was difficult for them
- students relied heavily on the teacher for feedback

And so I set out in the second semester to make some changes. As many of you will be able to relate to, my thought process was more ambitious than life would allow for.

The new iteration (Gradeless 2.0):
- I added to my deconstruction of curriculum to include the learning map (read here for a description of the first week of class in Semester 1, I kept the math processes part and then the grades 10s did the following instead) by cutting up the map into pieces and giving it to them to put together (this forced them to read at least parts of the map and start to become familiar with it)
- Trying to spend more time modelling the use of criteria and feedback for students and giving them more dedicated time to do assessment as learning (trying to help them be less reliant on the teacher)
- Having students engage in the learning map by self-evaluating at the end of each set of summative evaluations (admittedly, this happened after the first set but did not get done in explicit class time after that)

New reflections:
- The new iteration was time well-spent. Students definitely had a better grasp of what the map was intended to do and were more comfortable using it (not all of them, there is still some work to be done, perhaps a more pointed effort to conference with students more often)
- I want students to refer to the map more to increase their focus on identifying where they are and what their next steps might be (keep the focus on noticing and naming the learning and reflecting on their progress)
- Students seemed to appreciate the transparency. One going as far as to say "I finally know what it means to be a level 4 in math" and used this as a way to help himself set goals
- The feedback at the end of the course from my students shows that even the ones who rated the learning map on the low side liked the idea of it, they just found it confusing at times

So it seems like the learning map is something I should continue to pursue and should put a focus on helping to make it more student friendly - I am just not sure what that would look like yet. I wonder if there is  way to make it a bit more interactive so that students can see examples of some of the more confusing parts or read explanations of terms.

If you have any suggestions they would be welcome!

Happy summer!

JALI Assessment As Learning Reflection

As many of you who have read one of my blog entries already will know, I am have been on a journey to improve my understanding and use of assessment in my teaching practices over the past few years. In semester 1 of this year I had the opportunity to participate in one of my school's "mini courses" offered for teachers. This one was lead by one of my colleagues and was to work on our use of assessment AS learning.

This is an area that I feel I have continued to struggle with but know that I need to tap into better. In order to survive in my quest (see recent post on this quest) for a feedback-focused math classroom I need to tap into the skills of my students to give themselves (and each other) effective feedback. Students deserve feedback, and getting them involved in the process engages them in the learning better, makes evaluation more transparent, and makes teacher workload a bit more manageable.

I was able to be exposed to some strategies I had not considered in my classroom before the JALI course and am now trying some new things in semester 2. My goals are for students to:
- engage in the learning map more regularly
- do more co-construction of criteria
- explicitly use criteria to give each other (and self) feedback on their work
- (and by extension) for students to better self-identify their needs

I am grateful for colleagues who are so willing to share their experiences and expertise with others and found sharing with the other course members was a reward in itself!

Reflections on Midterm Conferences in "Gradeless" 9-10 Math

This post can also be found on our team's TLLP blog.

It has been an observation of mine that students are struggling to transfer the meta-cognition skills gained in other places into the math classroom. The ideas and structures I am putting onto their math learning seem to be very different than anything they have done in math before that they do not realize they have done it elsewhere. It has made for some interesting reflection on my part.

In continuing with my journey to explore student reflection I wanted to have students self-evaluate at midterm and conference with me to determine their report grade and report card comments. I set this up using an assignment on Google Classroom and had the sign up for a conference time-slot.

My grade 10s were given a reflection document that included a few things (outlined via images below).

Part 1: Identify pieces of evidence and start to identify criteria from the map that were evident in that evidence

Part 2: Highlight where evidence shows that they are for each criteria of each overarching learning goal in the course (the map is a partial map, only including the aspects relevant at this point in the course)

Part 3: Self-evaluate and reevaluate learning and next steps

When this was all said and done I opened this file when students came to me for their conference. Since I was finding that students were struggling with this process in math I ended up spending most of this time looking at their map with them and identifying areas where we disagreed so that we could discuss them. I recognize that I had not done the map justice (did not explain it well enough) and had already known that it would be difficult as it would be their first real exposure to it (I was only able to write the map myself the week before giving this assignment). Needless to say, I learned a lot - and had already planned to get a student focus-group together to help me reword the map more appropriately for students.

So next time I will:
- get students using the map earier
- rework it to use more student-friendly language
- model how to use the map
- have students evaluate using the map before midterm
- continue to build student reflection and self- & peer-assessment skills explicitly

The grade 9s I do not have a map for so I approached their reflection by having them fill in a chart while referencing the parts of the curriculum document that were relevant at this point. They were often able to identify specific expectations that they were doing well on and ones that they had to work on. What ended up lacking was them considering these expectations from a lens that expanded from just the "understand and use" - I need a way to make sure that the 9s consider the math processes as well in the future.

Overall students responded fairly positively during conferences when I pointed out things that had not considered that showed they were struggling with aspects of the course, but the discussions took a long time. The conferencing process was valuable, but I need to seek some ways to make it more manageable and to be away from facilitating student learning for less time.

Week 2/3 in "Gradeless" Math - Self & Peer-Assessment and Reflecting on Progress

This post can also be found on our team's TLLP blog.

In the second full week of school I put a lot of focus on starting to develop student's skills in self- and peer-assessment. Without these skills the idea of developing an environment that creates more autonomous learners likely would not happen (and the burden of giving descriptive feedback would fall entirely on me - and I also have a goal to get more sleep this year).

Here is the gist of the steps I attempted to take last week:

1. Give students questions to use when reflecting on their work (such as "Have I written my solution so that someone else can follow it?"). I put these on the board and uploaded a photo of them to our Google Site for student's to reference.

2. Introduce the model I am using for descriptive feedback (Acknowledge what you are doing well; Describe what your next step should be; Determine how/when you are going to work on your next step). I also put this on the board and uploaded a photo to our Site. In the future, I would like to provide students with exemplars and discuss what good feedback looks like.

3. Assign students to choose a question they have done and use the questions from 1 and the model from 2 to write descriptive feedback for themselves (and asked them to upload to Sesame so I could give them feedback on their descriptive feedback).

4. On the next opportunity I modeled how I used the success criteria to write the reflection questions for students (this time we were looking at problem solving).

5. I then assigned a question for them to do as practice and when most of them were finished I had them swap with a neighbour and peer-assess using the questions and write descriptive feedback for their partner.

6. For homework that night I asked them to choose one of the questions they did at home to upload to Sesame and include descriptive feedback for themselves. I followed up with those who posted one to give them feedback on their self-assessment.

I plan to have report conferences with students at midterm and the end of the course to determine their report grades together. To help them prepare for this I also implemented the next two steps at the end of the week.

7. I created a chart (pictured below) with instructions for students for them to use to help them summarize what we had been doing. I filled in the overarching learning goals (OLGs) that I wanted them to focus on and they needed to list the evidence they had of that learning (i.e. quiz, homework, activity) and then list the corresponding success criteria from our learning map as ether "met" or "still working on".

8. Based on the instructions students sent home an email that summarized the chart (on my Google Classroom assignment it stated that they should: Tell them what they learned/were able to do; Inform them of what is still being worked on; Summarize how the student feels they are doing so far).

Once students started to send the emails and I looked at a couple I realized I needed to get them to do a reflection portion to help consolidate a bit better. Upon this reflection I decided to add this to the bottom of these reflections.

This will make sure students are reminded to revisit their goal and will hopefully lead to students setting some relevant goals for where they are at the time.

I will definitely be continuing to get students to use self- and peer-assessment and will continue to work on using the above style reflections to see how they go. Right now the tough part is convincing all of them to complete it (I gave them time in class, but probably not enough).