Definition of "Student Learning"
A teacher must understand how students learn and develop and must provide learning opportunities that support a student’s intellectual, social, and personal development. Academic preparation is an important component of a child's development. An effective teacher identifies the ways that different individuals learn best and provides learning opportunities that match these channels. Beyond academics, students are preparing for life on their own, building habits, forming relationships, and developing passions. Effective teachers closely manage their classrooms, uphold high expectations of behavior and attitude, challenge students to perform their best, support group interactions and teamwork, and provide support so that all students have an opportunity to succeed.
Supporting Artifacts and Analysis
My first artifact shows how I help students to take action, reflect, and then improve on understanding. The second artifact highlights my reliance on data to measure individual and class learning. The final artifact discusses my ideas to maximize student learning.
Iteration of homework, quizzes, and project reflections:
I believe that students learn best when they have a chance to re-examine past work and improve upon it. In my statistics class, I experimented with double-grading quizzes, projects, and reflections. On the first pass, I provide detailed feedback on what students did well and where they can improve. The opportunity to gain back some of their points in the second revision motivates students to seek my help, learn from peers, and ultimately improve their understanding of the content in the revision process. In all of my classes, assessments are tiered -- homework is graded for completion (with the expectation that students check their own work for accuracy), daily quizzes on handheld responders are worth few points but check student understanding in real-time, quizzes are worth a little bit more and simulate testing conditions, and the tests hold most of the weight. This provides students time to learn, assess, and improve their understanding at each level of assessment. With tiered assessments, students learn exactly what they need to work on before the next assessment. With so much prior feedback, both teacher and students are rarely surprised by the results of the unit test. This artifact is a document that explains in greater detail how I use revision to support student learning and engagement.
Data mining and assessment analysis:
Data drives my instruction day-to-day and semester-to-semester. The feedback I gather from short multiple choice and quizzes gives me a gauge on a class's understanding of the key concepts. Free response quiz results give me data on things I need to review and re-teach for the entire class and allows me to identify individuals who need extra attention. As a teacher, it is easy to believe that the opinions of the more vocal students represent the entire class. Real-time data gives all students an equal voice and guides my pacing of instruction. With this data, I can also keep an eye on the individuals who are not yet self-advocating for support but clearly need help understanding the content. Semester-to-semester detailed test data allows me to find areas of perpetual weakness so I can focus improvements on a unit before I begin teaching. As a department, we keep track of how many students get each problem on a unit test correct. This item analysis goes beyond the big picture numbers to identify the types of problems that students need better preparation to solve. When revising the notes and videos/lectures that go with a unit, I look at historical data to see what sections need to be improved. I can measure the effectiveness of my changes by looking at the updated data from my current students as part of the continuous improvement process. This artifact includes an example of historical data records I built on from my mentor teacher and tells a personal story on the power of data as a "reality check".
Thoughts on student motivation:
This is a short paper and video presentation on how I engage students through appropriate challenge and differentiation. I reference the research of Mihály Csíkszentmihályi on the "flow state" and propose what students need to enter into such a state while learning in school. If students are challenged at the right level and have choice in how they demonstrate their learning, student engagement and real learning can be maximized. The video presentation connects these principles to games. Games are carefully engineered to teach the player, in a fun way, how to play the game and constantly improve with higher challenges. Unlike school, where students are forced to come, games will only be purchased and played if they engage the user. The presentation highlights the motivating factors within games that can be used in the classroom to achieve similar engagement. Many of the examples in the presentation come from things I implemented with my Statistics class this year.
Synthesis
Students learn in a variety of ways. The most important step in the learning process is engagement -- even the quickest students will struggle to learn when their interest and focus is away from the subject. To keep students motivated, I use real-world examples and games as introductory hooks into a topic. To maintain engagement, I use frequent feedback to help students learn from their mistakes with time and support to demonstrate their improved understanding on the next level of assessment. For students who do not respond on their own to formative assessment feedback, I can use the aggregate class data and individual data to target students who need my help. In class, I use facilitate peer instruction, allow students to work through problems in groups, and use team projects to support learning through application and social interaction. By providing multiple opportunities to demonstrate knowledge and skills learned in a unit, my students know that I care about their learning and growth and that I hold them to a high bar of understanding.