Week 5: The Assessment-Instruction Process and Enhancing Core Math Instruction

 

The Assessment-Instruction Process

Within the first few weeks of class, we discussed the context-learner match in order to teach reading and writing effectively. This week, we discussed the rest of the Assessment-Instruction Process. In our previous discussions, getting started with assessment involved evaluating the context for learning as well as the learner individually. 
- Step 4: Evaluating the Match Between Learner and Context - Teachers will evaluate the match between the learner's knowledge, skill, strategies, and motivation and the context's setting, instructional strategies, resources, and learning tasks. 
- Step 5: Reflecting on Information, Planning Instruction - Teachers will reflect on their findings between the learner/context match and plan instruction based on hypotheses of what the learner needs. 
- Step 6: Establish a Match Through Diagnostic Teaching - 
By utilizing diagnostic teaching, teachers will use evidence to create hypotheses about the learner's needs and altering the context to match the learner. This involves controlling the conditions of instruction by changing the setting or altering the instructional methods and/or materials.
- Step 7: Adapting Instruction with Curriculum-Based Measurement - When teachers adapt their instruction, they typically use alternate methods of teaching to fit the learner. Alternate methods compares two or more instructional techniques to teach the same content or skill. Using the technique of scaffolding, teachers can modify tasks until learners are able to accomplish the task independently. Using scaffolding, teachers can start with minimal supports that only increase when the task is above the learner's frustration level.
- Step 8: Report Findings - After teachers modify the context to match the learner, it is necessary to track the learner's progress to make sure they are improving in their learning of reading and writing instruction.

When I start using the CRI to instruct my student in placement, I plan to use the test battery to decide what components of reading and writing to teach and implement into my lessons. This method of assessment and instruction helps teachers to understand their students as individual learners and adapt their instruction based on the learners' needs.

We also read about and discussed math instruction and best practices. The guidelines for best practice are somewhat specific to math because instruction builds on previous skills. Teachers need to prioritize and teach critical content, sequencing examples to demonstrate instruction, teach the requisite skills to build on basics, and model instruction to demonstrate tasks, using scaffolding to promote independence. I remember growing up annoyed at my teachers for the math review packets over the summer, but as math became more difficult for me into high school, I thanked my teachers for reteaching us the skills we would be building on and reviewing at the beginning of the year with us. Practicing with my teachers and thinking of ways to remember the skills helped me to improve as math got harder.

Week 4: Richard Blanco Visit and Comprehensive Reading Inventory

 

Richard Blanco, "One Today"

On Tuesday of Week 4, we met with Richard Blanco, the youngest, first Latino, and first openly gay person to ever read an Inaugural Poem. As the Woodrow Wilson Visiting Fellow for the Writer's House at Elizabethtown, a session was organized between the Education majors in our class and Blanco to discuss facilitating teaching poetry in the classroom. As we talked, Blanco mentioned only discovering a real love for poetry when he realized how much writing was involved in civil engineering, and how beautifully words could be manipulated. Having one right answer as to themes and symbols seemed to be the overarching fear that everyone who disliked poetry had with it. As a class, we were encouraged to expose our students to poetry as much and as early as possible. Blanco facilitated a mini-lesson with us using one of his poems, "Looking for the Gulf Motel". He said he would "teach the poem like a poet", a strategy to teach poetry in the classroom. He first read us his poem, and then asked us to absorb all of the information through our senses, splitting the room to find imagery that specifically related to sounds, sights, smells, tastes, and touch. Blanco, as evidenced through "One Today" and "Looking for the Gulf Motel", very much writes on the rule of "show, don't tell". He uses verisimilitude, replicating the experiences he's had throughout his life to evoke the emotions of his audience through writing. Blanco emphasized encouraging students to develop emotional responses to images within poems. Teaching students that poetry connects people to one another, rather than one way to interpret a poem's meaning, eases the pain of the poetry unit. At the end of our session, we wrapped up with tips to teach poetry, and a few stuck with me based on my past experiences. I wish when I was growing up I was more able to analyze more contemporary work. Using songs side by side with certain themes or lessons could have worked beautifully in the classroom. Blanco even mentioned using reverse chronological order to teach poetry, comparing more modern, living poets with classics like Shakespeare and finding that general messages and themes have repeated for centuries. In class, we always talk about engaging our students, and using modern, fun approaches to poetry will motivate students to analyze and create.

On Thursday, we talked about the Comprehensive Reading Inventory, and our assignments for placement. I had my first field placement the day after, and asked my co-op if she had a student in mind for me to work with. She mentioned she'd get back to me, and I started to plan my assessments for the following week. My goals with my student for the first day of CRI administration are to do:
- the interest and reading attitude surveys, as well as 
- the alphabetics exam for phonemic awareness,
- letter-naming, and 
- graded sentences. 
I chose these items of the CRI because they seem to be the least time-consuming and based on my teacher's classroom, I do not think I will accomplish the whole battery of tests within one period of sitting down, no matter who I get. My teacher has poor classroom management and it is difficult to manage her class when they do the Daily 5 and she only sits down with small groups for directed reading and writing instruction. I am interested to see which student she will assign me, since I know one of the students who also has ADHD was already assigned to another student for placement.

Week 3: Diagnostic Teaching and Multi-Dimensional Assessment

This week revolved around using assessment and instruction to influence one another effectively in the classroom. Best practice implements a cyclical process of planning for instruction, using instruction to plan assessment, and reflecting on instruction and assessment to plan better instruction. In order to assess students with disabilities in particular, teachers need to understand that a certain assessment only tests a set of skills a student has within the particular testing context. In another context, a teacher might see drastically different results assessing the same set of skills.

In the Assessment/Instruction Process, the goal of teachers is to evaluate the match between the context and the learner to facilitate meaningful instruction. When a match between the learner and the context is created, students become strategic, motivated, and reflective in their learning. One huge component of beginning instruction and assessment is to motivate students. When working to motivate low-achieving or struggling students, teachers typically start with a system of extrinsic motivation, but as students become independent, intrinsic motivation will build. Praise for positive behaviors, both socially and academically, encourages students to want to act and learn independently. One of the main points discussed was to use rewarding motivations, possibly to earn fun activities or responsibilities within the classroom. One teacher I worked with over this past summer used Brain Breaks as a fun activity with a class of upcoming kindergarteners, who enjoyed earning activities like bunny-hopping around the room. 

While using the Assessment/Instruction Process, the first step is to find the learner/context mismatch in the classroom (if any), and the next step would be identifying barriers within different contexts. Through removing barriers and determining the best contexts for learning with individual learners, performance then can be established and improved. 

Week 2: Strategies for Effective Learning - Reading, Writing, and Math

The Interactive View of Reading and Writing

One of the strategies we learned about this week was the Interactive View of Reading and Writing. The goals of this strategy to learn and perform well in reading and writing are to "use reading and writing to accomplish personal, recreational, academic, and civic purposes". To me, this means that students should use reading and writing to function effectively in the real world, rather than just drilling and practicing the mechanics in the classroom. Vygotsky, through his social learning theory, believes that the way that teachers and anyone in society uses reading and writing reflect the views in the society in which the people live. Important functions in reading and writing will be taught and parallel what society believes is important. When instructing and assessing students who struggle, teachers must take into consideration the learner and the context. Keep in mind that skilled performance is both "variable and dynamic". The elements of skilled reading and writing performance include:
- Comprehension: using information to make meaning, understand, and learn and remember
- Composition: writing to convey ideas, in stages (prewriting, drafting, revising, editing, and publishing)
- Vocabulary Development: essential for comprehension, knowing the meanings of words and how to infer meanings of new words
- Word Identification and Spelling: essential for reading and the process of constructing meaning, smooth flow of reading
- Rate and Fluency: grouping words into meaningful phrase units to maintain the process of comprehension, reading becomes more like speaking
- Grammar, Usage, and Mechanics: arrangement of words into meaningful units by a system of rules (grammar), choosing words to fit the context of writing (usage), punctuation, capitalization, in writing, mechanics clarify meaning, in oral language, mechanics express meaning (mechanics)

Contextual factors that influence performance include the instructional settings, practices, and resources available for the student to learn, in addition to the assessment practices used to monitor the performance of the student.

Learner factors that influence performance include the student's prior knowledge, knowledge about reading and writing, and their attitudes and motivations about their feelings of reading and writing.

When contextual factors and learner factors are favorable, then skilled reading and writing performance occurs. The image above shows the combination of both the learner and contextual factors creating skilled reading-writing performance.

Evidence-Based Strategies for Teaching Mathematics

Another strategy we learned pertained to teaching mathematics and different strategies to use to help students become independent learners. These strategies, when used in math instruction, help students to remember what they learn and how skills build on one another, rather than memorizing information for only one context. The six strategies mentioned can help students contextualize mathematics. The strategies include:

- Schema-Based Instruction: helps to understand and break down the structure of problems, uses backward chaining (converting to an equation) to solve the problem, determines the goal of the problem (or what the solution should be), and locating missing information to solve using diagrams

-  Cognitive Strategies: steps developed to generalize solving word problems, using checklists rather than diagramming, checklists help to stay on task academically and behaviorally; Say Ask Check involve reading the word problem, asking what information is needed, and solving and checking the solution; STAR stands for search, answer, translate, and review, and is used to solve word problems as well

-  Scaffolding: building new instruction onto previously learned skills, integrated approach makes connections between the mathematical disciplines to find applications among them, taught explicitly at first, then practice opportunities are presented, with the goal of independent problem-solving, using immediate feedback to improve

- Peer-Mediated Instruction: defined as "pairs of students working collaboratively on structured, individualized activities", inquiry-based with teacher planning to work smoothly, engages students in communicating about math, paired by ability level across the median, students take turns being the tutor and tutee, researchers find that student achievement improves using this method over teacher-led instruction   

- Concrete-Representational-Abstract (CRA) Sequence: uses concrete manipulatives, representational pictures, and abstract symbols, that can be used at all levels of math instruction, students begin by physically using manipulatives, then move to semi-concrete representations (tally marks and pictures), then abstract representations (symbols, numbers, and equations) to solve problems, guides students to mastery of skills

- Mnemonics: words, sentences, or pictures to improve/strengthen memory, can be teacher- or student-created, keyword mnemonic (choosing sounds to represent the words to be remembered and creating a visual), pegword mnemonic (one word or phrase that starts the same letter in an acronym, as in PEMDAS), and letter, these help more with basic math facts and memorization in general

Week 1: Key Concepts, Main Thoughts

In this week, it was discussed that reading and writing work best while combined. Historically, reading and writing were seen as separate subjects, rather than taught in conjunction with one another. Recently, views have shifted in order to include reading and writing as a combined subject. Reading and writing should be taught together in order for students to write about and respond to their reading, and students will learn content and writing styles and mechanics through reading works of other authors. Students will be taught not only to use reading and writing to express themselves, but also to analyze content, such as primary documents in a Social Studies class or biographies about important inventors in a Science class. Teacher collaboration is crucial as well for student success. In our reading, the authors discussed collaboration among educators as being key to successful classroom learning. If the general education and special education teachers plan together to incorporate all aspects of the curriculum into their lessons, all of the students would benefit. Unfortunately, it becomes more and more difficult for teachers to come together and collaborate when instruction is so heavily influenced by political policies. Even as a pre-service teacher, I realize through field placements and working with teachers at other locations that the demands on teachers to match these political policies becomes stressful and incredibly demanding. Whether a teacher can continue to have a job or not frequently depends on how well his or her students perform on state-mandated assessments. Collaborating is crucial for classroom teachers to review teaching practices and analyze lessons, learning from one another to teach meaningful lessons in their classrooms. 

In addition, we read the article "Going Beyond the Math Wars" from Teaching Exceptional Children. This article emphasized blending direct instruction with inquiry-based learning, and focused on multiple strategies to use in the classroom to help students become independent learners. With the challenges students in special education already face, they need careful planning within their lessons to scaffold their skills to build upon basics and achieve higher levels of learning. In my field placement last semester, it was difficult for my students to even transition from using the same manipulatives in a concrete manner, and switch to using the same manipulatives in digital form through an iPad app. When teachers blend explicit and indirect instruction, students build more meaning from class.