Curriculum Leadership Institute

Pathways to School Improvement

E-Hints Related to Instruction

Below is an archive of E-Hints related to classroom instruction and planning. We welcome you to use them to improve pedagogy in your classroom or share them with a colleague who might benefit.

Thank you for making learning fun for kids, even when it means stepping out of your comfort zone!

Teaching Tip - Follow every introduction of new learning with time for students to reflect and discuss. This way they'll have a more permanent stamp in their memory of what you're teaching them.

Returning to School During COVID-19 (Part Two)

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This E-Hint is the second segment in a two-part series providing suggestions for returning to school during the COVID-19 pandemic. The focus of Part One was on meeting the social-emotional needs of students and planning to instruct the curriculum. Part Two (this segment) delves into onsite and online instructional options and checking for understanding in an online environment. 

Instructional Options

Sadly, uncontrollable factors during the spring last year, caused a loss and possible regression in learning for some students. Although a quarter of onsite contact time was lost in the 19-20 school year, try to avoid reteaching the end of the previous year’s curriculum. Instead, consider these options and use those that work best for your students.

Find a baseline for content and skills. Use questions from your summative assessments to create a pre-assessment aligned to your local curriculum for this school year. Many companies promote standardized tests promising a quick gauge of students’ current abilities. While these cookie-cutter assessments may seem appealing as a fast, easy solution, unfortunately, they do not give accurate information about your local curriculum. Additionally, they are not an accurate diagnostic measure to determine individual student deficiencies. 

Provide a formative pre-lesson check. Ask a few brief questions to get a read on student understanding for each lesson. You’ll need a quick response, so use instructional technology like Quizizz or Google Forms to gather results and guide your next step. Formative checks are for learning, so it is a natural fit. Using this option requires you to have a couple of lesson options ready for the day. If students are prepared to move forward, go with Plan A, but if they are not prepared, go with Plan B.

Implement looping for the upcoming school year to increase tracking and development of individual student skills. Looping is the educational practice of assigning students to the same teacher for two or three consecutive grade levels. There are several advantages to looping students. On the academic side, teachers know their student’s strengths and challenges. By looping, you can save time without having to discover the best learning style of each student.   Instruction can be more focused and efficient, which will translate into higher student success.  Looping also creates social-emotional security for students as they already have relationships with their teachers and peers. Those relationships quickly grow in a familiar setting with familiar routines. Therefore, looping results in higher attendance rates. The sudden end to onsite learning last year robbed students and teachers a sense of closure. So, additional time together could change a negative situation into a positive one.

Use the Instructional Planning Resource (IPR) to plan your instruction. The IPR has been a part of the CLI Model for many years. It has evolved from hard paper copies to static electronic versions to real-time Google Docs. The IPR requires you to align your instruction to the local curriculum, and is often called an “educational toolbox.” Multiple teaching methods, student activities, and supplemental resources are included on the IPR to help you plan your instruction. The academic range of your students may have grown wider, so utilizing the differentiation feature on the IPR provides intervention and enrichment options to meet their needs. While teachers never expected to deliver so much online instruction, they did discover new tools to add to the old ones. Some even work better! Utilize new strategies, activities, and online tools as you move forward in a face-to-face setting. Not only will it give your instruction a fresh feel, but it will also create a sense of familiarity for students before there is a need to return solely to online practices. If you are currently planning for the new school year, create both onsite and online options for teaching the curriculum. Offering choices to your students is never a waste of time, and strategies that you don’t use for full group instruction may fit well with a smaller group who require additional options to reinforce their learning.

Use technology daily to support onsite instruction. Create student groups, establish classroom norms, and guide the use of technology while onsite. This way, you can provide immediate support and save time troubleshooting program features should you need to move to remote learning.

Checking for Understanding – Use Your New Tech Skills!

Solid instruction includes formative checks for learning and requires immediate feedback to the student. But, how can this still be manageable in an online setting? Here are some handy tech tools to help you be creative:

  1. Observe student work using the drawing features on a digital whiteboard. For example, when communicating through ZOOM, the student selects the writing instrument after the teacher assigns a task.  Student responses are written in their handwriting and viewed by the teacher on the student’s whiteboard. This feature works great with math problems, handwriting practice, or original graphic organizers. Teachers can see progress and offer input in real-time.
  2. Some online learning platforms include a polling feature that can be used similarly to the traditional bell ringer. When students enter class, pose them with a question. When submitted, their answer is accessible to you, the meeting host.
  3. Another easy check is to ask all students a question in chat mode. Students can respond directly to you, who can then provide feedback in real-time.
  4. Google Forms are a quick and easy way to gather student feedback.  Individual responses from students are collected, compiled, and organized with charts and graphs, quickly allowing you to determine the next steps for instruction.    
  5. Several standards require collaboration between students.  Google makes this expectation easier by sharing features.  Students can review a piece of work with you or their peers through Slides, Sheets, or Docs and offer suggestions.  Making digital comments is speedier than handwritten feedback!
  6. Finally, frequent emails to your students can keep them on target through personal messages.  You can include parents on your emails to help their kids at home and to keep them accountable.

The best approach for an uncertain future is to prepare with options.  Create a plan and provide structure for students and parents, provide opportunities for interaction and feedback, and address the social-emotional needs of your students.  Flexibility is a common characteristic of educators, so take a deep breath, do your best, and remember that you’re only human. You’re going to need to remain flexible, especially through the upcoming school year.

Teaching for Reflective Learning

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Portrait of smart female college student with books and a light bulb above her head as a symbol of bright ideas
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As anyone working in education can attest, a greater emphasis is placed on criterion-referenced high stakes testing than in the past. In response to this reality, including reflective thinking in a teacher’s toolbox of instructional strategies can help students think about their learning and ensure that applications are meaningful and relevant in an increasingly demanding world. Using CLI processes prompts for reflective learning can be written into unit outcomes and components. They can be explicitly addressed in the instructional planning resource in the context of methods, activities, resources, and assessments.  Proficiency scales also allow students to practice reflective learning as well as tracking their learning.

Proficiency

Measuring the quality and extent of reflective learning is more challenging than measuring simple recall. Therefore, the criteria for implementing reflective learning must be more extensive than past approaches.  When such criteria are met, however, the results have intense and long-lasting meaning.

In their reflection on learning, students will:

  • describe their personal strengths and weaknesses in the context of the skills and understandings required,
  • identify and question underlying values and beliefs in the context of the skills and understandings required,
  • acknowledge and challenge possible assumptions on which expressed values and beliefs are based,
  • identify and describe feelings of bias or discrimination, and
  • acknowledge fears and inadequacies in attempting to improve.

The reflection required to meet the above challenges is designed to improve self-awareness, the first step to positive change.  It defines learning as being something more than the cognitive accumulation of facts and processes, placing it within a student’s life in ways that make scholastic growth a part of meeting personal, professional, and vocational goals.  It gives students emotional tools to positively weigh what they do, so they can identify approaches that work well and reinforce good practices over time.

Methods that Encourage Student Engagement in Reflective Practice

Educational researchers, such as Robert Marzano, Benjamin Bloom, Thomas Good, and Jere Brophy, referred to reflection as being a means to stimulate higher-order thinking. Many authors who advocate the use of cooperative teaching and learning, as well as constructivist approaches, also consider individual reflective behaviors to be valid behavioral outcomes. Research suggests that extensive student writing and speaking (based on solid inquiry activities) are the best vehicles for allowing student expression that is reflective of engaged thought, beliefs, and emotions.  A Subject Area Committee (SAC) can write unit outcomes and components that are specific to this type of writing and speaking.  On an Instructional Planning Resource (IPR), or other lesson planning structure, teachers can include such methods as reflective journals and other self-evaluative tools, peer critique, debriefing techniques, and dynamic feedback in group settings.  These can show up in the IPR methods, activities, resources, and assessment blocks. 

Reflective Learning versus the Negative Self-Fulfilling Prophecy

We all know that students who are otherwise engaged in their surroundings reject subjects they “don’t like” or find “too hard.”  Consequently, they either fail those courses or just get by well enough to keep teachers and parents mollified.  For whatever reason, they simply don’t learn the subject well enough to make any kind of personal and lasting difference.  Without the personal connection to learning, assessment with formal exams or application assessments, a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy kicks in and they fail.  They justify performance with “I knew I’d fail because I’ve always hated that subject” or “I knew I’d fail because I’ve never been good in that subject.”  Sound familiar?  However, because reflective learning causes students to acknowledge their fears and inadequacies and to identify their strengths, question beliefs, and challenge assumptions – such negativity can be deflected before it becomes ingrained. 

The CLI Model offers an effective platform for addressing this more substantial and meaningful approach to teaching and student learning.  Both a Curriculum Coordinating Council (CCC) and a SAC can systematically build in processes associated with curriculum content and instructional techniques that make mastery real and student performance valid.

The End of the School Year is in Sight

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High School Pupils Celebrating End Of Term
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Yes, the end of the school year is in sight.  Teachers are worried about finishing the curriculum, checking in books, taking posters off the walls, entering grades, and all of their other year-end tasks.  Administrators are ticking items off of their unique building goal lists and sending out reminders and final instructions for the last days of school, all the while contemplating their summer worklists.  In anticipation of the end of the year, we experience a seemingly abrupt conclusion followed by a collective sigh.  Afterward, the thoughts of “Oh, no, we forgot… “ settle into our minds.

Let’s start now to check off the tasks and items that are complete or need follow-up.  

We can then take time to reflect and celebrate the positive accomplishments that we might otherwise overlook in a rush to the end.  The provided checklists are republished to serve as a guide to districtwide and classroom reflection and to remind us of all the tasks that require completion or monitoring to start the next year.

5 Holiday Snack Recipes for Your Classroom!

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As a throwback to our most popular holiday E-Hint, A CLI Christmas Recipe Book, we’ve compiled five more recipes! Bring these delicious holiday snacks to your classroom party or keep them at home for you to munch on. Each one is a tried-and-true hit from our CLI staff.

Happy Holidays!

Want to Improve Reading Comprehension? Keep Science and Social Studies in the Elementary Schools

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It is a familiar scenario and solution.  The pressure is felt to improve reading skills to score higher on standardized tests.  Elementary teachers can’t extend the school day, so they borrow time from a content area which doesn’t have a state assessment or one not as often.   Social studies and science take a backseat.   Even though this move seems logical with the best intentions, the results are counterproductive. Since the 1990s, the amount of instructional time in science and social studies has decreased over 90 minutes per week.   It is often the first place teachers look to “pull” students from if they need interventions. Unfortunately, by cutting these courses, the opportunities for developing content vocabulary and knowledge about real life is also reduced. 

Why teach social studies and science?  Social studies classes provide content knowledge, but most importantly, students learn the foundation for why it is necessary to contribute to society as a good citizen.   Science activities are a way to capture the interest of students with fun, hands-on, and minds-on lessons.  Learning activities related to science and social studies help students develop problem-solving and critical thinking skills while connecting concepts to their world. 

Support for the Key Shifts in English/Language Arts Standards  Many states have revised their English/Language Arts Standards in recent years and have outlined key shifts from past standards. Continuing to schedule regular science and social studies classes allows opportunities to teach needed skills. The background knowledge gained from social studies and science provides the context to understand new and complex text for greater comprehension.   Reading about science is no replacement for phenomenon or inquiry, but it can help build the knowledge base for “doing” science.   Plus, citing textual evidence from informational text helps provide pieces necessary for accurate analysis of an investigation.  

Vocabulary and Reading Comprehension English/Language Arts Standards require students to use domain-specific words in their writing and while speaking.  Science and social studies classes provide opportunities for students to learn word meanings, read and hear them applied correctly in context, and use the words for communicating.  Students receiving explicit instruction over the meanings of affixes and root words benefits the current class, but that knowledge is utilized by the students to become stronger readers in all classes.  Vocabulary acquisition improves the comprehension of complex literary and informational text.

Student Engagement  A significant, well-documented reason to keep regularly scheduled science and social studies classes, is that students love the activities these topics provide!  The natural fit for collaboration and project-based learning allows students opportunities for implicit learning, developing good work habits, and applying what they learn to their lives.  Learning while having fun is impactful in many ways!

Teachers are well aware of the importance of reading on grade level by the 3rd grade.  If this doesn’t happen, opportunities to be successful in the future will be more of a challenge.  Capturing every moment available for learning is critical.  If you are interested in utilizing an integrated approach to teach more than one content area at the same time, download CLI’s FREE Civic Education Resource, Life, Liberty, Law.  This resource is aligned to National Standards in Social Studies but also references ELA, Math, Science, Fine Arts, and Social/Emotional Learning Standards.  Get yours at cliweb.org/resources-2. 

Proficiency Scales and the CLI Model

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Many of our school districts have begun work with proficiency scales, a tool introduced by Robert Marzano and Marzano Research to determine levels of student learning. Teachers have seen success in their classrooms when sharing proficiency scales with their students and allowing students to track their progression from level-to-level; therefore, allowing students to take ownership of their learning. One benefit of including proficiency scales in your curriculum, instruction, and assessment work is that both the teacher and student can use them.  Let’s take a closer look at what proficiency scales are, their purposes, and how they work within the CLI Model.

Proficiency scales, typically a four-point scale, include related curricular targets and scores which are intended to clarify a progression of learning. They allow teachers and students to identify student performance. Please review this sample template. The use of proficiency scales is a decision to be made by your Curriculum Coordinating Council (CCC).  Keep in mind, that proficiency scales can be altered to meet the needs of your school or district.

Additionally, a proficiency scale can aid Subject Area Committee (SAC) members in identifying which curricular targets are a priority and must be on a common assessment. Therefore, creating proficiency scales fits perfectly as the first step of assessment work in year three of the CLI Model. This graphic organizer, revised from the Common Assessment Development Cycle graphic from Marzano Research, illustrates the assessment process that we use in our model.

By creating proficiency scales first, SAC members identify priority curricular targets (components) and use this information to better plan their assessments. Jan Hoegh, a consultant for Marzano Research, recommends the following questions as a way to identify what should be included on a proficiency scale.

What is the primary topic of the outcome? Outcomes are summary statements for a unit of instruction. They are meant to encompass all of the components listed as steps to achieving the outcome. Determine the primary topic of the outcome and use that information to develop your level 3.0 score. Sometimes, one of your components may fully communicate the primary topic of the outcome and can, therefore, be copied and pasted into the level 3.0 field of the proficiency scale.

Are there any components that don’t directly relate to the primary target? Some states include standards that are meant to be repeated from grade-to-grade or are more supplemental in nature. Although these standards are important and work well within an outcome, they may not directly relate to the primary target. If this is the case, they may be excluded from the proficiency scale.

Please remember, however, that even if a component is not included on the proficiency scale, it must still be taught and assessed. Everything that is included in your district’s guaranteed and viable curriculum is essential, and students are still expected to learn it. But, components of this nature may be evident in the final product without having specific items that measure them; they tend to be critical understandings or skills that contribute to the end result.

Are there any components that are pre-requisite knowledge or skills? Evaluate the remaining components to determine if they meet this criterion. If so, these may be included in your level 2.0 score.

Similar to other steps of your curriculum, instruction, and assessment work, please think of these questions as guiding questions, and understand they will not always provide the answers that you need to complete your proficiency scales fully. That does not mean that your curriculum was written poorly, but it does mean that you need to think about the end result and include information on the proficiency scale that will prove beneficial to teachers and students. Remember, the purpose of a proficiency scale is to clarify the learning progression for teachers and students and further allow them to identify where a student lies on that progression.