Flexible Grouping and A Great Question to Ask Your Students

Excellence in Education: Flexible Grouping   

In overseeing special education, I’m blessed to see many examples of flexible grouping, but this isn’t a strategy that is limited to special education classes.

Most teachers deliver information in a consistent manner that usually involves whole class, small group and individual student opportunities. Recognizing that each student is different, flexible grouping allows teachers to match students and their instructional needs.*

Advantages to flexible grouping:

• Differentiates and individualizes learning
• Motivates students because students are placed in groups where they can be successful and through peer influences
• Addresses social needs
• Promotes student collaboration
• Provides different experiences with different outcomes

Some Flexible Grouping Strategies

Group Pass: The teacher poses a question (this could be factual recall or an open-ended statement) and each student responds by writing an answer down. Students then pass the paper to a peer who checks the answer. The process is then repeated. In using this with factual/recall information type questions, students can be grouped with similar ability students and different questions can be asked to different groups, or students can be grouped in differing ability groups where stronger students help struggling students.

Student vote: A question is posed to the group with different possible answers. In a history class this could be an opinion question with strongly agree-agree-disagree-strongly disagree answers. In a math class a question can be posed with different answers or solving strategies and in another class this might be would you like to learn more / read about topic A, B, C, D. Each student then goes to one of the corresponding four corners. This can be used to group students by interest.

Readiness: Students are grouped by proficiency.

Administrative Notes

Flex tomorrow.

Learning Walks on Wednesday.

Positive Referral Link: http://goo.gl/s0KXRB

Work Order Request Form: http://goo.gl/H7hFwK

Comment Box: http://goo.gl/forms/KAHNoGf5D2

Some upcoming dates:

April 18: Prom

April 30: Honor Breakfast (Top Decile)

May 17: Scholarship Banquet

May 18: Senior Picnic

May 26/27: Now sent in stone: Senior Exams

May 29 @ 6pm: Graduation

Some upcoming edcamps (opt-out credit can be earned):

May 9: Edcamp MetroDC (Potomac, MD)

Worth Your Time

Distracted by Rewards: Moving Away from Carrots and Sticks

The Real Stuff of Schooling: How to Teach Students to Apply Knowledge

An Open Letter to My High School Self  This might be worth sharing with your students. 

Pew Survey Results about Teens, Social Media, and Tech

Tweet of the Week

This has been circulating on Twitter for a while. I think it’s a great idea and worth sharing.

Give your students an opportunity to complete this statement, “I wish my teacher knew…”

Sharing Rubics and Models, Buncee

Cougar Communication

Excellence in Education: Sharing Criteria (Rubrics) and Models

As a teacher I was sometimes reluctant to share students models of excellent work for fear that they would simply copy the previous work. Truthfully little thought went into this poor decision and eventually I saw the light and shared student work from previous terms. I used the student work to demonstrate various performance levels by comparing it to the rubric (or having students evaluate it with the rubric). Recently, I’ve seen several teacher do a much better job than I ever did by using the same student examples and the criteria throughout the unit to help students better understand high-quality work.

Doing so benefits the students and learning. Even the best-written rubric may not be clearly understood by students. By sharing the rubric and work examples, students are more likely to know the desired criteria and will be able to set goals for their work. It takes the guessing out of the work, allows students to self-assess and will ultimately rid the teacher of having a student exclaim, “I don’t understand why I only got a B on this project.”

Tech in Education: Buncee

Buncee is a web-based creation tool that allows teachers and students to incorporate multimedia onto a shareable digital canvas.

1. It allows you to record audio straight into the canvas or alternatively you can upload it.
2. Easily embed links to other sites
3. You can add multiple canvases (slides)
4. Works great with YouTube videos
5. Simple interface and use
6. You share your canvases through Social Media posts or email
7. Integrates well with Social Media, so you can add/upload from Social Medi

Possible uses:

1. Student or teacher presentation
2. Using it to flip your lesson with lots of multimedia
3. You can create a teacher dashboard which enables you to add students and to submit work to your Buncee Dashboard. Doing so creates a very friendly student dashboard as well.

Administrative Notes

Grades are due March 25 at 8am.

Positive Referral Link: http://goo.gl/s0KXRB

Work Order Request Form: http://goo.gl/H7hFwK

Comment Box: http://goo.gl/forms/KAHNoGf5D2

Some upcoming dates:

April 18: Prom (Chaperones needed)

April 30: Honor Breakfast (Top Decile)

May 17: Scholarship Banquet

May 18: Senior Picnic

May 26/27: Now sent in stone: Senior Exams

May 29 @ 6pm: Graduation

Some upcoming edcamps (opt-out credit can be earned):

May 9: Edcamp MetroDC (Potomac, MD)

April 18: Edcamp Delaware (Wilmington)

Still waiting for more info about Edcamp MetroDC and Edcamp95 (Virginia/Prince William maybe)

Worth Your Time

Finland schools: Subjects scrapped and replaced with 'topics' as country reforms its education system: An interesting artcle about reforms to Finland’s education system in which they are moving away from subject-based teaching

How Teenage Brains are Different

TEDTalk : 3 Rules to Spark Learning from a high school chemistry teacher   

Image of the Week

Choral Response and CORBS Feedback

Excellence in Education: Choral Response

I saw choral response used in a different—and great—way this week. Choral response is, of course, when the teacher asks/posts a question and the entire class responds, preferably after wait time is provided or students have had a chance to answer on their own.

The “new” use of choral response that I saw was a quick strategy to get a general idea of what the students knew about the topic. The teacher asked the class a series of questions and had the entire class respond in unison.

What I liked about this simple strategy was it did not single out students, allowed the teacher to gauge what the class knew and established a mindset that it’s OK to be wrong.

Ideas for the Classroom: CORBS Feedback

CORBS is an acronym for how to provide effective feedback (Hawkins and Shohets, 1989)

Clear: Simple, specific and straight as opposed to vague, complex or confusing

Owned: Describe how it made you feel and use language  such as “I found…” or “I felt…” making feedback your own perception and not as an ultimate truth.

Regular: Try to give feedback as early as possible so that the person has time to do something about it

Balanced: Balance the positives with the negatives

Specific: Feedback should be based on observable behaviors and specific situations that can  be modified. General feedback is difficult for the learner to use, so attempt to be specific and give examples.

Administrative Notes

Homecoming was a great week! The spirit displayed by our students—and teachers—was phenomenal, capped off with a great pep rally, football game and homecoming dance.

Each year, the Kettle Run spirit seems to grow. We must never lose sight of the how the culture of our school influences student learning and we thank you for creating such a great climate.

Positive Referral Link: http://goo.gl/s0KXRB

Work Order Request Form: http://goo.gl/H7hFwK

Tonight’s twitter #vachat (8pm) discusses Response to Intervention/Dealing with Struggling Learners. Hope you can join us.

What I’m Reading

10 Design Questions that Will Improve Your Teaching : From Marzano’s Art and Design of Teaching to help plan effective units and lessons.

Differentiated Instruction Visually Explained

Why a Leading Professor of New Media Just Banned Technology Use in Class : An interesting BYOD article from The Washington Post