Candidates create and engage their students in literacy practices that develop awareness, understanding, respect, and a valuing of differences in our society.
- 4.1 Candidates recognize, understand, and value the forms of diversity that exist in society and their importance in learning to read and write.
- READ 575 (Assessment and Instruction of ELL students) Week 6 Post:
- Week 6: Please read H & T ch. 5 and Brown ch.10 and respond to the following:Hurley and Tinajero present 4 equity issues regarding learning and assessment of ELL students as well as 6 guiding principles of assessment. As a teacher of ELL students, how can you balance adhering to these principles with the pressures of the standardized test culture of public schools?Please make your response 2-3 paragraphs and reply to at least one of your fellow student's posts.
Side note: My experience in the last two years has been at a private international school and, for a year before that, at another private school in Oregon, so my practical experience in balancing the standardized test culture of public schools with the guiding principles of assessment and equity issues is a bit limited. However, I do work in an ELL setting with students who have very limited English up through near-native speakers.
Hurley and Tinajero’s principles of assessment and equity issues are as follows:Guiding principles of assessment (Hurley & Tinajero, p. 90-92) - Assessment activities should help teachers make instructional decisions.
- Assessment strategies should help teachers find out what students know and can do…no what they cannot do.
- The holistic context for learning should be considered.
- Assessment activities should grow out of authentic learning activities.
- Best assessments of student learning are longitudinal…they take place over time.
- Each assessment activity should have a specific objective-linked purpose.
- Equity issues (Hurley & Tinajero, p. 90)
- Encouragement of development of native language abilities rather than submersion in English and eradication of language and culture
- Equal curriculum access for all children rather than tracking and labeling ELLs
- Equal participation in meaningful interaction with challenging subject matter, peers, and teachers rather than limited participation
- Real world application and success in learning the challenging content areas rather than useless memorization of facts and watered down curricula
- One of the absolute best models I’ve seen in designing curriculum and assessments that achieves most, if not all, of the guiding principles and equity issues is using a curriculum framework (not the specific curriculum itself) called Backward by Design. If you haven’t heard of this framework, which can be found in the book Understanding by Design (2002) by Grant Wiggins and James McTighe, I would highly recommend finding out more about it, as it has revolutionized how I think about organizing my year. You can also find more information here: http://shop.ascd.org/productdisplay.cfm?productid=103055. Essentially, the framework helps teachers to understand what it means for students to really understand something beyond the mere memorization of facts. In order to do that, the year is broken down into various units (with 6 as an average number) and under each unit are various benchmarks. Those benchmarks are all related to the unit’s “big idea”, which is an enduring understanding, such as “The Earth has limited resources that are distributed unevenly.” Within the framework, teachers design assessments by beginning at the end, hence the name backward by design. In order to help students better understand their learning, it is essential that real-life applications are made through performance assessments. Each unit has at least one performance assessment.
- Students are can see how their learning connects to the real world in this framework, which reduces the “Why do we have to learn this?” questions. Also, as we have read, authentic assessments and learning activities are motivating for students, which helps them to have a better understanding overall. One such learning engagement and assessment in this framework that my third graders are doing for the “big idea” listed above is to track the water use in the shower over a 5 week period of time. Then, students will graph it and analyze how the water use can be reduced. Additionally, they will write persuasive letters to their family and neighbors about reducing their water use, in addition to designing information reminders for their home and school. The framework is most successful when taken with an interdisciplinary approach, incorporating multiple subject areas, as Mr. Tran did in Hurley & Tinajero, which then is more holistic.
- In this framework, a scrapbook of assessments is used for each unit so that students can display their understandings in various ways, which helps teachers to better understand what students can really do. Each assessment is linked to specific objectives and, because learning is unit by unit, there is assessments can be done more easily over the length of a unit in longitudinal fashion. Standardized tests are a part of the scrapbook and should be used and analyzed for patterns for individual students and the school as a whole. If students are highly motivated in their learning and have had multiple opportunities to demonstrate their understanding in a variety of ways, then, ideally, they should also be able to accomplish the standardized tests with some degree of success, keeping in mind that this set of tests is just one part of the whole child.
- 4.2 Candidates use a literacy curriculum and engage in instructional practices that positively impact students' knowledge, beliefs, and engagement with the features of diversity.
- Off to Adventure unit plan
- READ 575 Week 5 Post:
- Week 5: Please read Brown ch. 8 , H & T ch 4 and respond to the following:Brown identifies four types of reading performance. Each reading performance makes use of different text structures, therefore different assessment measures are used to evaluate each reading performance. Hurley and Tinajero, in chapter 4, highlight the importance of teaching pre, during, and post reading strategies to help improve students' reading comprehension. They also discuss the use of these strategies for assessing ELL students' reading abilities.After reading the assigned chapters, please respond to the following:
- 1) How do you see the pre, during and post reading strategies discussed in Hurley and Tinajero merging with the assessment tasks in the four areas of reading performance presented by Brown? Do you use any of these strategies for assessment purposes in your own classroom? What results do you see?
- Please respond to at least one other person's post.
Types of reading:- Perceptive. “Bottom-up processing is implied” (p. 189).
- Selective. Bottom-up and top-down processing to “ascertain one's reading recognition of lexical, grammatical, or discourse features of language within a very short stretch of language.”
- Interactive. Typically top-down, it is when readers interact with the text. Using background knowledge to interact.
- Extensive,. More than a page. Professional articles, essays, technical reports, short stories, and books.
Brown identifies four types of reading in chapter 8: perceptive, selective, interactive, and extensive. Each of these brings a different reading process with it, with perceptive reading where “bottom-up processing is implied” (Brown, p. 189) to interactive and extensive reading, where the process is more of a top-down approach. Generally, the pieces that require more bottom-down approaches, such as perceptive reading, are shorter in length and focus on form rather than meaning. Top-down reading pieces, then, tend to be longer in length and focus more on meaning rather than form.
Hurley and Tinajero give many strategies for pre-reading, during reading, and post-reading. While they were all very helpful strategies, they tend to lend themselves better to top-down types of reading assessment tasks. However, some assessment tasks may fit within Hurley and Tinajero's ideas for pre-, during, and post-reading strategies. Perceptive reading “involves attending to the components of larger stretches of discourse” (Brown, p. 189) and the types of assessment tasks may include reading aloud, a written response, multiple-choice and picture-cued items. Hurley and Tinajero, in discussing the assessment of pre-reading strategies (p. 69), suggest the use of an anticipation guide. They suggest scaffolding for students who are not yet proficient enough to read the text independently, which can include previewing vocabulary. This could fit with some of the perceptive reading assessments suggested by Brown.
Interactive and extensive reading assessments best fit with Hurley and Tinajero's pre-, during, and post-reading strategies. For example, Brown's interactive reading assessments like cloze procedure (p. 202-203), impromptu reading plus comprehension questions (p. 204) and short-answer tasks (p. 206-207) fit within the framework of Hurley and Tinajero's during and post-reading strategies, such as asking students to summarize, ask questions for clarification, and predict in reciprocal teaching. Additionally, Hurley and Tinajero's ideas about keeping a dialog journal (post-reading), reciprocal teaching (during reading), and keeping a reading response journal (post-reading) fit well with the assessments for extensive reading, which include short-answer tasks and summarizing and responding.
The strategies of pre-reading, including brainstorming, graphic organizers, and anticipation guides, fit well with Brown's extensive reading assessment of skimming tasks (p. 213) and interactive reading assessment of reading charts, maps, graphs, and diagrams (p. 210). Finally, using during reading strategies such as reciprocal teaching, note-taking, directed reading-thinking activities, think-alouds, and more (Hurley and Tinajero, p. 72) fit with Brown's extensive reading assessment of note-taking and outlining.
In my classroom, I use several of these assessments, but most often use summarizing and responding assessments to understand a child's comprehension of the text. I often ask students to summarize and respond in smaller chunks, such as page by page or chapter by chapter, depending on the students' abilities. Most often, this happens by having students write their brief responses and/or summaries on sticky notes, labeling the page number, and then putting it in their book. When I conference with students, I can look in their book to see their thoughts and when students finish a book, they move their sticky notes into their journals (which are labeled with the book title, author, and date). If the sticky notes aren't staying well, I photocopy the pages. - 4.3 Candidates develop and implement strategies to advocate for equity.
- In collaborating with my colleagues to help struggling readers (see part B for TCE 509 course), I have developed and implemented strategies that advocate for equity among various differences in my classroom.
