Month: February 2019

Yesterday’s field trip to the VMFA was a great way to experience and observe what a field trip might look like. My field trips in special education are strikingly different so I really enjoyed the insight. I really liked how in the front room, the VMFA provided different cards for students to use to think about art differently. Each card provided a prompt for students to answer and/or think about when they were observing the art. I thought that this was a good strategy for students to utilize creativity, critical thinking, and collaboration on the field trip. To target observational skills, I really liked the way that with each piece of art we observed, the guide moved us through phases of 1. What do you see? 2. What do you notice? and 3. What do you wonder? I think that provided a good opportunity for students to take notes and then possibly complete a journal entry or short writing prompt about their own reflections from the trip. My favorite room in the VMFA was the interactive music and art space. Engaging students in both art and music is very important to me in my classroom, as I would think it would be in my general education classroom. I loved that there were opportunities for students to create their own music, listen to music and art in other languages, and engage with braille activities. I did think that the distance learning was a great way for students to engage without actually traveling to the location; however, after the presentation, I was disappointed to learn that this option isn’t even available to elementary classrooms per the current grant.

This semester, in both instructional design and social studies, forms of assessments have been an important piece of each course. When you start to unpack different kinds of assessment strategies it makes me feel both overwhelmed and supported at the same time. Overwhelmed with the idea that because there are so many pieces, there are many elements to use and confuse (as noted in all of the bad assessment samples). The variety also makes me feel supported to know that as the classroom teacher, I am still provided with the choice to determine how I’m going to evaluate what my students have learned. For me, rubrics are a significant contributing piece to my success as a student at UR. It helps me to outline and define clear expectations as well as the ability to compare and contrast what is important/relevant and what is not. That being said, using these rubrics for performance-based assessments seems to be dauntingly inconsistent across educators. Like Deborah brought up in class, it also seems at times unrealistic that teachers will have such time to set aside to making “grading” consistent and equitable across the board. I am still wondering, if we aren’t giving percentage grades on all performance-based assessment, is the grade more for us as teachers to understand where our students are, rather than students trying to reach some numerical achievement? I really appreciated the review of bad examples of assessment. I have experienced assessment in both good and bad ways and this class has really demonstrated a clear path to providing good questions that require students to incorporate the six competencies in Deep Learning and more. What really resonates with me is that it’s not about trying to trick students, or to make questions as difficult as possible, but to provide and create questions that encourage critical thinking and information recall in a way that they can apply knowledge and not just regurgitate it.

I really like the way that tonight’s class gave me the opportunity to learn about applying social studies instruction in the classroom as well as giving me a chance to learn new historical information. I really enjoyed the progression of the Harriet Tubman activities and the resources that it provided. I think that it demonstrated a clear lesson on biographies that I will be able to refer to as a model for our lesson plan 1. The “tea party” was an active and engaging way for students to compile new information and to communicate and interact with other peers. I think another good name for this activity could be “Sentence Storyteller’s” 🙂 Learning about sorts in other courses, I have always felt that sorts were particularly boring. In this case, I thought that the sort demonstrated an important and significant full-circle activity for attention/hook, accessing prior knowledge, and for use of closure. Using this in my classroom, I would like students to use a visual notebook during the hook (post sort), to ask students to generate a few sentences about what they think the lesson will be about and what they hope to learn. After the closure sort, I would ask that students go back to their notebooks to write down 2 things that they learned and 1 thing that surprised them. I really enjoyed viewing the lesson video from start to finish. We have been on many classroom observations in this course but it is not always true that you will observe something of significance or strategies that you can connect to your own classroom. To watch a lesson unfold in a well-generated and thoughtful way, helped me to connect our class activities and discussion. For our own exit strategy, I liked that we were given a sort. I think that it reinforced our lessons strategies but incorporated a variety of content areas across instruction, content, standards, and front-loading. Thank you so much for this clear and transparent definition. It is often a term used in our coursework that I hadn’t been able to quite grasp until this evening.

I really enjoyed our class last night! I thought each activity was engaging and did well to reinforce the ideas that we’ve been targeting throughout the semester. I think what resonated with me the most was when Dr. Stohr referred to history as being “his-story”. Doing the activity about her uncle during the war was an example of just that. It allowed us as the students to see into someone’s life, understand their history. As we discussed, it’s easy for students to see history as the culmination of famous people’s story. This activity allowed me to make a more personal connection to what history means and motivated me to dig deeper into mine. I think this lesson is not only engaging for students, but it was a good way to incorporate primary and secondary sources, make inferences about the information, and encourage students to unfold an unknown story. This activity could be used as a means to incorporate a variety of targeted skills across content areas. I also really liked the picture comparison activity. I enjoyed the way it looked at observational skills while giving students the opportunity to think freely and creatively. I was surprised to see the Venn Diagram at the closure of the activity. I think that it was a good way to incorporate the compare and contrast element in a fun and engaging way. Overall, really fun class!