Module Five
Priming and Orienting
Activating what students already know and care about as resources for learning -
Setting purposes and payoffs that grab learners in the NOW!
Essential Question for the Course: How can we most effectively teach learners for deep engagement, joy, and expertise that can be developed and refined throughout a lifetime?
Culminating Project: Throughout this course you will be designing a unit outline and five fleshed out lessons. In Module 7 you will be creating an online presentation of your unit.
Guiding Question for the Module
What needs to be in place for students to be engaged and excited about learning? To be prepared and ready to successfully address the new challenge and learn from it?
Module Checklist (Looking Ahead)
In this module, you will complete the following items:
1 - Priming/Orienting Activity
2 - Two Lesson Canvases - Community Building & Frontloading
3 - Lesson Canvas Post On Padlet
4 - Respond to 3 Padlet Posts
5 - Unit Template Development
6 - Reflective Writing
Priming & Orienting Activity
Think of something complex and difficult and significant that you have learned to do recently. What were the conditions of your engagement? That is:
Why were you willing to engage in the challenge of learning?
What were the resources that you needed to access to get started?
What supports allowed you to get started?
Write a brief list in response to each question. Afterward, pick one of those lists and rank them from most to least important.
Share your response in your folder in our shared Google Drive.
Priming Orienting for Empowered course.pptxwhat happens when we read.pptxInput
(For your convenience for review, you can also access this PDF of the slide deck.)
Or if you prefer you can watch this recording of a webinar with a live audience which goes even deeper - 1 hour
This voiced slide deck highlights the significance of priming and orienting to all learning, and explores a few of the major principles of practice for planning and implementing priming and orienting into your instruction. The slides should assist you with constructing frontloading activities for your unit (and for the lesson frontloading and lessons that you'll develop in the next module), and with your framing of an essential question and sub-questions for your unit.
(For your convenience for review, you can also access this PDF of the slide deck.)
To "internally persuade" you how necessary priming and orienting are, do the activities in this slide deck: What Happens When We Read. At the end of the slide deck there are some more ideas for creating frontloading activities.
"What Happens When We Read" Frontloading Video
Reading Assignment
Planning Powerful Instruction - Chapters 6-8
Chapter 6: Priming Learners Through Caring Community and Collaborative Classroom Culture: A Prerequisite "Must-Make Move" for ICA (We already went into this topic in Module One so consider here how you can take community-building even deeper)
Chapter 7: Framing the Future Challenge: Priming and Orienting Learning Through Essential Questions
Chapter 8: Preparing Students for Success: Priming and Orienting Learning Through Frontloading
blank EMPOWER canvas.docxActivities
Think about this: What are two strategies from the book, and another strategy not in the book, that you could foresee using to create classroom community and a supportive environment for the learning challenges to come in the unit?
Your assignments:
1) Community Building Lesson Plan: Make a copy of the EMPOWER Template to outline a lesson for community building that would also frontload and activate learners’ prior interests and knowledge so that they are primed for the learning challenges to come in this unit, e.g. along the lines of the People Bingo activity in the elementary book and the Who's Done It activity in the secondary book. We call this kind of lesson a two-fer as it achieves multiple purposes!
This is your first pass at seeing how the EMPOWER template can guide you through lesson level planning to insure that you are actually priming, orienting, and assisting students to new conceptual and procedural knowledge.
2) Procedural Feedback Practice: Practice using procedural feedback in your life outside of school as well as in learning environments. Monitor what and how it works, and how to navigate challenges and productive struggle. TRY GIVING SOME PROCEDURAL FEEDBACK TO THIS MODULE'S PADLET POSTINGS! REMEMBER - DESCRIBE WHAT WAS DONE, AND THEN THE MEANING AND EFFECT THAT WAS ACHIEVED THROUGH THESE MOVES - or for procedural feedforward: DESCRIBE WHAT MIGHT BE DONE AND WHY YOU THINK THAT MIGHT WORK USING A CAUSAL/BECAUSE EXPLANATION.
3) Frontloading Lesson Plan: Make a copy of the EMPOWER Template and create a frontloading lesson to prime and orient learners to the overall purposes, payoffs, and culminating project for the whole unit.
Place your lesson plans in your folder in our shared Google Drive.
Share out at least one of the lessons you created in this module on our Priming and Orienting Padlet. Ask any questions or tell us your concerns.
Make sure you check out three of your classmates' work and comment on what geniuses they are too! REMEMBER TO RESPOND WITH PROCEDURAL FEEDBACK. DELIBERATE PRACTICE LEADS TO PERFECTION!
Transfer of Learning/ APPLICATION
Navigate to your folder in our shared Google Drive and open your unit template.
If you are using our unit plan, you will want to complete the following components associated with this module:
Essential Question (Revisit the essential question you brainstormed in Module 3 and consider if you would like to revise it in any way. Consider ways to keep the essential question present for learners throughout the unit. Plan for ways to involve learners in creating guiding questions for the unit.)
Guiding Questions/Subquestions (Revisit the guiding questions you brainstormed in Module 3 and consider if you would like to revise it in any way.)
Frontloading Activities (For this section, provide a brief synopsis of the community building and frontloading lessons you created above. You may also choose to link these lessons within your unit plan for easy access for outside readers.)
Reflective Writing
Compose a one-page response reflecting on the following question:
Why is procedural feedback such a powerful and crux move of cognitive apprenticeship?
Reflect in a Google Document and share it with your mentor by posting it to your folder in our shared Google Drive.
Online Applications
Consider: When teaching online or at a distance, what are the tools you can use to develop rapport with students? To help students to get to know one another and interact respectfully with one another? To get them uptaking and using each others’ ideas? To get them to enjoy each other and enjoy being together?
When teaching online or at a distance, what are some ways to do frontloading? e.g. to get students interacting and sharing in ways that both activate and build on prior interests and knowledge (collecting and representing survey data together, for one example).
For example, we are using Flipgrid and Padlet to have you record responses, share, interact, and learn from each other. Procedural feedback can be given online over Google Docs, through comment functions in other apps, over email, and the like.
Other ideas:
Survey generators . . . survey data collectors, Doodle Polls, Survey Monkey, etc.
Loom and other screen capture apps...
VOXER and other voice response apps so teachers and learners can respond to and dialogue with each other asynchronously
Gut Check!
1- Have you shared your response to the Priming/Orienting activity in your folder?
2 - Have you completed the two frontloading lessons for the unit and placed them in your folder?
3 - Have you shared at least one of these frontloading lessons on our Padlet?
4 - Have you responded to the Padlet responses of three (hopefully) new participants in the course?
5 - Have you completed the required components of your unit template? Update your unit template with any revisions and with summaries of these two lessons and other unit frontloading ideas that might be necessary to preparing your students for success. (Please note: Units always have a frontloading assignment and often have several, depending on how much priming and orienting is necessary to put learners into the game and prepare them for success.)
6 - Have you completed your post-module reflective writing and added it to your folder?
You will have done other work, like practicing procedural feedback, but you don't need to post about that at this time. (But just wait! So make sure you are doing it!)
Email your instructor/thinking partner when you are done with this module so that you can get timely feedback!