Assessing the Self-Assessment

When I was in high school I never once was given the option of completing a self-assessment. Sure there were peer assessments and teacher assessments, but what about an assessment that forced me to take a look at my own learning, at my own progression?

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As a prospective teacher, I have learnt about the importance of AaL and its correlation to inspiring active metacognition. When completing self-assessments, students are asked to evaluate their own learning and their own engagement. It truly is an opportunity to assess for the purpose of learning: you are able to see what areas you are excelling in, what areas you need to improve in. That is to say, it forces you to think, to reflect, about yourself as a learner: are you learning? What are you learning? How are you learning? What can you do to learn more? We call this process of self-questioning and self-reflection, metacognition. By engaging in metacognition students are able to assess their personal strengths and weaknesses, a process, I believe, that helps to inspire intrinsic motivation.

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When we talk about intrinsic motivation, we are talking about the internal, and personal, desire to achieve, to push oneself. By engaging in self-assessments students see for themselves where they need to improve and how they can do better on their own merit, as opposed to a teacher telling them what they have done wrong or what they need to improve on. It puts the onus of learning and improving on the student, acting as personal inspiration to chart their own growth and celebrate their own achievement. As opposed to seeking to improve based on external motivation (such as a failing mark that they receive on a test) they, can instead, be fuelled by the desire to achieve something that they themselves have set. And, by engaging in the process of setting goals based on self-assessed performance and improving on weaknesses, self-assessment also emerges as a tool for AfL, as students use their evaluations to better themselves as learners, as students, taking an active step towards bettering their achievement.

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Aside from promoting AaL and AfL, self-assessement tools also aid teachers in AoL. Often times, I believe, teachers depend on the milieu to gauge whether students understand what they're learning and wait until formal assessments to see that, in fact, their students did not understand what they taught. You know what I'm talking about, when a teacher asks if everyone understands and everyone casually shakes their head in agreeance as not to disrupt the classroom order or outcast themselves. But with self-assessments, teachers can alleviate this phenomenon. It allows the teacher to truly see if every student in his/ her classroom has engaged with the material, if they understand it, as the assessment is personal, unaffected by the all too familiar social pressure of "just saying you understand so we can move on." 

www.brightideasteaching.co.uk

I think that completing a self-assessment at the end of every class will be a very helpful tool in my future classroom. It will allow me to see if I have met my learning objectives (AoL), if every student has grasped the lesson to the point where we can move on. And, if the assessments prove otherwise, it allows me to plan ahead for the next class (AfL), to ensure that I start off the class with a review of the previous lesson, going over any questions or extreme areas of difficulty. In doing this, I believe that I will be giving students equal rights to achieve.

Here is a link to a document that looks at what successful self-assessment looks like and aims to do:
http://www.edu.gov.on.ca/eng/literacynumeracy/inspire/research/studentselfassessment.pdf

Integrating the Curriculum

As I work towards creating a grade 11 integrated curriculum, I catch myself asking, why isn't this something that was employed when I was in high school? The more research and planning I undertake towards this project, the more inspired I feel to implement an integrated curriculum in my future classroom.

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When I was in high school, I found myself connecting similar ideas amongst subject areas and creating the same types of projects and evaluative measures across different domaines. What I was learning in Social Studies trickled down into themes that I was learning in History; the presentation that I had to complete in Business was really no different, fundamentally, from the presentation that I had to give in my English course. If all these subjects are interrelated, why wouldn't you integrate them?

theinspiredclassroom.com

In an integrated curriculum, the overlapping objectives from multiple subjects are combined into one large evaluative objective: for a broad example, consider that having students create a time-capsule from the 1950's, in which each artifact must be made by hand, could integrate History (choosing a historically correct artifact), Art (creating the artifacts) and English (providing written rationale for why each artifact was chosen).

An important facet of student engagement and motivation in the classroom is creating a lesson that is both interesting and real-life applicable and I believe that an integrated curriculum facilitates just that. By intertwining subjects into projects and discussions, I believe, that they naturally become more fruitful, creative. And by creating cross-curricular units and projects, each teachable subject, I believe, becomes more relevant and applicable. 

There have also been studies completed that prove the educational merit of an integrated curriculum. A study from Anne Lowe (1998) entitled L'enseignement de la musique et de la langue seconde: pistes d'integration et consequences sur les apprentissages, evidenced that integrating Music and French education bolsters educational achievement. By incorporating French lessons that were facilitated through musical instruction, students were found to have scored higher on French competency tests as well as those in Music. Thus, it seems that an integrated curriculum not only livens, but betters, the classroom. 

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Moreover, in a video by Hess Academy, middle school teacher Caleb Collier discusses how an integrated curriculum also helps students who struggle with individual subjects to excel. A student may have difficulty in one specific area, but by integrating it with a topic that they excel in, or find interest in, the student has greater motivation and inclination to succeed:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WoSdGzyVlBs

In today's society, we are encouraged to think across boarders. Businesses, for example, must make use of Mathematics to calculate quotas and costs, English to create documents and presentations, Psychology to estimate customer behaviour, French to translate campaigns. So if schools are meant to ready students for society, shouldn't integrated learning and integrated thinking be an active part of the curriculum?

As a prospective French and English teacher, simple ways that I plan to integrate the two topics, is by using French vocabulary to enrich English vocabulary and vice-versa or, talking about how French and English literary movements affect and inform one another. Even using simple segways to incorporate the two subjects, I believe, can enrich the students' understanding and appreciation for each subject respectively.


Hess Academy, 2014. Integrated Curriculum at Hess Academy, retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WoSdGzyVlBs. 

Lowe, S., A.  (1998). L'enseignement de la musique et de la langue seconde : pistes d'intégration et conséquences sur les apprentissages. Canadian Modern Language Review, 54(2), 223- 238.

Encouraging a New Culture of Learning

Last week I was given an assignment in my Fourth year French course: give a multi-media presentation on anything dealing with the Beur subculture, anything which will then be the basis of your other two summative assessments. This assignment seems great right? You can be creative, inquiry driven and be guided by passion, interest. Yet, I have been uninspired, unable to come up with a topic, not really knowing where to start.

It seems that I have been stumped by the traditional model of education, a model that endorses teacher-directed learning that is rooted within a prescribed curriculum. I am so used to fitting into perimeters and memorizing directed knowledge (also known as the banking model of eduation), that I have fallen into the category of a strategic learner--one who completes educational tasks and engages in learning with the goal of academic success--lacking the ability to search for knowledge based on my intrinsic desire to learn, to question.

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As a prospective teacher, this truth both saddens and upsets me. Current literature and educational trends propose a shift in the classroom paradigm to student-directed, inquiry-based learning, in which students are engaged in the learning process by learning about what interests them. Students are to be encouraged to question, to formulate the desire to learn based on individual passions. The "Be's" of education and desired twenty-first century skills emphasize creativity and creative thought, yet this is something that my traditional education has not equipped me to intrinsically exert.

corsame.com

I want my future students to be deep learners, learners who care about learning to feed a desire to learn. But how can a modern breed of teachers inspire something that they themselves have not learnt through their educational endeavours? This is an issue that troubles me, but I am glad that I am able to confront these issues and reflect upon them now, giving myself time to refine my teaching pedagogy before entering the classroom. I know now, that an important facet of my teaching pedagogy will be inspiring creativity and self-regulated thought in the classroom: I want my students to be motivated and engaged to learn when they are given a self-directed project, not lost and flustered like I currently find myself to be in my endeavour. In order to do this, I need to implement activities that frame the student in the middle of the classroom paradigm, encouraging student-directed, inquiry-based learning, something simple like allowing students to choose their essay topic for English class as opposed to merely prescribing it is a way to implement this paradigm, allowing students to be guided by their own questions. This, too, underscores the importance that teachers are never a master, but are always a student: it is important that teachers accommodate new literature and educational pedagogies that were not available or applied in the contemporary classroom in order to engage in a progressive form of education.

One activity that I plan to use in my future classroom to promote student-driven, inquiry-based education that I have learnt about in my teacher-education courses is Genius Hour, a creative place where students create work based on their own ponderings, an activity that engages in the twenty-first century "Be" of creativity:

Kesler, Chris. What is Genius Hour? An Introduction to Genius Hour in the Classroom. Retrieved from  
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NMFQUtHsWhc.

Hand in Hand: Individualization and Of, For, As Assessment

An important conceptualization that prospective teachers learn is the intertwine amongst curriculum, instruction and assessment:

                                                            Classroom:

                           Instruction  <--------------------------------> Assessment 

                                                           

                                   ^                                                                 ^  

                                   |--------------> Curriculum <-------------|

Teachers are responsible for teaching the curriculum and do so through varying instructional strategies. Teachers assess the effectiveness of their instructional strategies through assessments. Upon consulting these assessments teachers adjust their instructional strategies to their students in order to effectively relay the curriculum they are prescribed to teach. 

Through my personal experiences I have seen this model in work, more interestingly, I have seen how this model fits hand-in-hand with individualization. Throughout my university career I have tutored Mathematics and I have found it invaluable to constantly assess AoL and AfL in order to see if the activities I am doing are effective, and when they are proven not to be effective I change my instructional approach and then re-assess to ensure that the curriculum is being effectively learnt. I started off my tutoring approach with direct instruction , simultaneously giving examples and explanations of the Mathematical processes which ended with independent practice. Upon assessing the student's responses to several questions (AoL) I discovered that my instructional method was not effective. I then changed my instructional approach to hands on, manipulative based activities in which the student was a more active part of the learning process (such as grouping candies to model division) which made use of kinestetic-visual learning rather than verbal-visual learning. Upon another AoL, I found that the student understood the Mathematical processes we were going over much better. I then implemented a brief AfL, asking the student which method of instruction they preferred (which measured which method they were most engaged with), which one they found easiest to use to understand the concept and if there was anything that I could do to clarify things or make the learning process easier. This allowed me to tailor my instructional approach to my student--a process known as individualization--in order to ensure that the student was not only in the best position to learn, but was in a position in which they were most motivated to learn. This process of individualization was increasingly important for me as a mentor because I was dealing with a student with an exceptionality; therefore, I wanted to ensure that my instruction was tailored to their specific learning needs, learning needs that were not being met in the traditional classroom which doesn't have the resources to have the instructional flexibility that I have access to being one-on-one with the student. It is also important to note that through this process of individualization and AfL, teachers endorse AaL as well, as students become better able to identity what learning strategies work best for them. The student I tutor recognized that they preferred play-based exercises and would ask to engage in those activities--they were able to recognize which instructional strategies best facilitate their learning and engagement.

So, the diagram then transforms into:

                               Individual learner: 

     Instruction  <--------------------------------> Assessment 

                 
                 ^                                                          ^
                 |                                                            |
                 |------->                               <---------|                      
                                          Student 
                  ^                                                             ^ 
                  |                                                               |

                  |                                                               |  

                  |--------------> Curriculum <-----------|

The curriculum is instructed to the student who is then assessed to see how affective the teacher's instructional strategies are relaying the curriculum. Through this assessment the teacher is able to adapt their instructional methods to optimize the student's learning (individualization). In turn, the student becomes more aware of themselves as an individual learner as their A(f)L evokes a metacognitive process [A(a)L].

I have discussed the importance of individualization as it interweaves of, for and as assessment and specifically helps those with exceptionalities, but how can teachers in a traditional classroom practice individualization? It requires that teachers tailor their lessons to the individual learner, in which one class comprises of twenty students. This approach is demanding of the teacher, which calls for the ministry to downsize the number of students per class. Though this paradigm switch is costly, one must consider that educational literature recognizes that students possess a diversity of learning styles and multiple intelligences, which calls for an individualistic approach to classroom delivery. The world, too, is becoming more and more individualized, people now have life plans that differ from the collective of their family and societal expectations, and more and more people are forming entrepreneurial enterprises which focus on personal attributes, skills and capabilities. When the world and working paradigm are becoming individualized, why wouldn't the classroom become so too? Are teachers not facilitating the transition from school to society? Perhaps a solution could be a play on the flipped classroom, in which the teacher would create diverse instructional aids (tailored lessons with examples, tailored computer programs) that students consult individually at home and when at school the teacher will circulate the classroom, ensuring that each child receives individual help in conjunction with their individualized lesson. 

Here, Insight schools describe how they individualize education in conjunction with assessment, instruction and curriculum: 

Insight schools. Individualized Education at Insight Schools. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lAHF7ly6cuw&list=UUn5BbP_SXfz2eXABkp2B7hg. 

My Experience with Experiential Learning

I want to start my blog by sharing an experience that rings true to the effectiveness of new-story education, an experience that showed me first-hand the merit of active, experiential learning. As a student of French education ensuring language competency is paramount, especially being an Anglophone French education student. I wanted to exhaust another avenue to improve my communication skills and fluency, so when my University offered a Summer exchange I immediately signed-up. I stayed in Trois- Pistoles, Quebec for a month living with a host-family. My days followed a schedule in which I would attend a language class (which taught and reinforced fundamentals of the language), followed by an atelier where you chose an extracurricular activity to complete (I chose the reading and writing of French literature and French film), then every night there was a cultural activity to take part in (my favourite was the concert of Patrice Michaud, a known Quebecois musician). My experience in Quebec affected the ways I understood and appreciated the language in ways I could've never imagined, which is why I have solidified myself as an advocate for interactive education.

I believe that one of the many reasons my French was able to improve so much in such a short amount of time was the two-pronged immersion under which I lived. Not only was I immersed in the language when having to communicate with citizens of the town (most of which spoke no word of English) but I was also immersed in the language when living at home, having to communicate with my colocs (roommates) and famille d'accueil (host family) in French as well. When communicating with native speakers I received corrections that facilitated the improvement of my vocabulary and my comprehensiveness, simply living under conditions such as these refined my French and helped me ameliorate common Anglophonic mistakes that I often made. I believe that this method of language apprehension is much more affective than the passive, old-story method of learning French grammar and composition. Yes, it is necessary to learn subject-verb agreement, know how to conjugate verbs and know which modifiers go where, but composition and communication isn't something that can simply be memorized. You have to experience communicating in real-time with native speakers to prove testament to your semantics and be able to communicate within the perimeters of a conversation, forcing yourself to be reactive. Being able to write a sentence semantically and grammatically correct within the classroom is entirely different than being able to ask for directions to a native speaker or correct yourself and circumvent in order to explain something to someone who doesn't understand the context under which you speak. It is for this reason that I do not believe that a langauge is simply learned, but experienced and lived within--something that passive education simply does not facilitate, but interactive education does. William Temple said that "the most influential of all educational factors is the conversation in a child's home." After having lived in an immersive Francophone environment, I prove testament to Temple's observation. You learn the most under those and from those you most closely interact with. Having lived with a Francophone family taught me the most of all--vocabulary I never learnt in school, expressing cultural sensitivity and understanding and being able to communicate with the purpose of being understood. That is to say, living under, and experencing, a Francophonic enviornment is the most conducive way to learn French if the most learning occurs within the context under which you live.

Not only was I immersed in a language, but I was immersed in a culture. It is one thing to listen to a lecture about a culture's history and identity, look at photos in a textbook; it is another thing entirely to live in, and experience, the culture first hand--to have a hand of being part of a culture's history. I believe that it is through cultural interaction that a culture's identity is best understood and appreciated. When on exchange I was told Quebecois legends from natives of the area, ate meals that Quebecois families have been cooking for generations (my favourite of which was Vol-au-vent, a puff pastry filled with chicken that has been stewed with gravy and legumes), listened to traditional Quebecois music and learnt traditional Quebecois dance. These are experiences that not only enriched my understanding of French culture but are experiences that I can bring into the classroom. Instead of having students merely read a chapter on Quebecois culture, I can bring in the cooked meals that I ate, play the music I listened to, in order to evoke a first-hand cultural interaction within the classroom. Better yet, I can bring students to Quebec for a direct first-hand experience of the culture.

Throughout this post I have stressed the importance of active, first-hand experiential learning, as my exchange improved my understanding of  French language and culture in the span of one month when I have been studying French and trying to improve my compentancy for years. I believe that it is through interactive education that students will be better able to learn and understand language. They not only learn to comprehend the language through their repeated exposure, but they force themselves to learn the nuances of the language and discover vocabulary that is learned solely from speaking to a native speaker. Not to mention, as a result of interactive education, students can become more motivated to learn and observe the applicability  of speaking another language, both of which encourage and foster engaged students and continuance, I believe, of secondary language education. It is for these reasons why I am an advocate for mandatory immersive programs within secondary language education, even if it is taking students to Quebec for a week. Living in Quebec for a month reminded me why I have devoted my educational career to the French language and improved my communication and comprehension skills in ways that the classroom, with its passive approach to education, has been unable to do. Even though a month-long immersion may not fit into the curriculum, even a small amount of time can make a large educational difference.