ImagineIT - Phase Five
I spoke with two teachers and 11 students. Each had a variety of comments and suggestions for my ImagineIT project.
The teachers felt that my project was a necessary one and were very interested in how it progressed. When we talked about how to assess students on their perseverance, three ideas came forth:
When we discussed my proposed steps to help them overcome this giving up, they agreed that all of my steps were a good start, except for one. A few of them seemed to think that when I asked students to exchange papers (and critique each other's mistakes and then share out), it seemed kind of cruel to bare another's errors. Still another student kept asking, "What if no [students] can solve the problem?" which I thought was a very good question that I neglected to consider.
I will be adapting many of the suggestions: I will use the same rubric for all assessments and I will have the students help design it. I think using the same rubric will better allow me to track the students' progress, and having the students design it will allow them ownership of their perseverance. I am not going to use the entire CERA suggestion because it is too limiting as most of its questions relate directly to reading a text, but it did have interesting ideas for self-reflection, including questions like, "What kinds of things were happening in your mind as you read/tried to solve this problem?" and, "What did you do that helped you to understand the reading/the problem?"
Finally, I won't be worrying about students feeling bad about critiquing each other because (a) that is a part of persevering, and (b) we are in a safe space, where sharing is welcomed.
The teachers felt that my project was a necessary one and were very interested in how it progressed. When we talked about how to assess students on their perseverance, three ideas came forth:
- The rubric could be the same for all assessments
- Students could come up with the rubric themselves
- My ideas to assess perseverance paralleled a previously discussed method of analyzing text called CERA (Curriculum-Embedded Reading Assessment), which comes from Reading Apprenticeship
- Going in circles, trying different methods, but nothing works.
- If it looks hard, I won't do it
- I have an idea, but I can't execute it.
When we discussed my proposed steps to help them overcome this giving up, they agreed that all of my steps were a good start, except for one. A few of them seemed to think that when I asked students to exchange papers (and critique each other's mistakes and then share out), it seemed kind of cruel to bare another's errors. Still another student kept asking, "What if no [students] can solve the problem?" which I thought was a very good question that I neglected to consider.
I will be adapting many of the suggestions: I will use the same rubric for all assessments and I will have the students help design it. I think using the same rubric will better allow me to track the students' progress, and having the students design it will allow them ownership of their perseverance. I am not going to use the entire CERA suggestion because it is too limiting as most of its questions relate directly to reading a text, but it did have interesting ideas for self-reflection, including questions like, "What kinds of things were happening in your mind as you read/tried to solve this problem?" and, "What did you do that helped you to understand the reading/the problem?"
Finally, I won't be worrying about students feeling bad about critiquing each other because (a) that is a part of persevering, and (b) we are in a safe space, where sharing is welcomed.