Scaffolding Discussions and Extended Written Response

As part of the This I Believe (NPR, 2010) curriculum, we were asked students to do an extended written response activity outside of class which I felt might be a little challenging for students who most likely have not practiced critical thinking at this stage.  So I began this activity as a pyramid discussion, where I asked students to read through This I Believe essays that I passed out, then discuss the questions given as pairs.  Since I found my nontraditional students more willing and eager to share (for the most part), I paired them with traditional students.  I walked around the room to ensure that the students were comfortable with the questions and discussing them.  After discussing as a pair, they group with another pair, and share their ideas.  This continues until the entire class is discussing the article. Then I give them the assignment to take home (NPR, 2010):

 

1. Visit http://www.thisibelieve.org and search the essay database for submissions

from your city or state or for essays on a theme of interest to you.

 

2. Skim quickly through the opening paragraphs of several of these essays

and print copies of 3 you’d like to read.

 

3. Read through each essay the first time listening for the author’s unique

voice. What experiences have shaped the lives of each? How does each

respond, physically or emotionally, to these experiences?

 

4. Without attempting to indicate your agreement or disagreement with the

essay, write a 1–2 paragraph summary of the author’s core belief and the

way this belief has shaped life in the past or present. Each summary

should be scrupulously accurate in recording the philosophy that guides

the life and choices of each author.

 

5. Bring the essays and your summaries to class and be ready to discuss the

original ways these writers responded to the assignment. How do they

establish their own unique voice through each essay?

 

Initially, some students were not comfortable answering the questions listed, and tried to give very short responses – I sent the assignments back and asked them to work more.  I found that most students found articles that had great meaning for them, and tied very nicely into their own creeds and belief systems.  The last week of the term, I heard students discussing the articles we covered in class, of their own accord.  It was wonderful to hear their conversations, whether they were stating that the authors were a little “off”, or that they thought of statements within the articles when they encountered similar things in real-life.

NPR.  (2010).  This I believe sample college writing curriculum. http://www.thisibelieve.org/educationoutreach.html

Personal Communication and Follow-Ups

Since I teach part of the time, but advising is my full-time role, I felt I should include an activity that paired my role as an adviser with my role as an instructor. For a week before this activity, we have gone over general education requirements, the academic catalog, requirements of degrees, how to communicate with faculty, and what it means to self-advocate. This is designed to assess students’ understanding of navigating certain resources within college.

I passed out this case study, and after giving students some time to go over the questions, students moved into groups, shared and evaluated their answers, and then students shared as groups. With the first few questions, students volunteered, but when I noticed that the same students were sharing while others slumped lower and lower in their seats, we began to go around the room so that all could share.  For the next to last question, when students shared, we had a class discussion about their ideas.  If students disagreed with an answer, I was clear that the students needed to practice etiquette, and we used the student handbook, website, and catalog to find the appropriate answer (rather than making me the “answer man”).

There are a few potential sources of bias that I can think of – since I am an adviser, if students share something that is inaccurate or may cause more work and effort for advising, or even touch on a political aspect of the role of advising v. the role of other departments in the institution, this may cause a filter in my perception. My non-traditional students may be more naturally prepared for some questions due to life experience and maturity, and my traditional students may be more prepared for some questions since they have just come from another academic institution (high school) and have been more trained/focused on academics in the past year.

 

Advising Case Study

How does Susannah find out who her adviser is? List two different ways she could do this:

Once she knows who her adviser is and where her adviser has an office on campus, what does she do?

Once she has an appointment with her adviser, what is Susannah responsible for doing before the appointment to prepare?

Think of three questions or topics for Susannah to discuss with her adviser when they meet.

Finally, how does Susannah actually register for her winter courses?

After this activity, I carefully observed my own advisees and spoke with other advisers, and felt that this activity simply was not enough to encourage prompt, responsible advising with self-advocacy.  I gave the students the following activity one day when class was canceled – thankfully, I received much more positive feedback from advisers, and learned a valuable lesson – disconnected activities and assessments will not translate into effective learning (which helps to explain a portion of my assessment approach).

Advising Task

To complete the following tasks, please log in to Webster, and go to “Student Services and Financial Aid”.  Read each category description carefully to answer the following questions.

1.        Who is your adviser?

2.       Do you have holds on your account?

 

Even if you do not currently have holds on your account, you will have an advising hold before registration begins (for freshmen, Sunday, November 7 at 6pm).

3.        Do you know who can remove this advising hold?

Go to www.eou.edu.  At the very top of the page, you will “Find Someone”. Click on this, and then click on “Faculty and Staff Search”.  Enter your adviser’s name.

4.        What are the office number, phone number, and e-mail address of your adviser?

5.        Think of 3 questions that you would like to ask your adviser.  What are they?

Go to back to Webster, and go to “Student Services and Financial Aid”, then “Look Up Classes to Add”.  For term, select “Winter 2011 (View Only)”.

6.        Find at least two classes that you need to take or would like to take next term.  What are they?

Now prepare an e-mail to your adviser, using the format we discussed in class.  Explain to your adviser that you would like to meet to prepare to register Winter term, and give the adviser a few days and times that you are available to meet (please note:  if your adviser if pre-professional health, she prefers that you sign up on her door instead of an e-mail).

7.        Did you send the e-mail to your adviser?  What did you say in your e-mail?

When you meet with your adviser, bring your 3 questions and ideas for courses with you to the meeting – you will find that it is much more productive!

Connecting a Cohort Through Assessment

Below is a test plan that I created, with some of the improvements and explanations suggested by my classmates.  My plan involves a cohort of two courses a college level writing course called Introduction to Expository Prose, where they are currently analyzing discourse communities and developing essays, and a college survival class where they are working with the “This I Believe” college curriculum to learn to think critically, analyze essays, and develop their own “This I Believe” essays.  This would not be a test used all at once, but more of a process, to be added to a portfolio that they’re developing.  First would be a selected response test on grammar and mechanics (since they are working with this topic in both courses), then in an extended written response assessment, they would analyze a discourse community from a sample given.  Next, they would analyze an essay in class, and then they would develop their own.  Throughout the process of the assessment, students will be writing their own reflections on their progress, and then comparing this progress to faculty feedback.

My thinking with this approach is to meet the theme and design of the cohort courses, while finding a way to thematically analyze students’ progress overall.  With this being the beginning writing course, and the other course having such a different design, grammar and mechanics should be considered, but the shared, greater focus and purpose of both courses is to develop abilities in the other three components mentioned, so I counted grammar and mechanics as a small percentage, and made the other three equal.

Learning Target	Type of Target	Assessment Method	Percent Importance
Understand grammar and mechanics of writing	Knowledge	Selected Response	10%
Effectively identify and describe discourse community	Reasoning	Extended Written Response	30%
Critically analyze reading passage/essay	Reasoning	Personal Communication	30%
Understand process and steps of writing an essay	Products	Performance Assessment	30%

Reflective Portfolio

I have a wonderful opportunity to be part of the redesign of the curriculum for the course that I currently teach.  Given the seeming effectiveness of reflection in my class, I have suggested that we incorporate a portfolio with the intent of student self-reflection (Stiggins, 2006, p. 345).  So often in college, students are taught how to meet standards and then told whether or not they’re meeting standards, but I’m not sure how often they’re actually given the opportunity to reflect on their own work let alone the meaning of college and their purpose for attending.  A course that is ultimately designed to build college literacy is a great platform for a portfolio that explores these concepts.

Here are the suggestions that I have shared or will share for this portofolio:

Activities that we have done in or outside of class – too often activities are assigned, completed (or ignored), and we move on to the next topic – we need a little more meaning and context attached.

We have a few activities that involve group work. Students will include reflections on their participation, and the effectiveness of the group work. They will share reflections on what would have made the group work more effective.

Students will incorporate reflections on the meanings of the activities and what they feel they learned.

One thing I tried this year that I think should be included was two Clear/Unclear Windows reflections (Ellis, 2001).  The end of the first week of class, students drew a line down the middle of their paper, labeling one side “Clear”, and the other side “Unclear”.  They shared aspects of college that were clear and that they understood, and aspects that were unclear (which informed my teaching for the term).  At the end of the term, we repeated this activity.  Some things remained the same (some students knew their major at the beginning and the end, for example), but some things changed.  One student in particular moved from a definitive (and not so informed) idea of the degree he would earn and where his future would be – this idea moved to the unclear side – he didn’t know what he wanted to be, but he knew he wanted to earn a degree and knew he could be successful.  These windows are like a little time capsule, and give students the chance, if only for 20 minutes, to reflect on their experiences over the whirlwind of 10 weeks that constitutes their first term in college.

Finally, students will include their “This I Believe” essays (NPR, 2010) if they are part of the curriculum again next year, and have a reflection on what brought them to share this belief.

Ultimately, this portfolio will give students a chance to reflect on success without the pressure of typical college portfolios.

Ellis, A.  (2001).  Teaching, learning & assessment together. Larchmont, NY:  Eye on Education.

NPR.  (2010).  This I believe sample college writing curriculum. http://www.thisibelieve.org/educationoutreach.html

Stiggins, R.,  Arter, J., Chappuis, J., & Chappuis, S. (2006).  Classroom assessment for student learning: Doing it right- using it well. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Education, Inc.

My Assessment Approach

I used to believe that I had a handle on assessment, that I had a solid belief system for it.  When I taught ESL, I despised assessment (especially standardized assessment).  When I began teaching at the community college level, I came to see the need to assess my students’ learning, but I wanted it to be friendly, helpful assessment that wasn’t scary.  As I worked with my advisees and saw that there were times that for every piece of homework, for each step of the way, they were relying on another’s knowledge, I came to see why tests are important.  This was reiterated each time a student came excitedly proclaiming that they earned an excellent grade on a test, so they really must have learned.  Through this past year in college and the multiple readings I have encountered regarding any type of education philosophy, I have learned that an extreme approach is simply not healthy, and I started to see the validity of standardized testing for the sake of accountability.  Then, I learned about reflective assessment.  I saw the value of giving students the opportunity to assess themselves in truly meaningful manners.

Now, I am a university adviser and I teach a type of first year experience, college survival class to a wonderful group of students.    At the start of the school year, I was still embracing reflective assessment.  Throughout the past term’s placement test reviews, blank stares or excited responses from students, and reading my classmates’ conversations in this course on types of assessment, the difficulties of curriculum alignment and standardized testing, and objective vs. subjective testing, and the realization that in each topic, there are at least two different, equally valid perspectives, I am convinced that I will never be able to create a finite, consistent philosophy of assessment.  There are too many different angles.

At this stage, all I can really focus on and settle in to is achieving one goal, explained best by one of the opening statements of Stiggins, et. al. (2006):  “Used with skill, assessment can motivate the unmotivated, restore the desire to learn, and encourage the students to keep learning…” (p. 3).

This statement struck me the first week of the term, and I have revisited it multiple times over the past weeks.  I recently heard someone state that “students will learn what they are tested on, so we need to have tests in classes”.  It was spoken with such authority and finality that I instinctively recoiled, and I made it clear that I did not want overt exams in my class – this is essential and necessary for some courses, but assessment must be tailor-made to each class, its purpose, and its design for learning.

My class is designed to build institutional literacy, college skills, and competency and confidence.  Creating a test just for the sake of a test, and in order to force student learning, is not bound to be successful in terms of motivation and success.  Robert DiGiulio (2009) states that, “Student success is fostered by the work students do, by what they produce…In the final analysis, what the student does will have a greater impact on how successful the student is (and feels he or she is) than what the teacher knows, says, or believes” (page 116).  The work a student produces, rather than disconnected points in a grade book, will motivate students far better than a test, for example, on test strategies and skills.

When I stated so emphatically that I would not test my students (especially not on testing skills), I was asked, “How will your students ever learn if you don’t give them tests?”  My initial response was that I teach my students, and then we use reflective assessment in and outside of class (in the case of test strategies, this involved applying the skills we learned in other classes).  For this portfolio, I have thought about this question further.

In “How we Think”, John Dewey (2005) states, “The pupil labeled hopeless may react in quick and lively fashion when the thing-in-hand seems to him worth while, as some out-of-school sport or social affair.  Indeed, the school subject might move him, were it set in a different context and treated by a different method” (p. 128).  Rather than giving students tests that are “separate events or objects set apart from learning and teaching” (Ellis, 2001, p. 37)I believe that my students will learn, not by the fear of tests that are disconnected from the rest of their college experience, but rather by making each of our activities – and each of our assessments – worthwhile and meaningful, which at times will require that we try different contexts and different methods.

My portfolio, then, is my descriptions of types of assessments I have tried in class this term, along with assessments I am proposing we incorporate into our curriculum for next year.  While I do not have a finite philosophy of assessment, I can say that I no longer feel negative about assessments – they are necessary, they are important, but we must work to make sure that they remain effective and meaningful.

Dewey, J. (2005).  How we think. New York, NY:  Barnes and Noble Publishing (Original work published 1910).

Di Giulio, R. (2009).  Psst…it ain’t about the tests. Canestrari, A. S. & Marlowe, B.A. (Eds.), Educational foundations: An anthology of critical readings (pp. 120-125).  Thousand Oaks, CA:  Sage Publications, Inc.

Ellis, A.  (2001).  Teaching, learning & assessment together. Larchmont, NY:  Eye on Education.

Stiggins, R., Arter, J., Chappuis, J., & Chappuis, S. (2006).  Classroom assessment for student learning: Doing it right – using it well. Upper Saddle River, NJ:  Pearson, Education, Inc.

Portfolio Entries 2-5:

https://tjrasmussen.wordpress.com/2010/12/10/connecting-a-cohort-through-assessment/

https://tjrasmussen.wordpress.com/2010/12/11/scaffolding-discussions-and-extended-written-response/

https://tjrasmussen.wordpress.com/2010/12/11/personal-communication-and-follow-ups/

https://tjrasmussen.wordpress.com/2010/12/10/reflective-portfolio/