Things I have learned as a teacher:
School ==> education higher priority
Education Center ==> Education lower priority
If Struggling:
What do you think your friend/table partner would say
Questions to ask: Is anything confusing to me?, Why did I get this answer wrong?, How can I do better next time?
Hexagonal Thinking: https://www.edutopia.org/article/using-hexagonal-thinking-deepen-classroom-conversations/
In a 2024 study of nearly 1,000 fifth- and sixth-grade students, researchers found that high-quality homework that asked students to extend their thinking, rather than repeat what was covered in class, led to better emotional and behavioral engagement compared with rote homework tasks. In the study, teachers assigned homework that was “more elaborate” and “worthwhile” for students to complete—preparing a mini-lesson on a topic to present in class, for example, or researching and then debating a public issue—while conveying the “usefulness, interest, importance, and/or applicability of homework.” Compared with their peers in a business-as-usual classroom, whose engagement levels dropped as the year progressed, students who experienced regular, high-quality homework “showed positive emotions, were happier in school and were more interested in the classroom, paid more attention in class, and were more attentive to school rules,” the researchers found.
Personal Reflection: What surprised you today? Where might you use this skill outside of English class? How does this connect to something you already know?
How to help students: https://www.edutopia.org/article/8-classroom-task-initiation-strategies-help-students-get-started?utm_source=Facebook&utm_medium=Social&utm_campaign=Q12026
Specify to reference their guided notes slides on Canvas or the notes taken in their notebook.
Major topics should include a group activity of some kind.
If doing presentation, designate person a-b-c-d with exactly what they need to talk about. (elaborate on minimal text on poster, and what they need to say when presenting in front of the class.)
More opportunities to talk aloud in class.
Signs about expectations/coming into the classroom on the clearboard next to the teacher's desk.
Design Guided Notes slides to be more visual, less slides, story telling.
2 groups design poster on same topic, break into 2 groups to present in front of people.
Storyboard writing/reading assignments/guided notes
Progression Checks: Completing a certain amount of work at the end of the day in order to receive points. Break up larger assignments into daily chunks and keeps them responsible for working a certain amount in class.
Absences during PBL (Project-Based Learning)
Minimize How Absences Affect Those Who Are Present
PBL depends on a strong classroom culture where learners collaborate and depend on one another, and this rests on a foundation of trust with their peers. Prolonged absences, especially during key moments of a project, can break down this crucial trust. It’s important that the absence of one student doesn’t affect another student’s learning or grade.
Make sure that your projects include an individual product that is more heavily weighted than group products. Seriously consider finding alternative methods of assessing student work that don’t involve group grades. Research into group grades also shows that students dislike them, especially in inquiry-based projects, so avoid them for the sake of those in class and out of class.
Provide What Students Need To Rejoin Class Up Front
When creating student norms and agreements, set the expectation that even if a student isn’t present, they’re expected to keep up with the work as best they can, but make sure to provide the means for that to happen. Encourage those who are confused about how to keep up from home to reach out to you, and be willing to help them adjust missed lessons to ensure that they get the core knowledge needed to progress.
Have A Clear and Low-Stress Runway For Reentry
Some students are reluctant to return because they don’t know what will happen when they come back and assume the worst. You can preempt this issue by constructing a clear and consistent reentry plan. When a student comes back, begin with a one-on-one debrief or facilitate a meeting with their group mates where you can discuss what they missed and what they need to agree to do in order to rejoin.
Consider Individualizing The Project Experience
PBL projects are often individualized to ensure adherence to IEP/504 plans or meet other special needs. While it’s always ideal to try to reintegrate absent students back into the planned project path, it isn’t always possible.
Therefore, you might want to provide a “pull the ripcord” option where students with a certain number of days away can elect to forgo the group experience altogether and produce a less involved version of the team product by themselves. While this is a less-desirable outcome, especially since it involves much more work for a student who might already be feeling overwhelmed, some teachers have reported that students have felt “social relief” knowing that their absences won’t become a friends problem and they can work at their own pace.
Use Grouping Strategies Alongside an Individual Product
One way to eliminate issues around group products is to remove the source of the stress and design PBL without a team product. In some cases, a group product might be inappropriate—especially if the piece is personal to the individual experience—like a memoir or artistic expression of a student’s life or lived experience.
Embedded Scaffolding:
Claim. To start the claim, we teach students how to use a strategy we call sentence mirroring. This embedded scaffold facilitates answering the prompt directly by using most of the phrasing in the prompt except for question words (e.g., who, what, how) or thinking verbs (e.g., explain, persuade, justify).
For example, take the prompt, “Explain how increasing global temperatures lead to sea-level rise.” Using the sentence mirroring strategy, the response would start with “Increasing global temperatures lead to sea-level rise by…” We teach students to remove the Explain how and start their response with the rest of the prompt, resulting in the first part of a precise claim. Students would provide the rest of the claim using the knowledge they learned from the lesson. We also teach them that the phrase by + verb(ing) is one way to answer any question that starts with Explain how.
Evidence. The phrases that often start the “Evidence” section of the CER include expressions such as According to, An example of this is, and For instance. The goal of these phrases is to signal to readers that the writer is presenting specific facts that can include statistics, places, events, dates, and names of people and groups.
For phrases such as According to, we teach students that the name of an article, an author, an organization, or an institution must be given in the sentence, in addition to the fact. For instance, a sentence in this part of the paragraph might be written as follows: “According to NASA, the last century has seen a consistent increase in sea-level temperatures around the world’s oceans.” NASA is cited as the source of the fact, which includes a specified duration of time and an observable phenomenon.
Reasoning. After presenting evidence through factual details, students need to explain how those facts support the claim in the “Reasoning” section. We scaffold this section by suggesting that students use Since or Because. Sentences that begin with these phrases should directly refer back to the evidence. More important, the reference to the evidence is used to substantiate the claim.
Returning to the evidence for global warming provided by NASA, a sentence that shows reasoning might be written as “Since the sea-level temperatures have risen, this warming causes land-based and sea-based ice to melt.” Often, one sentence that mentions the evidence does not sufficiently support the claim. Therefore, we also teach students that they can use Because to start their second sentence to explain further the evidence supporting the claim. In this example, that sentence could be “Because the warmer temperatures cause the ice to melt, the melting ice turns into water that flows into the ocean and causes the sea level to rise steadily.”