Friday 14 March 2014

Dustin St Godard - Classroom Instruction that Works


Teacher Toolbox – Classroom Instruction that Works

The text chosen for this task is called “Classroom Instruction that Works: Research-Based Strategies for Increasing Student Achievement” (2nd Edition).  It was a very well laid out text with so many important tips to keep in mind for children.  The text was put into four parts, labeled in order include part one, creating the environment for learning.  Part two, helping students develop understanding.  Part three helping students extend and apply knowledge.  Part four, putting the instructional strategies to use.  The parts were also subdivided into a total of ten sections throughout the text.  This summary will include information on the first eight which includes all the parts of the text with the exception of putting the instructional strategies to use. 

                 In part one, creating the environment for learning, the main focus was on setting objectives and providing feedback for the students.  Objectives are set so learning becomes purposeful and reassures students there is a reason for learning the current content.  With this, students will be able to connect what is done in class to what they are supposed to learn and build intrinsic motivation by setting personal learning objectives.  Recommendations for use in the classroom related to setting objectives include developing objectives that are specific but not restrictive (figure 1.1 has some excellent examples of too general, too specific, and just right learning objectives), communicate the objectives with the students and parents, make a connection to previous and future learning, and have students set personal learning objectives.  Now, when a student is provided with proper feedback it helps improve performance, confirm understanding, demonstrates what quality performance looks like and explains what changes are necessary to improve learning.  There are four recommendations for providing feedback in the classroom.  First, feedback must address what is correct and elaborates what to do next.  Second, feedback should come at the appropriate time in order to meet the student’s needs.  When a student is focused on figuring out a difficult task or learning a new concept, delay feedback.  When the student is in need of feedback in order to complete a task or when acquiring procedural skills, immediate feedback may be necessary.  It is also important to know your students as delaying feedback for high performing students can develop cognitive and metacognitive processing but for low performing students, frustration.  Third, feedback should be criterion referenced.  Rather than referring to a child as “your smart” or good job”, which are examples of personal feedback, teachers should use feedback that addresses knowledge to be learned along with providing information to improve performance with specific guidance.  Ensuring that the teacher is providing the proper feedback, a rubric can be used as it provides levels of performance for a skill (example provided on figure 1.3).  Finally, teachers should engage students in the feedback process.  This allows students to reflect on their own performance or performance of others and provide feedback.  In the case of reflecting on others, it is important to note that students should not provide scores for peers.  Only feedback on what is correct and what may need work.

                The next section for creating the environment for learning involves reinforcing effort and providing recognition.  There is a link between motivation and achievement.  Motivation determines the amount of effort a child put into a task along with time spent.  Therefore, teachers need to build that motivation that leads to achievement by reinforcing effort and providing recognition.  Reinforcing effort allows students to recognize the relationship between effort and achievement.  When students see the results hard work can have, they change their attitude and can then persevere when times get tough.  The text supplies three classroom recommendations when reinforcing effort in the classroom.  First, teach students the relationship between effort and achievement.  This can be done by providing stories of oneself or examples from media clips related to effort so students can gain a better understanding.  Second, provide guidance on what it means to expend effort.  When a teacher supplies a definition of what it means to work hard by giving explicit actions and behaviours of effort, it will lead to success.  And third, get students to track their effort and achievement.  By monitoring this, it allows students to focus on the learning objective, what it takes to achieve the objective and their progress to get there.  Next for this section is providing recognition as introduced above.  It is important to use the mastery-oriented approach (explained more below) as it bases success on mastery of a task and results in increased engagement.  When done correctly, positively effects learning.  If praise and recognition is personal or ability oriented, it forms a negative effect on the student’s intrinsic motivation.  There are three practices teachers can provide in the classroom for providing recognition.  First, promote mastery-goal orientation.  Teachers should emphasize learning and meeting goals rather than comparing students.  This approach leads to students increased self-efficacy and intrinsic motivation.  The students will recognize that they can control their work and success through this approach.  But if students are compared to one another, they lose that sense of control because they cannot control how other students perform.  Second, provide praise that is specific and aligned with expected performance.  Teachers can acknowledge the care students put into their work and the progress they are making in understanding the concepts.  However, praise must also be sincere.  How, what and when teachers praise is important.  Do not praise every accomplishment as students begin to rely on it and it is no longer sincere.  Other negative ways to praise a child include in the presence of peers, overused, random, disconnected from accomplishment or inconsistent with cultural norms.  The third recommendation for providing recognition suggests using concrete symbols of recognition.  By using rewards to recognize quality of work, student’s self-efficacy will improve.  The types of rewards can include stickers, tokens or coupons.        

                The final section in part one is on cooperative learning.  With the world becoming more than just a place that needs high intellectual capabilities, cooperative learning provides opportunity to prepare students for a future of working with others.  The cooperative learning theory suggests that learning is maximized through well designed social interaction.  As students talk through the material, they develop a better understanding.  Through this cooperative work, students also feel an obligation to work for one another and it results in an increase in motivation.  Out of the five suggestions made by a research group Johnson and Johnson, the authors of our text highly suggest using two of the five for learning activities.  The first of these two is positive interdependence.  This emphasizes that everyone is in it together and the success of one person does not come at the expense of others success.  It is important to ensure that the students work load is equal among students.  Second is individual accountability and this relies on the feedback on how each member’s efforts contributed to the achievement of the goal.  A teacher can determine this through formative and summative assessment as it will determine each student’s contribution.  There are three classroom practice recommendations for cooperative learning.  First, include elements of positive interdependence and individual accountability.  This way, students are responsible for their own learning, learning of the group and get a chance to demonstrate what they know to one another.  Second recommendation is to keep the groups small.  No more than five students because any larger results in a decrease in external and internal motivation as students figure their individual contributions go unnoticed.  Finally, use cooperative learning consistently and systematically.  There are three types of cooperatively learning that can be used for the classroom.  Informal, suggests turning to your neighbour for example, and clarify expectations for a few minutes.  Formal learning is done over several days and designed to ensure students have time to complete a task.  And the third is base groups learning.  This is a long term group that provides support for one another.  These groups can be used in the classroom to complete routine tasks, plan activities and help to establish a sense of belonging.   

                Now welcome to part two, helping students develop understanding, beginning with cues, questions and advance organizers.  With an estimate of 80 percent of teacher/student interactions involving cueing and questioning, this is a rather important topic to understand.  Cues and questions activate a child’s prior knowledge and give an idea of what they will learn.  In more depth, cues are hints of an upcoming lesson, they reinforce information students already know and are able to provide new information.  A question allows students to access previous information and allows a teacher and student to assess what they know and do not know.  Four classroom recommendations are suggested for cues and questions in the classroom.  First, focus on what is important.  Without this, the teacher will guide a student on the wrong path and the student will miss what is important in the lesson or not understand how to integrate the teaching to prior knowledge.  Second, use explicit cues.  Explicit cues can help students activate prior knowledge by bringing up relevant personal experiences or situations they encounter on a regular basis.  Examples for this include showing pictures of the topic and asking students to identify what they know the most and least about.  Or, telling students what to pay attention to by providing a list of questions students can answer as a result of the lesson.  The third recommendation suggests to ask inferential questions.  Rather than using “right there” information questions, inferential questions require a student to access prior knowledge.  Questions can help students make inferences about events, (who is usually involved in this event?), things (what action is usually performed on this thing or person?), actions (who or what usually performs this action?), and states of being (what is the basic process involved in reaching this state?).  And lastly, ask analytic questions.  These questions require students to think more deeply and critical about what is presented.  Questions can be related to analyzing errors (what are the errors in reasoning in this information?), construction support (what is an argument that would support this claim?) and analyzing perspectives (why would someone consider this to be good?).  As for the advanced organizers also brought up in this section.  They help create stories and pictures that use background information to learn new information.  There are four formats for advanced organizers starting with using expository advance organizers.  Here students can describe or explain in written or verbal form, new content students will learn and can emphasize what is important.  Second, use narrative advance organizers as it serves to engage students while activating prior knowledge as they read through information presented in a story format.  Next, use skimming as an advanced organizer.  This requires students to quickly look over the material before reading it fully.  It helps students determine what the material addresses and organizes new information.  “Tilling the text” is a form of skimming and asks students to read all subheadings and points of emphasis.  With this, students will better understand key points, slow down when encountering something of interest and it will encourage predictions.  The final recommendation suggests using graphic organizers in advance to learning as it introduces new material.      

                In the next section to part 2, the text discusses non-linguistic representations.  There are two ways to store information.  The first is in words, which is linguistic.  The second is as images, which is non-linguistic.  With non-linguistic representations, a teacher can engage a student’s natural tendency for visual image processing resulting in the child constructing meaning of relevant content.  There are five classroom recommendations for non-linguistic representations.  First, use graphic organizers as a way to combine both linguistic and non-linguistic representations by representing ideas with words and symbols.  Second, make physical models or manipulatives.  These should be concrete representations of content or concepts that help students create mental images.  The next recommendation is to generate mental pictures with the children.  Through proper detail, students can incorporate sound, smells, taste and visual detail to the mental picture of content and concepts in the lesson.  Fourth, create pictures, illustrations and pictographs.  They allow children to represent learning in a personalized way and is especially helpful when learning new concepts.  The fifth recommendation is to engage students in kinesthetic activities.  This means getting the students moving as physical movement associated with a concept helps in creating a mental image.  This occurs because mental images include physical senses and they create more neural networks in the brain resulting in a longer memory.  Movement can be in the form of roleplaying, acting out vocabulary, or using one’s body to illustrate concepts.  

                The third section in part two is on summarizing and taking notes.  Summarizing requires the student to learn how to sort, select and combine information as it will lead to an increased understanding in what it is they are learning.  It is also the process of removing what is unnecessary and leaving behind the important points.  Note taking is the process of identifying what is the essential information as students access, sort and code information.  Both of which deepen understanding because the strategies involve a higher order way of thinking.  There are three recommendations for summarizing in the classroom.  To start, teacher should teach the students the rule based summarizing strategy.  This is a step by step process that begins with removing the unnecessary material for understanding.  Once that is complete, take out the repeated material and then replace lists with a single describing word (dutch, oak, spruce can all be changed to tree’s).  The last step is to find a topic sentence or create one for the information gathered.  It is important for the teacher to model this process whenever possible.  The second recommendation is to use summary frames.  Summary frames are a series of questions designed to highlight critical elements of the text pattern.  There are six basic frames used in the classroom along with their questions.  They include narrative frame (examples, who are the main characters and what distinguishes them from others? When and where did the story take place? What prompted the action in the story?), topic restriction-illustration frame (what is the general statement or topic? What information restricts the general statement or topic? What examples illustrate the topic or restriction?), definition frame (what is being defined? what general category does the item belong? What characteristics separate the item from other things in the category?), argumentation frame (what is the basic claim or focus of the information? What is presented that leads to a claim? What examples support the claim? What restricts the claim?), problem-solution frame (what is the problem, what is a solution? What is another? What solution has the best chance to succeed?), and finally, conversation frame (how did members of the conversation greet one another? How did the conversation progress? How did the conversation conclude?).  The last classroom recommendation for using summary is to engage students in reciprocal teaching.  This is successful when the teacher models the four comprehension strategies for reciprocal teaching (summarizing, questioning, clarifying and predicting).  To begin, the teacher can take on all the roles but then eventually pass each role off to the students.  The process will sound similar to the following example.  The summarizer reads a passage and sums it up for the group.  This is followed by questions to be answered by all.  The clarifier helps clarify vocabulary, pronunciation and terms.  Then the predictor asks the group what they think happens next.  The next part of this section is note taking as mentioned above.  Reminder that this is a form of reviewing information as it is put into the students own words for understanding in a condensed form.  There are three classroom recommendations for note taking.  The first is to give students teacher prepared notes as this models how to create well organized notes.  Second, teach students a variety of note taking formats.  Students have many different learning preferences and teachers should be prepared for all of them and allow students to choose their note taking preference that works best for them.  There are three note taking formats.  Webbing is the first.  It is non-linear, uses shapes, colours and arrows to show relationships among different concepts (example shown on figure 6.3).  Another format is outlining, where information is hand written of typed.  The third format is a combination of linguistic and non-linguistic representations.  On a sheet, use one side of the paper to write key points and draw on the other side of the page (example provided on figure 6.4).  The final recommendation for note taking in the classroom is for the teacher to provide opportunities for students to revise their notes and use them for review.  The process of revising and review allows a student to recognize the purpose of note taking.  In review, the teacher can correct misconceptions and provide corrective feedback.  The process of revising notes comes with the suggestion of teachers encouraging students to double space their notes so additions can be made as students elaborate on what they have learned.

                The final section in part two, helping students develop understanding, is on assigning homework and providing practice.  Homework is opportunities to learn and review outside of school.  The effects of homework is not totally clear to researchers as there are a variety of factors that are in play.  These factors include parental involvement, students learning preference and homework quality.  Evidence suggest homework is more beneficial for older students.  However, regardless of age, homework can have a negative effect on family time, physical and emotional fatigue, lack of community and leisure activities and student-parent conflicts.  Therefore, teachers should ensure that assignments make the best use of out of school time.  There are three recommendations when using homework as a classroom routine.  First, develop and communicate a district or school homework policy where a clear set of guidelines based on age, expectations and relationship between homework and grades are in place.  At the early year’s level, homework should be administered sparingly as it can create friction between a teacher and parent related to the role a parent has to play in their child’s schooling.  A study in 2010 suggests parents involved interaction can improve the child’s performance.  Second, design homework assignment that support academic learning and communicate the purpose.  The teacher should be clear with the student and parents the purpose of the homework given out in the classroom.  The third recommendation is to provide feedback on assigned homework.  The feedback benefits the child and can be in the form of written responses or grades.  However, if a teacher is providing grades, it should count towards the student’s non-academic performance (as in the student’s participation level).  Therefore, the more beneficial route would be to supply the students with written feedback as it encourages students to take risks and show conceptual understanding that wouldn’t be found in graded work.  The next part of this section refers to practice which is an act of repeating a skill so it is immediately accessible for cognitive use.  The practice should be overt where students are actively involved in recalling information through quizzes, rehearsal or self-assessment.  It is suggested that practice should incorporate more than one aspect of a skill at a time so relationships can be formed.  There are three recommendations for providing students with practice.  First, clearly identify and communicate the purpose of the practice activity.  The purpose of any practice activity should be for students to become faster and more proficient at a skill aligned with the learning objective.  Without knowing the purpose, the students become distracted.  It is a good idea to keep parents involved in what is going on in the classroom.  The notifications can come in the form of newsletters, blogs, shared calendars and websites.  Second, design practice sessions that are short, focused and distributed over time.  A short sessions encourages students to make the full use of their time.  Teachers should focus the practice so students can target the difficult aspects of a skill.  And the skill should be practiced over a long period of time rather than all at once because it is estimated that a skill should be practiced 24 times in order to reach 80% competency.  Also, the sessions at first should be massed (close together) and overtime, the practice sessions should be spread out or distributed.  The third recommendation is to provide feedback on a practice session.  When a skill is first being practiced, the feedback should be formative so the student can learn what they are doing correctly and what they need to adjust.  Following plenty of formative practice sessions, the teacher can provide a summative practice session focusing on speed and accuracy. 

                The final part that will be discussed is part three, helping students extend and apply knowledge.  The one section analyzed is on identifying similarities and differences.  There are three classroom recommendation for identifying similarities and differences.  First, teach students a variety of ways to identify similarities and differences.  Students benefit from explicit instruction with steps and modeling for identifying similarities and differences.  So it is important to model and provide several opportunities to practice each strategy.  There are four strategies outlined in the text.  The first is comparing, where the students have to identify between or among items or ideas.  The steps involved begin with selecting the items to compare, identify the characteristics of the items being compared and then explain how the items are similar and different.  Another strategy is classifying, which organizes things into groups according to similarities.  The step by step process for classifying starts with identifying items to classify.  Then select an item, describe its attributes and identify others with the same attributes.  Once complete, create a category by specifying attributes the items need to become a member.  Continue this process by selecting another item and identifying its attributes and items similar.  If necessary, create a new category or split previously made category into smaller groups requiring more specific requirements to be a member.  The next strategy is creating metaphors which is a good technique for learning new material when it is abstract or difficult to understand as it connects what students do not know to what students do know.  Begin by identifying the basic elements of the new information being worked on.  Then write basic information as a more general pattern by replacing words to more general terms and summarize where possible.  Now, find new situations where the pattern applies.  The final strategy is creating analogies that can help students see similarities in things that are dissimilar.  Step one is identify how two items in the first pair are related.  Then state the relationship in a general way before moving to step three, identify another pair with similar relationships.  The second recommendation is to guide students as they engage in the process of identifying similarities and differences.  The direct approach has the teacher simply state the similarities and differences among items which is effective when students are actively engaged in a discussion on similarities and differences.  Another approach is to apply structure tasks where items to be compared are supplied by the teacher.  The third and final recommendation for identifying similarities and differences is to provide cues to help students identify similarities and differences.  Cues can be in the form of posters of important problem features, a labeled diagram or prompts for students to reflect on what is learned.  Cues can also be done with pointing out patterns in the information, providing guiding questions or using objects as analogs.

                The text confirmed many of the theories that were outline in the course.  For example, the information provided on feedback informed us that feedback has to be provided at the right time for the best understanding and can also assist a teacher in what will be done next when referring to formative feedback.  Another big topic discussed in class was reinforcing effort which was a discussed in the text.  By reinforcing effort, a student can recognize the relationship between effort and achievement.  One difference that was noticed from the class readings and the text for the teacher toolbox was on praising children.  Alfie in one of our readings suggested never praise a child as it will negatively impact the children’s future learning.  The text suggests when praise is done correctly it can increase a child’s socio-emotional indicators and result in a positive effect on learning.  The text even suggested using concrete awards such as stickers, tokens or coupons to build self-efficacy.  An idea that was not recommended in class readings.  But in the end, the text would be a great addition to any first year teacher’s toolbox as it has many strategies and many connections to what the class had discussed.

 

References

Dean, C. Hubbell, E. Pitler, H. Stone, B. (2012). Classroom Instruction that Works: Research-Based Strategies for Increasing Students Achievement. Denver, Colorado: Mid-Continent Research for Education and Learning.

 

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