CBE AREA 3 – Final Reflections Secondary Learning Leaders – May 2014
How has using the TEF this year, impacted your practice and the learning of your students?
- Every single task I assign has a purpose. Students never work on something just because they have to. Big ideas are emphasized, and I try to make the work more student-driven. When students are answering their own questions, they are so much more invested in their learning
- Review of concepts essential to build rich and meaningful learning experience for students. Opportunities to collaborate with like minded peers. Learning experiences to challenge current practice and assessment tools
- I have attempted, this year, to create tasks that are more authentic, and tasks that I feel students will find more exciting, worthwhile and interesting. I’ve also made self- reflection and student participation in the assessment process a bigger part of my practice
- Has helped my practice be more focused and intentional. Given me tools to help students help themselves. Lets me take bigger risks, because they are more intentional risks. Students’ writing has improved with better feedback loops. Peer learning has improved with more intentional questions on my part that guides students to their own conclusions/learning.
- We now have a common language in our team meetings and the TEF is a starting point when sharing task design.
- Using the TEF has impacted teacher practice. As I work alongside teachers in their classrooms as a Learning Coach, TEFR has been the center of our work together. Creating worthwhile tasks, so Teachers as Designers of Learning is where we have worked this year. Using the Task Design Framework facilitated planning conversations with teachers as we designed worthwhile tasks together.
- I feel as though it has helped guide me in my planning and approach to teaching
- It has made me reflect on my practice and show students that learning is authentic. Assessment is embedded in many different ways throughout projects. I have concentrated on building relationships with students and now working together students are willing to take risks
- Teaching for more understanding helped the depth of knowledge that students developed. The students have greater understanding about what was covered
- The ideas are the easy part, actually fleshing out those ideas into manageable pieces, while keeping the final product/performance in mind has been more challenging but I’m getting better
- Having the students help build rubrics around existing exemplars. This has helped me understand where some gaps in learning/understanding are and when student learning has grown (as the discussions around the rubrics/exemplars continues through to completion of the task). It has also helped the students achieve their goals more easily as they haven’t been told what to aim for, but have continued to use the target to guide their learning on their own.
- It has impacted the way I think about planning and the structured subtasks and intentional feedback loops have helped my students achieve deeper understanding and a better final product
- It has encouraged me to move away from front-loading the kids with information and to take the risk to let them engage in inquiry based learning. The Teacher Effectiveness Framework has provided me with a roadmap of the types of skills I need to develop as an educator and incorporate into my teaching
- Working collaboratively with my Math/Science partner teachers has been effective in allowing us to plan tasks and assessment that meets our students’ needs. Always trying to create an authentic meaningful task for the students. Working intentionally with students on how to give effective feedback and intentionally planning for feedback loops as part of my task design.
Describe the impact you have had on teacher and student learning in your school through your role as the learning leader?
- I model effective teaching and talk about my struggles a lot, so that other teachers know that it’s ok to talk about our practice openly. I visit classrooms to provide support and feedback to other teachers about task design and assessment
- Opportunities to have conversations with school/teacher colleagues about the work we do during the Galileo Learning Leader sessions. Opportunities to develop learning tasks with Galileo leaders. Opened up discussions with discipline team about assessment for learning.
- I am not a learning leader at my school, but I believe the impact that I have is through the sharing of what I learn in Galileo sessions with my colleagues
- Bigger tool box of suggestions for teachers in my department. Given a common language and common focus for Learning Leaders and teachers who have attended Galileo, regardless of department. As it turns out many of us attending Galileo also happen to be on the school’s PD committee, so it has focused PD for staff of whole school around TEF and Redefining Fair
- Working with Galileo throughout the year has enabled me to improve my knowledge of discipline-based inquiry as well as my confidence in working with my Math and Science team to help them elevate their understanding and practice
- As the EL Learning Leader, I was also responsible for leading a group of teachers in my PLC. We read Redefining Fair, which I brought to our meeting, and we plan using the Task Design Framework! When teachers bring their samples of student work we are able to share techniques strategies, and feedback towards improving teaching practices and increase student engagement and achievement using the TEF.
- The impact I feel is that there are a lot more open conversation in what is going on in the classroom with teachers. There is an openness to the dialogue that has been shown through the introduction to Galileo. It has helped foster a common language with teachers and students. I feel that there are more opportunities for us to understand the power of intentional designing of tasks and assessment processes.
- I have been more effective giving feedback and helping other teachers with formative assessment incorporation in the tasks they design and in their classroom practice
- We have increased the amount of sharing of ideas and practices within the department
- Teachers are much more comfortable coming to me after seeing something I’ve done and using that as a jumping-off point, rather than asking for help generally
- Some students have learned to love (and hate) politics due to the inquiry projects/work in my class. They definitely have a strong(er) understanding and do not feel apathetic regarding the topic. It has also helped me in my PLC work as I am less excited (which can be intimidating and off putting) and have calmed down. I now help build/make suggestions in a much more effective manner using the TEF or other frameworks introduced by Galileo
- I am not a learning leader
- I have shared many of the curricular ideas from our Galileo sessions (as well as the rationale(s) presented for inquiry-based learning) and have shared them with my colleagues in our math curriculum meetings and PLC meetings
- Planned a PD day using TEF for planning and Damian Cooper to help guide the day for teachers to be meaningful. I have continued to try and work with the students to create tasks that are meaningful for them. PLC work – planning tasks and assessment – looking at outcomes based assessment
What are your plans for next year to continue to build on what you have learned this year?
- Not 100% sure where I will be, but I will continue improving my practice and task design. I want to grow my task(s) library to include the very best tasks for each topic. I also want to continue to develop my formative assessment strategies and document my conversations with students
- Continue collaboration with colleagues to develop assessment tools (common assessment framework). Continue developing work focused on large conceptual ideas. Continue with work in developing student voice and self-assessment for tasks
- I plan to look at all of my lessons/tasks and try to tweek them to make them fit into the TEF
- Create more rubrics for specific projects in my own classroom, collect more exemplars good and bad. Share through staff PD and department PLC rubrics, assessment and practices successful and unsuccessful formative assessment practices, pre-teaching data collection techniques, criteria development strategies, etc
- As a learning leader or otherwise, I intend to keep the discussions. It would be good to keep an ongoing compilation of evidence throughout the year. Creating our video allowed us to reflect
- I plan to use the Task Design Framework in my practice with teachers next year
- I hope to continue the growth on this year and foster the kind of learning environment it created during these monthly sessions
- Next year, I plan on continuing to share and collaborate as well as create more projects. I also want to learn more about group work management, continue learning how to incorporate spontaneous tasks as well as task design and how to incorporate the two. I would like to continue attending PD sessions so that I can continue working on how to share and promote good practice for others as a learning leader
- Continued reflections on our practice to develop learning of the students
- Extend myself to others at my school as a sounding board if not an expert, and building tasks and projects that are worthwhile, authentic and engaging. To also push myself past my comfort zone and maybe even use imovie
- Continue working with teachers in a positive, professional and accepting manner. Continue the work with the students on building rubrics and assessment
- I want to try to redesign a lot of the tasks that I use now so that students can be more successful. I also want to find more real world applications that relate to my subject area and try to base new tasks on these
- To continue to take the risk (and leap of faith) to incorporate more inquiry-based learning activities into my math classes
- You can’t create the best tasks possible with every topic so I would like to take all ‘great’ authentic tasks I did this year and tweek them for a new audience, as well as create other authentic tasks in other topic areas. Continue to provide students with feedback as much as possible
CBE Area 3 SLL Final Reflections May 2014
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