Articulate
"His learning was out of balance. He soaked up information and enjoyed it greatly, but that was the end. He didn't do anything with his information. He didn't use it to create ideas or actions." James E. Zull, The Art of Changing the Brain
One of the areas in which I feel I have made the most progress in over the past year or two in my teaching and in implementing SBL is in articulating what the students are going to learn in a given unit and course. This is also the area I feel is the most important. The clear message inherent in a KUD and learning targets allow a student to see their goal as well as the path and steps they can take along the way to get to there. Allows them to see the forest through the trees if you will. It also allows me as teacher to make intentional decisions about what I am teaching and what I think is important for every student to know, understand and be able to do. It is not easy work though and I have found that when I attempt to do it in isolation I am not as clear as when I am working with other colleagues so that I can collaborate. Working with others has really helped me to hear what other educators find important about the content, organize my ideas, process them out loud and then come to decisions about how to make that transparent to students. It not only tells the student what their specific goals are but also allows them to have more informed discussions with me about their skills. Rather than a student coming to me and saying that they want to know how to go from a B to an A they are asking how they can improve on a specific skill. The conversations have also provided me time to reflect on whether the targets need revising or not. If I am not able to answer clearly how they could achieve a particular level on a target then I would rewrite it to be more clear for myself and the student. I also have found that I have been asking students to think more deeply and to process the information in a different way. As the quote above refers to I feel like I am making the students do something more meaningful with all of the smaller pieces of information in order to get them to see the bigger understandings. Writing the KUD and learning targets allowed me to think about what I really wanted to students to learn and think about.
Last year as I was just starting to learn how to write learning targets and use them in my geometry classes I was pleasantly surprised to see that a few students were using the learning targets as a way to study for an upcoming summative assessment. They were going through each target and self-assessing whether they could actually do each part and then coming to me with questions if they weren't sure. I hadn't thought of the learning targets being used in that way but it was such a great use of them and demonstrated to me that they were clear and reinforced that I had in fact given instruction, practice and feedback on all of the skills to the point where the students knew they were a good checklist to prepare for their assessment. I think about that every time I sit down to write a KUD and learning targets and helps keep my focus on why articulation is such an important first step towards student success.
"His learning was out of balance. He soaked up information and enjoyed it greatly, but that was the end. He didn't do anything with his information. He didn't use it to create ideas or actions." James E. Zull, The Art of Changing the Brain
One of the areas in which I feel I have made the most progress in over the past year or two in my teaching and in implementing SBL is in articulating what the students are going to learn in a given unit and course. This is also the area I feel is the most important. The clear message inherent in a KUD and learning targets allow a student to see their goal as well as the path and steps they can take along the way to get to there. Allows them to see the forest through the trees if you will. It also allows me as teacher to make intentional decisions about what I am teaching and what I think is important for every student to know, understand and be able to do. It is not easy work though and I have found that when I attempt to do it in isolation I am not as clear as when I am working with other colleagues so that I can collaborate. Working with others has really helped me to hear what other educators find important about the content, organize my ideas, process them out loud and then come to decisions about how to make that transparent to students. It not only tells the student what their specific goals are but also allows them to have more informed discussions with me about their skills. Rather than a student coming to me and saying that they want to know how to go from a B to an A they are asking how they can improve on a specific skill. The conversations have also provided me time to reflect on whether the targets need revising or not. If I am not able to answer clearly how they could achieve a particular level on a target then I would rewrite it to be more clear for myself and the student. I also have found that I have been asking students to think more deeply and to process the information in a different way. As the quote above refers to I feel like I am making the students do something more meaningful with all of the smaller pieces of information in order to get them to see the bigger understandings. Writing the KUD and learning targets allowed me to think about what I really wanted to students to learn and think about.
Last year as I was just starting to learn how to write learning targets and use them in my geometry classes I was pleasantly surprised to see that a few students were using the learning targets as a way to study for an upcoming summative assessment. They were going through each target and self-assessing whether they could actually do each part and then coming to me with questions if they weren't sure. I hadn't thought of the learning targets being used in that way but it was such a great use of them and demonstrated to me that they were clear and reinforced that I had in fact given instruction, practice and feedback on all of the skills to the point where the students knew they were a good checklist to prepare for their assessment. I think about that every time I sit down to write a KUD and learning targets and helps keep my focus on why articulation is such an important first step towards student success.