Cowculator

Essential Question: How do we design learning tasks that support all students to be successful? This week's activity helped me with this question a bit more than the readings did, I think. Going through the motions of identifying the rigor, access, and interdependence in a task helped show where it exists or can be created. I don't know that I have many generalizables right now -- group tasks help us offer access and of course interdependence and access requires openness and playing to different learning styles (visual support, perhaps some written words, instructions and discussion out loud, manipulatives when possible). Rigor seems to be a bit of a question here, as I continue to work towards understanding how on earth I'm supposed to take weird state-provided standards and turn them into things to do. Generally though, trying the task myself is always helpful to see how it feels and if it meets the mark. This is probably also a good place for backwards planning. The Hand...

  Essential Question: How do we design learning tasks that support all students to be successful? There are many ways to figure out what your students learn in a day, and I don't think I could begin to list all of them. But if there's one thing I do know, it's that you're probably going to have to ask them about it in order to find out. As teachers, we're always hoping that our lessons work and our students will have learned something new when they leave class for the day, but that won't always be true. There is no way to be sure of anything about anyone else if you don't ask them about it. I truly believe this extends to all parts of life. Assumptions will sometimes fail! Thus, figuring out what students have learned requires input from the students themselves. One way to figure out what they have learned is to design an exit ticket or wrap-up activity at the end of a class period. Asking students to share what they know now that they didn't know before...

 Essential Question: How do we find and feature all students’ competence? Bringing out the voices of students who don't always contribute has been a huge question in this world of online learning. I have only seen the face of one student in my mentor teacher's second class, and probably only heard the voice of about 5 of the 25 or so students in the class. There are a few things that I am thinking about this week to maximize student voices, some overall and some specifically in the context of online learning. This week, I will present these in more of a bulleted format to help organize my thoughts. Group Work. Some students love it and some students have yet to like it at all, but on the whole it seems the most logical way to give student voices the power. Particularly in the world of online, it's impossible for the teacher to be with every group at the same time, guiding and plugging up the airwaves, so to speak. Students have to be the ones bringing their thoughts to the ...