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November 12, 2012   

 

Exit Cards

 

Those of you who tried exit cards reported that you learned a lot. The process, though, raised a range of issues/questions. Before I respond to your frequently asked questions, a couple key points about Exit Cards.

 

Like many other formative assessment tactics, Exit Cards help us remain in sync with our learners about their learning, to double check if our conception of what/how they’re learning/feeling is accurate. Do you recall the research study I shared with you, the story about the “tappers” and the “listeners”? The “tappers” were given a list of popular songs, and their job was to tap the melody out for the “listeners”, who had to tough job of guessing the song title. The fascinating finding: the tappers, who only got the tune across 2.5% percent of the time, predicted that the “listeners” would identify their tapped out songs 50% of the time! This is what researchers Heath and Heath refer to as the Expert Blindspot—the more we know/understand a subject, the harder it is for us to accurately imagine what it’s like to be a novice.  The Heath brothers go on to call this the Curse of Knowledge. Formative assessment tactics like the Exit Card help us stay in sync with the reality of our students’ minds/hearts.

 

The National Research Council’s important book, How People Learn, begins with three overarching big ideas, the first of which is:

 

“Students come to the classroom with preconceptions about how the world works. If their initial understanding is not engaged, they may fail to grasp the new concepts and information that are taught, or they may learn them for purposes of a test but revert to their preconceptions outside the classroom.”

 

Well-designed Exit Cards provide an ongoing window into our students’ emerging conceptions. Do you remember the children’s story I shared with you, Fish is Fish, the one when the minnow and tadpole become friends? We can share this story with students to convey to them this point: we need their help. We need our students to share with us what’s “in their heads.” In the story a thought bubble rises above the minnow to show what’s in his head; Exit Cards are an invitation for students to show us their current “thought bubble” about their learning.

 

Now for some of your questions:

 

How do you use Exit Cards in an efficient/manageable way?

 

There are three ways to maximize the effectiveness & efficiency of Exit Cards: Purpose, Process, and Practice.

 

Purpose

 

Knowing the purpose of an Exit Card is key to using it efficiently. Are you out to check a skill they just practiced? Are you interested to see what they can recall? Is there a concept you want to see if they can explain? Do you want to ask them reflect on their work habits? Do you want to seek their feedback about your teaching and suggestions they might have for helping them?

 

Exit Cards can be simple & quick or complex & time consuming, depending on your purpose. Here are just a few different purposes and how they influence the design of the Exit Card.

 

Purpose: To set up an upcoming lesson that will be differentiated to meet the different needs of the class.

When we know this is our purpose, we can do two things. First, can take the time to create an Exit Card that will target students’ conceptions about particular knowledge, ideas, and/or skills. Second, we can set aside planning time to deal with what we learn (ideally with a colleague who can help us diagnose what students need and how to provide it).

Purpose: A weekly/bi-monthly dipstick throughout a unit to see how students’ conceptions are developing regarding the “big idea” of the unit.

This does two things. First, we don’t have to re-design the lesson for tomorrow. We expect to bump into all sorts of misconceptions regarding unit/course’s big idea. This information will help us tweak as we go, but mostly it allows is to get an overall sense of how conceptions are emerging, and we can talk with students about this in general, perhaps excerpting parts of students’ Exit Card that are representative of a pattern you noticed. Second, it’s a good idea to regularly ask students to think about how the particulars of their current work connect to a big idea of the discipline. Good formative assessment is a two-for-one: we get helpful info, and students engage in targeted practice. 

Purpose: To do a quick check at the end of a lesson to see what questions students have.

Sometimes it’s a good idea to take the time to design the Exit Card beforehand, but it’s also good to have a bunch of notecards around so you can create/pose a question or two “in the moment” and ask students to have at it.

 

Process

 

Perhaps the biggest stumbling bock with Exit Cards is the notion that we need to fix everything now. If only teaching were so tidy! Of course we want to use what we learn in Exit Cards to attend to our students misconceptions, but we cannot always be timely for all students. Yet, we can stay in sync with them, which earns their trust and respect because they feel understood, which goes a long way toward them hanging in there with us as we struggle to design future lessons that will meet more of our students’ needs. (Also, Exit Cards engage students in targeted practice and reflection, a good thing in and of itself!)

 

It’s good to keep in mind that there are many ways to process what you learn in Exit Cards (and the process you use usually depends on your purpose). While in general it’s always good to provide some general feedback to the class about what you learned, you do not always have to have a short-term plan for what to do next. Staying in sync with your students doesn’t mean that you are immediately providing them all with what they need (though it’s an admirable ideal); rather, you are doing your best to use what you learn to help the community make the best progress they can. Here is range of ways to process Exit Cards:

 

-provide general feedback, perhaps projecting an excerpt from a card or two that captures a pattern you observed in their responses, and/or

-make a plan to meet in private with a couple students who need some individual attention, and/or

-jot a note to a student or two in response to their Exit Card, and/or

-forecast for the class that you were surprised that so many were struggling with ______, and forecast when you plan to return to __________ with a lesson plan that contends with their confusion, and/or

-re-teach the concept right then and there, and then provide another Exit Card to determine their current conceptions.

 

Again, how you process your Exit Cards depends on your purpose.

 

Practice

 

This is stating the obvious, but here it goes: we need to practice designing, implementing, and responding to Exit Cards in order to become more skilled/efficient in how we use them. Also, we need to study examples of how our colleagues are using Exit Cards so we can tap our collective wisdom. 

 

4-Way Thinking

 

This potent strategy is one that needs to be taught over time for students and teachers to experience the payoff. The beauty of this strategy is how transferable it is across disciplines, which makes sense because it emphasizes different ways of thinking, regardless of the topic.

 

Here are some of the questions you asked, followed by some answers/tips for leveraging the power of this tactic.

 

Q: What’s the best way to teach these 4 separate-yet-related skills? Do you have to teach all four at once?

 

A: Here are three things I’ve learned about teaching 4-Way Thinking:

 

It’s best to show students a model or two so they can study what it looks like when it’s complete. Once they’ve done this, I allow them to use the model (and the 4-Way Thinking Tips document) to refer to as they begin to practice.

 

When students are novices with this tactic, I ask them to apply it to things that are familiar: a tv show, a commercial, a song, a piece of art, a you tube clip, etc. While they’re learning how to summarize, interpret, analyze, and evaluate, it’s helpful if they do so with something familiar. Once they get the hang of 4-Way Thinking, we can begin asking students to apply the tactic to things less familiar (a poem, an historical event, a math problem, a bio-ethical dilemma, a current event, etc.).

 

This tactic works best when students practice it in a wide range of ways over time so they begin to develop automaticity with the skill. Once students have a good handle on it, I will let them know that all good papers/essays/arguments synthesize these 4 ways of thinking. I’ll then have them create partners and ask them to read a published essay (perhaps an editorial or a movie review or a response to a text) with 4 colored pencils in hand—each color representing one type of thinking. I then ask the teams to mark up the essay, using the colored pencils to distinguish between summary, interpretation, analysis, and evaluation.

 

Q: Do I always have to have them do all 4 types of thinking?

 

A: While I think it’s a good idea at the outset to teach all 4 at once, I also think it’s a great idea to target the types of thinking, once students get familiar with what all 4 are asking them to do. One of my favorite/time saving ways to practice 4-way thinking is to simply spend 5 minutes or so asking them to come up with 5 interpretations of something we just studied.

 

Q: Interpretation and Analysis seem like the trickiest to teach. Any tips for teaching these two types of thinking?

 

A: Here are three tips:

 

Keep in mind that students need to practice this skill many times before they begin to really “get it.” So tip one: have faith that over time with practice students will begin to really understand how to interpret and analyze. (One nice aspect of this is that even our “top” students need to practice developing more sophisticated interpretations and analyses, so it’s not like they get “bored” with it.)

 

Before having students study / 4-way think about a topic, create “Persona Cards” and have students pull a card that will tell them who they need to pretend to be as they think about the topic. For example, if I were about to have students read an article about the recent Presidential election, I could have a stack of Persona Cards that have these personae: Planned Parenthood Nurse, Tea Party Member, Catholic Priest, Fox News Reporter, NPR Broadcaster, NRA President, NEA President, etc. This works so well because it helps students begin to see that people interpret and analyze facts differently, depending on who they are. This can be a big ah-ha for students, and it helps them see why it’s so important to think clearly/carefully about what we believe about a topic.

 

Use short texts—a quotation, a poem, an image, a graph, etc.—so that students can get lots of practice. This is a great way to “compress the field.” To learn how to interpret and analyze, students need lots of practice, and short texts make this more possible.  

 

Varying Modalities

 

Only a few of you worked with this tactic, but here are a few thoughts in response to what you wrote about your experience with varying modalities.

 

We know that the brain is more likely to learn/remember something if students are asked to practice/play with the new learning in at least three different ways. The fancy term for this is “complex encoding”—the more textured / varied the input, the more likely the recall/memory. This is why this tactic is such a good idea; it reminds us to vary how we have students practice a new skill. Think of it as a type of cross training. If we have students read and talk about something, that’s a great start, but if we then have them act it out, and then afterwards write a letter to a friend that describes the new learning, we will have increased the likelihood of them “getting it.” Varying modalities deepens learning.

 

There are so many ways to do this (Sternberg, McCarthy, Gardner, Silver/Strong) that one sometimes wonders, What’s the best way? Well, there isn’t one, but keep this principle in mind: it’s good to vary the modalities significantly so that the brain is stretched to use different parts, which makes the encoding process more complex. For example, we tend to lean on verbal skills when we have students practice, so a great go-to tactic is to ask students to show their learning through a non-verbal representation (a drawing/sketch) that shows the learning. While this isn’t always a perfect fit, it’s does a good job showing the idea of making sure that you vary the modality significantly.

 

Tiered Tasks

 

Those of you who tried out a tiered task all asked the same question: How do you remain sensitive to students’ different states of readiness? In other words, how do you avoid embarrassing students who need to practice the “easiest” option. Wouldn’t this humiliate students and cause them to shut down? This questions strikes at the heart of differentiation, so a few things to keep in mind.

 

In a traditional classroom—where all are treated “equally” in order to achieve “fairness’”—students grow accustomed to one-size fits all assignments. If out of the blue we throw in a tiered assignment that provides students some choice based on readiness, we open up a can of worms. For many students the default response is, “Why would I choose a hard one?” Some others might even say, “Why do they get to do an easy one, yet I have to do a hard one?” These kinds of questions indicate that our students need some practice thinking through some of the assumptions of a traditional classroom versus the assumptions of a differentiated classroom.

 

There are many ways to help students adjust their mindset, and here are just a few:

 

Ask your students to define the word “fair.” Initially, lots of people define fair as “everyone is treated the same/equally”, but with some help they can begin to accept a better definition: fairness in a school setting is about “everyone getting what they need.” This is still hard for some to accept, so providing a few anecdotes helps.

 

My two favorite anecdotes to share with students come in the form of a question. Anecdote #1) If I were taking a bus load of students skiing, and on the way up to the mountain I learn that some are experts, some are intermediate, and some are beginners, how should I organize how we practice when we get to the mountain? This leads to some pretty big ah-has for students, who have no problem seeing that the respectful thing to do would be to allow students to practice at the level they are ready for.

Anecdote #2) If I were a little league coach and I were pitching batting practice to my hitters, how should I pitch to my players, when I know that a few are all-stars, most are typically-skilled, and two have never played before? Again, students have no problem seeing that the respectful thing to do would be to pitch to them at their level, perhaps breaking out a “T” so that the new players can hit off the “T” rather than facing fast balls. Anecdotes like these help to bring some common sense into the classroom. If we want to be fair in the classroom, we need to do our best to create an environment flexible enough to meet the various student needs.

 

I like to begin the year with The Challenge Level Challenge, which I explained at the end of my previous post on this wiki (scroll down). Check it out. It’ a great way to help the students understand that we all have strengths and challenges, depending on what we’re learning. For example, I look smart when I’m asked to talk about a book with colleagues, and I find this easy and pleasurable. Put me under the hood of my car to check my radiator, and I break out in hives and feel inept.

 

Finally, I’ve found that Carol Dweck’s book Mindset helps me introduce students to the notion of developing a growth mindset—one committed to valuing working at the edge of our capacity. Here is a ppt that I tailor to the needs of the group I’m presenting to. I’ve annotated it so you can check out my suggestions for how to use it. So much of the success of differentiation requires us to challenge the traditional assumptions of school and help cultivate more of growth-minded culture.

 

Finally, something to keep in mind: most students have been with each other long enough that they possess a shared sense of the cognitive pecking order in a classroom. Hiding this in an attempt to protect someone’s feelings is well-intended, but in the end it doesn’t do that student many favors because it prevents him/ her from practicing in a way that will help him / her grow. A much better approach is to intentionally cultivate a growth-minded classroom culture where everyone is encouraged to work at the edge of their capacity, regardless of where they currently are. Our capacity improves with targeted practice, so where we are today is not as important as how we practice today.

 

Menus

 

A small number of you tried out this strategy, which makes clear to students the lay of the land: what they must do & what choices they have. As a couple of you pointed out, this can be used for a single lesson, or it can be used for an entire unit, laying out the parameters of what students need to do. This strategy is great for many reasons, but here are the biggies:

 

By providing some choice / flexibility about how students practice / learn, we help keep engage students.

 

Although designing a menu requires us to invest time up front, the payoff is the freedom it creates for the class and us to work together through the menu. 

 

Menus model an important principle of differentiation—organized flexibility: clarity about what matters most, and flexibility about how to get there.

 

Finally, as students get familiar with menus, we can invite them to propose other “options” for “side dishes” and “desserts”, which helps them participate in their learning.

 

RAFT

 

This was the least popular strategy and no questions were asked, so I offer two simple thoughts:

 

This is a great strategy for getting students to demonstrate/practice their learning through writing, often for a creative/fun purpose and audience.  

 

If you’d like to learn more and see examples, check out my previous post (scroll down).

 

 

 

August 28, 2012

 

Hello Everyone,

 

Below are 6 Bread & Butter tactics for Differentiating Instruction. For each I've provided a brief explanation, and then a link to resources/examples. For those of you who'd like a short refresher on what DI is and is not, check out this piece by Carol Tomlinson.

 

Additionally, right below these 6 Bread & Butter tactics, I've include three resources that might help you think about how to start the year in ways that can prepare our students for differentiation.   

 

1. Exit Card

This is a tried, true, and simple tactic (yet powerful) for helping us get/stay in sync with our students' emerging needs. Check out this range of examples of Exit Cards, and then consider how to adapt the tactic to your setting. Keep in mind: like any tactic, you can make it more sophisticated, but my favorite way to use Exit Cards is to stock up on hundreds of note cards and keep them nearby. I like to plan out / think through some exit cards, carefully tweaking the questions. Other times, I wait to see where we are / what the teachable moment offers, and then I pose the question/write it on the board right then and there. This give me the flexibility to adjust the questions based on my read of the class.

Tip: Especially at first, only use the Exit Cards when you can take the time to use what you learn to adjust your plans. (Ignoring the findings of Exit Cards can undermine your efforts, unless you explain to students why.)

 

2. Menu

A menu invites students to make decisions about the path they will take to the common destination. A menu could be for a single lesson, a week-long lesson, or even a year-long portfolio. They can take many forms. Once the teacher has decided on what the essential understandings and/or skills are, s/he can begin to create a menu. Here's one ways of creating a menu:

 

Part I.          The Main Dish (or Non-Negotiables)

 

                    This is an assignment(s) that everyone must do.

 

Part II.        Side Dishes (Negotiables)

 

     This is where the teacher provides a list of options and instructs students on how many s/he must      accomplish.

 

Part III.       Desserts (Optional)

 

     These are optional, but the idea is to make them irresistible. These should be high interest      and, of      course, challenging.

 

For a few examples, check out these pages 12-13, 51-52, 55-56, 78 - 81 in this collection of DI tactics.

 

3. Tiered Tasks

A tiered task is a readiness-based strategy that provides students with a choice of tasks that vary in difficulty; in this sense, the assignment has different “tiers of difficulty.” The students, with guidance from the teacher, choose the assignment that matches their readiness.

 

1. Decide on what the key learning is: what you want student to Know (facts), Understand (concepts/generalizations), and/or Do (skills) and the scope of the assignment (one lesson, a week, a unit, etc.).
   
2. Design an assignment that will engage and challenge your most sophisticated learners. Be sure the learning is rooted in the K.U.D. (learning outcomes).
3. Create another assignment that targets the same learning outcome, but decrease the level of difficulty.  

 

Here is a template you can try for practice (lesson's concept: political systems), and here's a template to get you started.

 

You can create two options or as many as you'd like. Check to make sure that all the tasks are respectful/engaging, regardless of the level of difficulty.

Tip: This work can be tricky, so work with others. Also, I find that this process helps me generate interest-based choices.

 

4. R.A.F.T.

This strategy can be used in any content area, and it’s a fantastic way to get students to think in a range of ways about a topic/idea/skill. They key is that it asks students to inhabit a Role and to write to a particular Audience within a certain Format about a certain Topic. Check out this single example, and the check out the examples on pages 13-14, 17-19, 22, 45 (math) in this wider collection of tactics.

 

5. Vary Modalities (Learning Styles, Multiple Intelligences)

We know that the brain needs to practice new learning in different ways to develop durable learning. There are many paths to this destination! Pick your poison: Gardner, Silver/Strong, Sternberg, McCarthy, etc, but keep the learning principle in mind: early in learning, brains like to get to try out an idea or skill in multiple ways (at least 3) in order to begin to develop durable learning. Check out these examples from page 2 on.

 

6. 4-Way Thinking

I love this line of Lynn Erickson's: "Raising rigor has more to do with elevating thinking processes than with covering more topics." I love 4-way thinking because it helps me target what key thinking skill students are working on. Eventually I want all of them to be able to synthesize all four skills (summarize, interpret, analyze, evaluate), but by breaking out these skills, I can figure out who needs practice with what. Plus, this tactic can be used throughout the year, which helps students consolidate their understanding. Here you go.

 

Getting Students Ready for Differentiation

 

Can't resist sharing a three more resources:

 

Creating and Sustaining Community

 

Portrait of a Favorite Community

 

Challenge Level Challenge: Green, Yellow, Red

This activity is a simple and fun way to get students thinking about their zone of proximal development--that place where we are working right at the edge of our capacity. Here's how it works:

 

     1. Handout the bulls-eye doc (it's in color, but you could have it in black in white and have them color it.

     2. Have them label each circle (green = easy, yellow = challenging, red = overwhelming).

     3. Then read out loud (one at a time) the Challenge Level Challenge prompts, pausing after each so students can jot the # of the prompt down in the circle that reflects how challenging the task would be for them.

     4. Afterward, go through the prompts and have students raise hands for each prompt: Who's in the green for this one? Who's in the yellow? Who's in the red? Inevitably, due to the nature of the prompts, students are all over the place.

    5. Then comes the final and most important question: what does this reveal to us? While you might need to tease this out some, here's where it should go:

       --All of us find some tasks easy and some hard, depending on the task. (As I say to may students, ask me to read and talk about a poem, and it's easy for me to "look" smart. Ask me to change my oil, and I'm in the red zone and looking scared and, well, not so smart.)

       --Next, I let students know that the brain needs to be in the yellow zone to make the most growth, and that we need to work together to help each other stay in that zone.

       --This creates a short-hand that we use all year (Are you in your red, yellow, or green zone?).

Finally, I then buy colored note cards (green, yellow, red) that we occasionally use while working in class. Each student gets a set of three cards, and they keep them on their desk, three-card Monte style. As they work, they change the color of their card to show how they're doing.This helps them develop meta-cognition (How am I doing?), and it provides a visual cue to me about how students are perceiving the challenge of what they're doing. This works great with team/group work, too. When students are working in teams, each team gets a set of cards.

 

Here's Bill's ppt from today.

 

Enjoy,

 

Bill

 

 

 

 

PREVIOUS POSTS

2/13/11 Post from Bill

 

5 Conceptual Framework Slides

 

 

 

2/2/11 Message from Bill

 

Thanks to everyone for contributing to yesterday afternoon's workshop. After retrieving and reviewing the principles of learning that frame our work together, we listened to a Radio Lab podcast (the marshmallow experiment) and then summarized, interpreted, analyzed, and evaluated the program, using the 4-way thinking template. We then considered how we might teach and assess learning habits (e.g., persisting in the face of challenges, striving for accuracy, flexible thinking), which led us to Carol Dweck's research (scroll down to access link) on the academic gains made by students who are taught about how the brain learns, which helps students recognize the practicality and power of cultivating a growth mindset.

 

I mentioned that I would post a few more resources (in addition to the ones I showed you yesterday, which you can scroll down to):

 

Bill's PPoint for Adults (yesterday afternoon's ppoint)

 

Bill's PPoint for Architects Students (the ppoint Bill used yesterday with Charlotte students)

 

To Really Learn, Quit Studying and Take a Test (This is the New York Times article I mentioned, the one that reports on how asking students to recall/write what they recently learned is a superior learning tactic.) Here's the link to the article: www.nytimes.com/2011/01/21/science/21memory.htm

 

I haven't yet, but I look forward to reading your responses to yesterday's google survey.  

 

Enjoy,

 

Bill

 

11/30/10 Message from Bill

 

Hi Everyone,

 

Hope you all achieved at least some degree of serenity over vacation, and here's wishing that there's still at least a little left!

 

So here is a range of resources that I've organized/posted based on our most recent individual/small group conversations. A few tips on navigating these resources:

 

1. Begin by locating the resources that connect to the focus we settled on for your particular work. For example, if you're going to have students track their learning over time, then click on "Tracking Learning Over Time", and there you'll have it.

 

2. You don't have to check out all the resources, but you might find some of the other resources interesting/helpful. For example, I've posted three videos for a few of you, but I bet you'd all like them.

 

3. If you get stuck or have a comment/question, email me (william_rich@ymail.com). 

 

As our work progresses and evolves, so will this space. If you have ideas for how we might make this site even more handy, just let me know.

 

Thanks again for inviting me into your work; I look forward to doing whatever I can to support your efforts.

 

Cheers,

 

Bill

 

Mental Models

 

     Tracking Learning Over Time (A short article by Robert Marzano; related resources)

 

     Mindset (Carol Dweck)  (A short article describing Dweck's mindset theory/research; PPoints that can be used with adults/kids)

 

Targeted Practice

 

     4-Way Thinking  (A potent tactic for teaching students 4 ways of thinking; this is most often used for reading/writing, but can be used elsewhere)

 

     Learning Habits  (Some resources that can help make more explicit what we value: persistence, contributing, flexible thinking, etc.)

 

     Flexible Grouping

 

Rapid Feedback

 

     John Wilcox article, More Assessing, Less Teaching (Wonderful short article with excellent reminders about the purpose of assessment and the power of well-crafted feedback.)

 

     Exit Cards (A wonderful packet that describes exit cards and provides lots of models.)

 

     Ten Formative Assessments (Ten simple tactics for getting/staying in synch with our students.)

 

Emotional Trigger

 

 

 

___________________________________________________________________

 

Cognitive Science/Education Research

 

     Three Key Findings & Implications for Teaching  (In just a few pages, read the foundational principles of how people learn in the National Research Council's foundational book, How People Learn. A must read for all educators.)

 

Related Videos

 

     An informative yet brief (15 minute) interview of Dr. Paul Black (formative assessment guru), that also includes interviews with teachers and footage from classrooms: http://www.teachers.tv/videos/secondary-assessment-formative-assessment

 

     Sir Ken Robinson's brilliant yet brief video (15 minutes) on Teaching What Matters Most:

 

 

Dr. Robert Duke gives a wonderful (but not very well lit) lecture titled: Why Students Don't Learn What We Think We Teach. I recommend skipping ahead to minute three of this 60-minute video, unless you'd like to hear a long introduction of Dr. Robert Duke.

 

 

In this short video (11 minutes), Dan Meyer (secondary math teacher) discusses math curriculum and patient problem solving .