Final Reflection II

What?

After completing the study on Classroom Instruction That Works by Robert Marzano, I learned an abundant amount of strategies to implement in my classroom to aid in boosting student achievement. I had a hard time deciding on just one strategy from his book to discuss for my final reflection. He had many brilliant ideas that I utilized in my classroom and enjoyed. So I couldn't decide on just one strategy. Therefore, I decided on the top three strategies that I really enjoyed and continue to use in my classroom.

The following instructional strategies worked for me because I was able to apply them in my classroom. These strategies also revealed an increase in learning and excitement in my students’ class work. These strategies were also the easiest for me to implement without a great deal of preparation.

Reinforcing Effort and Providing Recognition
Non-Linguistic Representation
Cooperative Learning

So What?

Reinforcing effort and providing recognition are strategies used to address students’ attitudes and beliefs. Psychologist Bernard Weiner believed that the notion of pay offs enhances achievement in students. If a person believes he or she has ability he or she can tackle anything. I have taken this strategy and utilized it in my everyday routine. I had trouble getting my students to respond to questions aloud in class when I was lecturing. I would even ask them the simplest ‘yes’ or ‘no’ question and I still couldn’t get them to speak. So I decided to start awarding extra credit points to those students who answered my questions. At first the strategy didn’t seem to make that much of a difference, but then after implementing it for about a week the other students started noticing that the students who were responding were getting free 100’s. Since reinforcing effort among my students I have started observing an increase in the responses I received in the past. However, I still have a couple of students who have yet to respond to this strategy. When providing recognition I verbally praise my students for doing well. For instance, when students turn their work in to me I make it a point to express my appreciation of their effort and I tell them thank you for turning in their work. I have found that it keeps the habit of turning in work from those students consistent.

Non-linguistic representation has become my favorite strategy. It is a strategy that involves mental processing in which students create information into pictures that stimulates and increases brain activity in them. The most popular form of a non-linguistic representation is graphic organizers. I used to have my students complete a graphic organizer on easier tasks such as what new foods were introduced during the colonial days by the Indians and the colonists. Since learning the importance of graphic organizers in student retention I have asked my students to create graphic organizers about the beliefs of Hinduism, Christianity, the causes of WWI and WWII, the advantages of the North and South during the Civil War, and many others. When I grade their graphic organizers I have seen an increase in the amount of understanding each student portrays. I have even researched fun, creative graphic organizer templates and I have been amazed at the number of resources available. My favorite place to get graphic organizers is from Edhelper.com.

Cooperative learning is a strategy that allows grouping of students to work together on an assigned task. It wasn’t until reading Marzano’s book that I realized I was doing cooperative learning wrong the whole time. I didn’t put students into any particular group. I just allowed them to work with their friends and pick their own groups. My reason for doing this resorts back to when I was in school. I always hated it when the teacher would stick me with a group of students who didn’t care about the assignment and I ended up doing all the work. I would rather have been grouped with my group of friends whom I knew would help do the work. I never understood why my teachers assigned us to groups. I am assuming that they must have read Marzano’s book. It all makes more sense now. I found that by allowing my students to group themselves other groups suffered because they went to their friends who made the same low grades as they did. Once I realized I was doing my students’ an unfair injustice, I started pairing them up according to a homogeneous grouping. The students who made higher grades were put with students who made lower grades. As an end result I noticed that all my students worked well together overall and each group was successful.

Now What?

Robert Marzano’s book study has enabled me to be better teacher. I feel like I have more experience and “tricks up my sleeve” than I did before reading the book. All of the strategies I discussed above have helped make teaching easier and more rewarding. I have found that my students enjoy the activities just as much I did. I will continue to implement Marzano's strategies into my teaching assignments for the rest of my teaching career.

Final Reflection on Teacher Professional Goals

My personal growth goal was to spend more time creating lesson plans that will help make my lessons fun and engaging. I wanted to create a learning environment where I could utilize more active learning strategies and more technology in the classroom. My professional growth goal was to check for understanding before moving on to another topic, and to utilize higher level thinking activities.

I have been successful in both my personal and professional growth goals. I created a lesson plan that allowed my Economics class to understand the role of competition in businesses. I split them into groups and I gave them two sales ads to similar stores to compare. For example, one group had Target and Wal-Mart, one group had Conn’s and Best Buy and the other group had CVS and Walgreen’s. They were asked to create a chart to represent a particular product and write the price down from each sales ad. Then after about 15 minutes of working I had the class present what they had discovered. They had to tell the class the prices and tell us which store had the better price on that product. In my professional goal I have a wait time where I ask my students questions to ensure that they understood the lesson. At the closing of class I review them of what we learned during the class period. Depending on their involvement, sometimes I make the review their “ticket” out of class.

My personal growth measureable activities were to sit down and take time to think about my lesson plans instead of just writing down assignments. I also wanted to collaborate with my peers on other suggestions on how to make my lessons more active. My professional growth measureable goal was to quiz my students over the material we just learned to check for understanding.

I have been successful in these goals because I have been able to take time to involve more in my lessons than just book work. When I was teaching my World Geography class about West Africa I created a slideshow of pictures. My husband had visited Ghana 2 years ago and I wanted my students to get a better understanding of the living conditions of Africa. So I decided to integrate technology in presenting West Africa. I hooked my laptop up to a portable projector and I showed my class the slides of his trip to Ghana. My students were amazed about seeing pictures of Ghana. When we read about it in the textbook my students weren’t able to grasp the condition to Ghana. After seeing the slides they were able to see the transportation used in Africa, diseases infecting the citizens of Ghana, and glimpses of their living conditions and economy. My students now remember more about Ghana from the slideshow than any other country we studied the whole year.

My personal growth assessment and evaluation goal was to keep my students engaged and excited during the duration of the class time. My professional growth assessment was to attend workshops and classes that would help me become a better teacher and to understand my students better. My students had enjoyed the new lessons that I created and I have taken Pay for Knowledge classes that have helped me understand my students. I have taken book studies such as A Framework for Understanding Poverty, and Queen Bees & Wannabes. The poverty class really helped me understand what types of environments my students live in and why they act the way they do in class. I feel that I learned so much about my students and I have been able to relate to them better which has also made teaching them more fun.

Strategy Reflection #9 Cues, Questions, & Advance Organizers

What?

Marzano states that cues and questioning are the heart of classroom practice. They are ways in which a classroom teacher can help students use what they already know about a topic. Cues involves "hints" about what students are going to experience and questioning previews what students already know about a topic. Advanced organizers are a way to simply present new content to students that will be taught in the duration of the lesson. One type of advanced organizer is skimming. Skimming is a way to expose students to information before teaching the lesson. I decided to utilize skimming into my classroom practice.


So What?

I decided to use skimming when I introduced a new chapter to my students. Before I started the lesson I gave my students about 5 minutes to look through the chapter. I asked them to look at key terms, charts, graphs, time lines and headings in the chapter. Once they finished skimming the chapter we discussed what they read or what they saw. They were able to tell me what we would be learning and already started asking questions about certain topics. By doing this my students were introduced to the material so when they saw it again the information was not new to them. Then they were able to recall the information better when they saw it again which helped their retention rate. I also incorporated a strategy called picture walks. In a picture walk students are instructed to look over the pictures in the chapter and try to explain what each picture is representing. Once they looked over the pictures I walked through the pictures with them again and asked them to tell me what they saw. We then read the captions under each picture to help us understand what the picture was depicting. Then once we started our lesson it was easier to understand because they were already familiar with the information and understood the pictures.

Now What?

Skimming is used a great deal in my classroom. I not only use it in my classroom, but I also use it when I am helping in Content Mastery. I try to teach students how to find the answer they are looking for by reading headings in the chapter and skimming to narrow down their search instead of reading everything word for word. Most students understand and are able to skim on their own, however, I have had a handful of students who just didn't understand what I was asking them to do. I will continue to use skimming because I feel that it familiarizes my students with key terms and information that we will discuss which makes it easier for them to understand.

Strategy Reflection #8 Generating & Testing Hypotheses

What?

Marzano explains generating and testing hypothesis as involving the application of knowledge. Most of the time when you generate and test hypotheses, you use two types of thinking, deductive and inductive. By using a variety of structured tasks to help guide students to generate and test their hypotheses, students can reach a higher level of thinking. The one that I used in my history class is the historical investigation.

So What?

My students had been learning about the early European settlers who came to the New World in the 1500s. Upon learning about the early settlers, we also discussed the Lost Colony of Roanoke in North Carolina. As many of you may well know the Lost Colony was settled in 1587 and started out with 115 men, women, and children. However when their leader left for England and returned three years later, he came back to discover that everyone on the colony had disappeared. Naturally my students' enthusiasm on the subject amplified. They began asking me questions about what happened to the colonists. I saw this as an opportunity to incorporate the historical investigation. I created a worksheet and required my students to respond to four instructions. I asked them to clearly describe the historical event being examined, identify what is known about that time period, offer a hypothetical scenario about what they believed happened to the Lost Colony of Roanoke, and finally research evidence to determine if the hypothetical scenario they came up with was plausible. My students were split into groups where they worked together to complete the worksheets. I was amazed at how well my students had understood the assignment. They were able to describe the possible diseases that were around during this time period that might have possibly led to the disappearance of the colonists. By the end of the assignment my students came up with scenarios that the people just moved to another location and didn't leave a note behind, they were killed by either Indians or the Spaniards, they all contracted the diseases and died from not being treated or they starved to death. Then once we discussed their scenarios I showed them the research that suggests that most of the things they said were the same explanations historians had come up with already.

Now What?

My students were so excited about trying to figure out what happened with the Lost Colony that they enjoyed the lesson. They were engaged in the group work and coming up with solutions to the disappearance. I found it impressive that my students were able to generate and test their hypotheses. I decided that I will use this lesson for as long as I teach US History so my other students can discover the same enthusiasm. I will also use it in my other history classes.

Strategy Reflection #7 Setting Objectives & Providing Feedback

What?

Providing feedback is one of the most powerful single modification that enhances achievement according to researcher John Hattie. When we consider feedback, it should be "corrective," timely, specific to criterion, and student led. To utilize feedback, I decided to use all of these but one suggestion. I have unintentionally become the world's worst when it comes to grading papers. When I first became a teacher I did well on grading papers and returning them back to my students. Now since I teach bell to bell I would just pile all the work in a grading folder to grade later. However, it started becoming a problem because with five preps I am constantly getting ready for the next class. When I thought I would have time during my conference to grade papers, something else always came up. Soon it was 2 weeks before my students received their work back. Then when I did grade it I would only put an "X" on the wrong answer. I never wrote down the correct answer or circled it.

So What?

Instead of putting a big "X" on my students' work I have since started circling the correct answers. I was usually in such a big hurry to finish grading that I didn't take the time to circle correct answers. I've started noticing that my students now look closer at their graded papers when I circle the correct response. I have also made it a point to grade their work as soon as they turn it in. By doing so I am able to provide them with immediate feedback. I have also found it keeps my papers graded so it doesn't pile up on me. I have been assigning reflections for my students to write after each section we discussed that day to grasp a better understanding of what they learned during the discussion. To utilize student-led feedback, I asked my students, on occasion, to exchange papers with either the person in front of them or behind them. I instruct them to read their peers reflection and make comments regarding the concept of the paper and to check for errors with either grammar or spelling. Although most of my students are unable to actually do this task, I have found that they enjoy being able to pretend to be the teacher. I go back after they turn in their reflections to read the peer suggestions because then it gives me a chance to see if my students knew enough about what was discussed to make corrections on peers' reflections.

Now What?

I didn't realize how harmful it was for me to not mark the correct answers before I hand back papers. I always assumed my students would be able to determine the correct given the wrong answer. I now take time to circle each answer when it is wrong so my students will have a higher percentage of success. The part of feedback that has been the most helpful is providing feedback in a timely manner. I didn't realize the importance of immediate feedback. My students would constantly ask me what their grade was on a particular assignment and I would tell them to wait until next time. Then weeks later I would finally give it back to them. What was worse is when I'd give back their work it would be after we took the chapter test. By the time my students got back their work they were unable to use the information to help them understand the chapter. I also found that I have less stress about getting my papers graded. When I keep up with them and grade them by the end of class I don't have a "to do list" hanging over my head for weeks. Now when I give my work back at the end of class my students immediately go back to their seats and look up the answers they got wrong in the book. Before this my students would just look at the grade and then put it away in their folders. I am definitely going to continue to return papers by the end of the period or by the next class period. In regards to student feedback, I only see a little change in success. Although my students enjoy grading each other's reflections, I have discovered that some students will make fun of others who didn't understand the assignment or made spelling errors so I will probably not use student led feedback in the future.