Week Six

Concluding the Semester

For our last class we focused on assessment, and everything seemed to come together! We looked at tips and tricks for assessment, such as keeping tests and quizzes simple, only include assessments that speak to what you want them to be successful at, design questions or tasks that allow students to think creatively or critically to show their mastery of the concepts, and include feedback/comments so students know what they are excelling at just as much as they know where they can improve and develop. This concept of giving feedback and comments is touched on in the video Introduction to Junior/Intermediate Conversations. The video explains the importance of including questions in your feedback so students can think critically about their development. It also mentions reflecting on the feedback that you are giving students, to question whether your feedback is helping with the students' thinking and development. It is important to also give conversational feedback and to record those conversations. Finally, allowing students to respond to the feedback makes it meaningful and informs their learning.

The overall purpose behind assessment is outlined in the Growing Success document. It explains how the primary purpose of assessment is to improve student learning. The For Learning of assessment is to provide teachers with next steps and strengths for students, essentially setting teachers up to coach students and provide them with feedback for development. The As Learning, portion is to help students develop their own ability and capacity to be independent and autonomous learners. This can look like students setting their own goals, reflecting, self-assessing, and determining their next steps in their learning. Some tricks to establishing Assessment As Learning are:
- Integrate assessment into the learning
- Share learning goals and success criteria
- Gather information about student learning before, during, and after
- Use a variety of assessment strategies and tools
- Help students develop peer- and self-assessment skills

All of this learning that we did in class and through the readings, solidified what we have been learning all year: learning should be student-centered. This can mean allowing students to be leaders in their own learning; providing students with next steps so they are always developing; or helping students to develop as respectful and responsible citizens in society. In order to provide opportunities for this to happen, I learned this semester that a few important concepts need to inform the classroom climate and overall learning.

Firstly, the classroom environment needs to promote and foster a growth mindset; in turn students will develop a growth mindset. I found this great article on growth mindset, 5 Simple Ways to Develop a Mathematical Growth Mindset, that explains how if you believe you can develop abilities through effort and hard work, then you will be successful. Students and teachers will believe that intelligence can always be developed. The focus shifts from getting the "right" answer or the "highest" grade, to a focus on the learning itself. Work ethic reflects never giving up, and trying multiple strategies instead. Finally, reflecting on your learning and learning from your mistakes is a big factor in growth mindset. The article shows how growth mindset works similarly with mathematician: persevering through problem solving, using multiple methods, communicating and justifying their thinking. Both growth mindset in the classroom and with mathematicians, "favours the process over getting the answer." Some suggestions to integrating growth mindset in the mathematics classroom, that you can read more about in the article, are:
* Using think-alouds to model what the growth mindset looks like (via the teacher)
* Ask questions that promote and celebrate challenges (prompting the students to take risks)
* Allow for collaboration opportunities (gain access to more strategies)
* Give students opportunity to share how they solved the problem
* Allow time for reflection, especially with mistakes

Secondly, students need to take that last aspect of growth mindset mentioned above (learning from your mistakes) and use their mistakes to inform their learning. They need to not only accept mistakes, but use those mistakes as learning opportunities. Students' brains actually grow and work hardest during mistake-making. Below is a great video that shows the reasons people generally shy away from or hide mistake-making.
(1) People are usually see mistakes as failures instead of learning opportunities
(2) People tend to focus on the loss, and chase after that, instead of progressing forward with a different strategy or method
(3) People believe mistakes don't matter


Thirdly, when have a classroom climate that promotes growth mindset and celebrates mistake-making, the learning environment is successfully set up to reach the needs of all learners. It is important to making math accessible to all students. In the article 20 Differentiated Instruction Strategies & Examples, it is shown that the content, processes, and products, can all be differentiated to better student learning. For example, there can be multiple ways to communicate instruction, activities can reach many different learners, and the way learners communicate their understanding can vary as well. This article provides a bunch of different strategies for differentiating learning:
- Learning Stations (each station can meet the needs of a different learner: visual, auditory, kinaesthetic)
- Task cards (break up a worksheet into task cards around the room)
- Interviewing students (asking them what works)
- Targeting different sense during instruction
- Be transparent about your own learning style, strengths, and next steps
- Think-pair-share
- Reflection and goal-setting
- Literature circles
- Free study time
- Independent, partner, and small-group work
- Different reading comprehension level activities
- Inquiry projects
- Passion projects
- Reflect on your own teaching strategies
- Technology
- Real-life examples
- Games

I hope some of this reflection from my semester, helps inform some great classroom and teaching practices for you :)