Selecting a Goal for Student Development

Selecting a goal for student development

Your team discussed these prompts last year. Please revisit your thinking about your students and how you want them to be different when they leave you. You might want to explore the same gap you looked at last year, or you might want to choose a new one. Either way, work on framing the gap and your student development goal as specifically and concretely as you can.

Think about the aspirations you have for your students. What kind of students do you want to foster and help develop at your school? What qualities do you want your students to have by the time they leave your school?

What gaps do you see between these aspirations and how children are actually developing at your school?

Discuss these gaps with your group. As a group, select a “gap” that you would like to focus on with your lesson study. Write a goal that states the quality you would like to develop in your students in order to address the gap you have chosen.

Assessing your Student Development Goal

How will you know if your students are making progress toward your SDG?

As a group, discuss these questions. Be very concrete and specific in your answers. As you talk, everyone should take some notes on the discussion

1. How will your classroom look and sound different when students have achieved this goal?

2. What experiences can you give students in the course of your lesson that will help them reach this goal? How can you give students practice with this goal?

3. What evidence can you gather to monitor students’ progress toward this goal?
Options For Lesson Planning

During the scheduled time for lesson planning each day, you will receive at least one structured assignment. If you finish that assignment and still have time to work, you can proceed with planning your lesson. Here are some suggestions for chunks of planning that you may be able to complete within the time we have available:

·  Identify the prior knowledge students will need to tackle the big ideas in your lesson

·  Identify the academic language you want to feature in your lesson. Consider both vocabulary and any specialized language that the lesson might require (e.g., compare, explain, predict, etc.)

·  Consider where the lesson fits into the unit, and where the unit fits into the year.

·  How will you preassess students’ current understanding before teaching the lesson?

·  Identify useful text in your textbook and consider how you might want to incorporate it into the lesson.

·  Consider what opportunities you can integrate into the lesson for students to:

o  Engage in productive dialogue

o  Do purposeful reading

o  Do meaningful writing

·  Review any relevant activities in the textbook. Consider whether they directly address the big idea you have chosen to focus on.

·  Draft possible preassessments and post assessments

Planning Your Content Assessment

1. Consider the big idea or ideas you have identified as your science content goal. What could it look and sound like if students have mastered this big idea?

We’d like you to consider how you will assess students’ learning, both during the lesson and at the end. It’s OK that you do not have the learning activities planned yet – we want to use your ideas about assessment to help shape the instruction. You can start with more general ideas – “the students should be able to tell the story of the rock from observing it” or “the students should be able to describe examples of convection from everyday life and explain why it happens”.

2. What evidence might you gather during the lesson that students understand this big idea?

Brainstorm as many ways as possible. Think of some of the techniques you have seen in eSCI (see the attached list)

3. How might you measure students’ mastery of the concepts at the end of the lesson or unit? Think beyond the end-of-unit assessment provided with your textbook. Brainstorm 4-5 ideas.

Examples of Assessment From eSCI Activities:

Informal in-course assessment:

Things you do during the lesson to track student understanding, but don’t use for evaluation (grading)

·  Whiteboard activities (in many eSCI sessions, for example, Making Sound)

·  Think-Pair-Share (in many eSCI sessions)

·  Gallery Walks (Mass/Volume/Density/Weight posters in Winter Retreat)

·  Reflective writing (Making Sound)

More formal end-of-lesson assessment:

Things you do at the end of the lesson or later on to measure student learning; may be used for evaluation (grading)

·  Challenge Statements

·  Check for Understanding (Density)

·  Performance assessment (Stacking liquids in Winter Retreat)

·  Creative writing (Applying Mass and Volume – write a poem, skit, story that illustrates the concept)