Lesson improvement process
What is an essential question?
PBL network
Leeson Improvement Template
creating an essential question
webquest taxonomy
common core standards
21st century skills
ISTE website
BEST PRACTICE LEARNING ACTIVITIES
online classroom projects
ethemes
Intel innovation odyssey
PBL - high school
score
thinkfinity
webquests
INFORMATION SKILLS
Big 6 overview
Big 6
ICT curriculum
assignment organizer
evaluating websites
Kathy Schrock
Microsoft Teacher Guides
ICT article
SCAFFOLDING TOOLS
scaffolding model - American Revolution
types of scaffolds
NCREL graphic organizers
Never Was About Technology (blog)
Microsoft's Innovative Teacher Toolkit
ASSESSMENT RESOURCES
Formative Assessment - what are they?
Best Value in Formative Assessment
Learning Activity Checklist
assessment for learning
how do rubrics help?
rubistar
What skills and competencies do our students need to be successful in college and their careers?
What are the characteristics of learning activities that will help students develop these skills?
Getting Started
In recent years social and economic changes have remade our world. As we discussed in Session 1, critical thinking, problem solving, leadership, creativity and collaborative skills are keys to our students’ success. So is the ability to know how to learn. For educators these changes have profound meaning.
The authors of How People Learn insist that preparing students for their future, “…requires rethinking what is taught, how teachers teach, and how what students learn is assessed” (Bransford et al., 2000, p. 121).
Improving a Lesson and Practicing Coaching
Learning Context
The authors of How People Learn (2000) believe "[t]eachers must teach some subject matter in depth, providing many examples in which the same concept is at work and providing a firm foundation of factual knowledge” (p 20).
How does the learning activity you are improving relate to your overall plans to help students master the chosen standards, particularly those that focus on higher order skills like critical thinking or problem solving?
In the Lesson Context section of the Lesson Improvement Template note the following:
What learning activities will help students develop the skills and competencies they need to be successful?
What is an authentic, engaging problem that students will address in this lesson?
Write Your Task
Your job in this part of the lesson improvement process is to write your task and add it to the Lesson Improvement Template.
Make sure your task:
What Makes a Product Real and a Question Essential?
The Center for Problem-Based Learning believes authentic, engaging problems are:
Task Before
Your teacher recently talked about being aware of the number of grams of fat, sodium, and calories in your diet and why it is important to know this information. You will calculate the nutritional value of what you eat at a fast food restaurant.
Task After
You are in a hurry to get to practice and decide to catch a bite to eat on your way. Your teacher recently talked about being aware of the number of grams of fat, sodium, and calories in your diet and why it is important to know this information. And your coach has been talking about how nutrition can make a difference in how well your team plays.How healthy is your favorite fast food meal?
What can you learn that could help you and your teammates choose fast food that is tasty and healthy?
The revised task has two elements found in many strong tasks:
Thinking Deeper About Essential Questions
Essential questions are a critical element of offering students active engaging learning opportunities. Grant Wiggins’ (Nov 15, 2007) article, What is an Essential Question? offers more insights into the purpose and value of essential questions. Read the article, and be prepared to discuss your conclusions about:
Coaching Tools—Resources for Writing Tasks
Use these Resources for Writing Tasks to help shape your task.
What are the content and 21st Century Skills standards that students will work on?
When students engage in authentic, engaging tasks, and these tasks focus on appropriate content, workforce readiness, and technology standards, students will develop critical thinking, problem solving and higher order skills as they gain understanding of the content. Instead of “covering” the textbook teachers may need to define a series of in-depth activities that are designed to help students master necessary skills and competencies to be life-long learners.
Identify Standards
Students can demonstrate performance for many standards from different content areas for a single problem-based lesson, but it is only necessary for you to identify the few standards you intend to assess.
Review the Learning Activity Checklist
What are the characteristics of learning activities that will help students develop the skills and competencies they need to be successful?
What are the teaching and learning activities the students need to address the task posed in this lesson? What tips will teachers need to adapt this lesson?
To encourage students to become active learners who seek to understand complex subject matter and are prepared to transfer what they learn to new problem settings, the authors of How People Learn (2000) tell us we need to:
Refine the Students' Product or Performance
Earlier you may have defined a product or performance as part of defining a task.
Write Directions for Learning Activity
Coaching Tools—Lesson Planning Resources
As you are revising the lesson, you may find the resources outlined below will be useful.
Aligning Standards and Student Learning Activities
Take some time now to review your standards and the learning activities you have outlined to ensure the two align.
What are the characteristics of learning activities that will help students develop the skills and competencies they need to be successful?
What are some ways that technology can enhance teaching and learning throughout the lesson?
The authors of How People Learn (2000) believe technology enhances learning by:
Integrating Technology Into the Curriculum
In her 2009 blog post Never Was About Technology?- Time to Focus on Learning? Silvia Tolisano shared the transformation of her beliefs about what technology integration means. After several years, she concluded:
“I was convinced that by helping teachers integrate technology into their lessons (doing the same thing…just with technology) would make the difference… Now, I have arrived at a point in the process where I believe that it is not (never was) about technology. To make a difference, it has always been about good teaching, reflecting and focusing on (relevant?) student learning.”
Add Technology Integration Strategies and Resources
Look for Connections
Let’s explore more deeply how technology supports classroom innovation. Technology supports learning by helping students with:
Technology Enhances Learning
Before we go much further let’s recall that the primary reason to integrate technology is to improve student learning.
The “Technology Enhances Academic Achievement” category of the Learning Activity Checklist should help you decide when and how to integrate technology into your improved lesson. You may want to use it as you integrate technology into your lesson.
Consider a New Technology Tool
Think about whether using a new tech tool—one with which you are not familiar—might improve the learning experience for students.
Give and Receive Feedback Protocol
In this protocol, participants take turns giving and receiving feedback. By working with a team, participants gain experience coaching a group (one-to-many), thereby broadening their expertise as coaches.
What skills and competencies do our students need to be successful in college and career?
How will student success be measured against the selected standards?
Getting Started
Bransford and his coauthors of How People Learn (2000) insist that educators must give learners opportunities to apply what they are learning- to revise and improve the quality of their learning- while they are engaged in learning (p4-25). Drawing on this thinking, our assessment strategies need to be continuous and ongoing rather than relying on an assessment that occurs after the project is completed.
Develop Assessment Plans
Use the resources below to create an assessment plan and add it, and any assessment(s) you are able to outline or create, to the Lesson Improvement Template. Make sure you:
Coaching Tools—Formative Assessment Resources
Formative assessments, conducted throughout the learning process, enable crucial adjustments to teaching and learning. They may include observations, discussions, drafts, self-assessments and quizzes. Whatever the form, students have a chance to apply what they learn from these assessments while engaged in the learning activity.
Assessment Resources provides an example of formative assessment and resources that will help you shape formative assessment.
Create Rubric(s)
Rubrics help students understand what teachers expect of them as they work to complete projects, and how their work will be assessed. Use Assessment Resources to create a rubric to evaluate students' achievement of selected content, 21st Century Skills, and technology standards.
Create Checklists or Tests
Add other assessment methods to provide students with feedback and guidance for completion of the lesson. Some possibilities include:
Aligning Assessment Plan and Standards
Compare your assessment plans to your standards.
What curriculum, technology, information source, and other resources will students need to complete the lesson?
Add Bibliography and Resources
If you have found information or curricular resources that are important to improving your lesson add them to your bibliography and include them in the Teaching and Learning Activities section of the Lesson Improvement Template.
Include any notes about search strategies, copyright, or technology resources other teachers would find valuable to the Teacher Notessection of the Lesson Improvement Template.
The resources below may help you as you add resources.
Curriculum Resources
Identify the specific textbook pages/sections, supplementary written materials, and other curricular resources that are needed for the lesson.
Coaching Tools—Information Resources
In some activities, teachers may want to identify a limited number of Web sites and other information resources for students to use. Identifying specific Web sites for students gives the teacher control over content accuracy and site appropriateness. It also makes the task more efficient for students.
In other activities, teachers may want the students searching for useful Web sites.
Finding Information on the Web will help students and educators find resources more effectively.
Bibliography
If you used print resources, direct quotations, copyrighted images, or images restricted by use only if cited, you should add a bibliography to your lesson template. This is not only best practice, but it models ethical behavior for your students. Use whatever citation format your school district endorses.
Coaching Tools—Copyright and Attribution
It is critical that students understand that text and graphics harvested from the Web are not necessarily part of the public domain, but are somebody's property. As such, the material belongs to the creator and remains so unless clearly indicated otherwise. Students must learn how to obtain permission to use copyrighted material and properly credit others' intellectual property.
The resources on Copyright and Citation should help think through copyright issues, intellectual property and how to give proper attribution for resources used.
Technology Resources
PBL network
Leeson Improvement Template
creating an essential question
webquest taxonomy
common core standards
21st century skills
ISTE website
BEST PRACTICE LEARNING ACTIVITIES
online classroom projects
ethemes
Intel innovation odyssey
PBL - high school
score
thinkfinity
webquests
INFORMATION SKILLS
Big 6 overview
Big 6
ICT curriculum
assignment organizer
evaluating websites
Kathy Schrock
Microsoft Teacher Guides
ICT article
SCAFFOLDING TOOLS
scaffolding model - American Revolution
types of scaffolds
NCREL graphic organizers
Never Was About Technology (blog)
Microsoft's Innovative Teacher Toolkit
ASSESSMENT RESOURCES
Formative Assessment - what are they?
Best Value in Formative Assessment
Learning Activity Checklist
assessment for learning
how do rubrics help?
rubistar
What skills and competencies do our students need to be successful in college and their careers?
What are the characteristics of learning activities that will help students develop these skills?
Getting Started
In recent years social and economic changes have remade our world. As we discussed in Session 1, critical thinking, problem solving, leadership, creativity and collaborative skills are keys to our students’ success. So is the ability to know how to learn. For educators these changes have profound meaning.
The authors of How People Learn insist that preparing students for their future, “…requires rethinking what is taught, how teachers teach, and how what students learn is assessed” (Bransford et al., 2000, p. 121).
Improving a Lesson and Practicing Coaching
- Open the Lesson Improvement Template and save it to your Lesson Improvement folder.
- To get started, fill in the Lesson Title, Instructor names, Grade Level(s), and Content Area(s).
- You will be updating this document throughout Sessions 4 and 5, and will share your work with other educators. Decide how you and your partner will revise and share your work.
Learning Context
The authors of How People Learn (2000) believe "[t]eachers must teach some subject matter in depth, providing many examples in which the same concept is at work and providing a firm foundation of factual knowledge” (p 20).
How does the learning activity you are improving relate to your overall plans to help students master the chosen standards, particularly those that focus on higher order skills like critical thinking or problem solving?
In the Lesson Context section of the Lesson Improvement Template note the following:
- Any prerequisite knowledge or understanding
- How the learning activity you are improving relates to previous learning, and in particular to other activities that will help students develop the same types of skill and knowledge.
- How students will be able to explain what they are doing and why they are doing it, and how the activity relates to previous learning activities.
What learning activities will help students develop the skills and competencies they need to be successful?
What is an authentic, engaging problem that students will address in this lesson?
Write Your Task
Your job in this part of the lesson improvement process is to write your task and add it to the Lesson Improvement Template.
Make sure your task:
- Draws on students’ knowledge, beliefs and passions;
- Includes a real, authentic problem
- Ask students to produce a real product that would be useful beyond school
- Addresses the needs of a real audience
What Makes a Product Real and a Question Essential?
The Center for Problem-Based Learning believes authentic, engaging problems are:
- Real-life, "messy," ill-structured situations.
- Complex in nature, not solved easily.
- Open-ended, not leading to one "right" answer.
Task Before
Your teacher recently talked about being aware of the number of grams of fat, sodium, and calories in your diet and why it is important to know this information. You will calculate the nutritional value of what you eat at a fast food restaurant.
Task After
You are in a hurry to get to practice and decide to catch a bite to eat on your way. Your teacher recently talked about being aware of the number of grams of fat, sodium, and calories in your diet and why it is important to know this information. And your coach has been talking about how nutrition can make a difference in how well your team plays.How healthy is your favorite fast food meal?
What can you learn that could help you and your teammates choose fast food that is tasty and healthy?
The revised task has two elements found in many strong tasks:
- A scenario. Scenarios can stimulate students’ interest, and help students by placing what may be an abstract idea in a more understandable setting and defining an audience.
- Essential questions help define the product the students will create to demonstrate learning. That product, Grant Wiggins (2007) insists, helps students make sense of important, complicated ideas. The Coalition of Essential Schools believes essential questions help students develop critical thinking and problem solving skills.
Thinking Deeper About Essential Questions
Essential questions are a critical element of offering students active engaging learning opportunities. Grant Wiggins’ (Nov 15, 2007) article, What is an Essential Question? offers more insights into the purpose and value of essential questions. Read the article, and be prepared to discuss your conclusions about:
- What you learned about the value of using essential questions?
- What are the qualities of a good essential question?
Coaching Tools—Resources for Writing Tasks
Use these Resources for Writing Tasks to help shape your task.
What are the content and 21st Century Skills standards that students will work on?
When students engage in authentic, engaging tasks, and these tasks focus on appropriate content, workforce readiness, and technology standards, students will develop critical thinking, problem solving and higher order skills as they gain understanding of the content. Instead of “covering” the textbook teachers may need to define a series of in-depth activities that are designed to help students master necessary skills and competencies to be life-long learners.
Identify Standards
Students can demonstrate performance for many standards from different content areas for a single problem-based lesson, but it is only necessary for you to identify the few standards you intend to assess.
- Find the Common Core State Standards or your state or local framework on the Internet.
- Use the 21st Century Skills Web site to access these standards.
- Locate relevant technology standards on the ISTE Web site.
- Add the standards to your Lesson Improvement Template.
- Include no more than three content standards and at least one technology or career readiness skill to assess.
Review the Learning Activity Checklist
- Locate the Learning Activity Checklist in your Coaching Handbook and review the Standards-Based Task category.
- Compare your selected standards to these attributes.
- Revise your selected standards if needed.
What are the characteristics of learning activities that will help students develop the skills and competencies they need to be successful?
What are the teaching and learning activities the students need to address the task posed in this lesson? What tips will teachers need to adapt this lesson?
To encourage students to become active learners who seek to understand complex subject matter and are prepared to transfer what they learn to new problem settings, the authors of How People Learn (2000) tell us we need to:
- Understand what knowledge, skills, beliefs, and interests our students bring to the classroom.
- Give students choices in what and how they learn.
- Encourage students to collaborate in ways that develop a classroom community of learners who help each other learn.
- Tap into the students’ motivation to focus on learning that they believe will have an impact on others in their community.
Refine the Students' Product or Performance
Earlier you may have defined a product or performance as part of defining a task.
- Refine the product or performance that students create to demonstrate their understanding and achievement of standards.
- Keep in mind that if you want students to develop critical thinking or problem solving skills, then the product you define (and the steps you write) needs to encourage development of these skills.
- As you consider your product you might also be thinking about the role technology plays in that product. Some options to consider:
- Video
- Multimedia presentation
- Brochure, advertisement
- Podcast
- Web page
- Digital Stories
Write Directions for Learning Activity
- Clearly explain the product or performance students will create.
- Outline the detailed directions students will follow to complete the task and include necessary scaffolding tools.
- As you develop this activity, make sure to write tips on how to implement this activity in the “Teacher Notes” section of the Lesson Improvement Template. Your ideas will assist other teachers who want to implement this lesson.
Coaching Tools—Lesson Planning Resources
As you are revising the lesson, you may find the resources outlined below will be useful.
- See Best Practice Learning Activities for ideas on products, performances, learning activity directions, and assessment.
- Information Skills introduces the Big 6 and a variety of Information Literacy resources for finding, assessing and using information well.
- Scaffolding Tools provides a variety of resources students can use to develop skills and organize information needed to address challenging, perhaps complex tasks.
Aligning Standards and Student Learning Activities
Take some time now to review your standards and the learning activities you have outlined to ensure the two align.
- Do you want students to develop critical thinking or problem solving skills?
- Do your learning activities focus on activities that will help students develop these skills?
What are the characteristics of learning activities that will help students develop the skills and competencies they need to be successful?
What are some ways that technology can enhance teaching and learning throughout the lesson?
The authors of How People Learn (2000) believe technology enhances learning by:
- Bringing exciting curricula based on real-world problems into the classroom
- Providing scaffolds and tools
- Giving students and teachers more opportunities for feedback, reflection, and revision
- Building local and global communities that include teachers, administrators, students, parents, practicing scientists and others
Integrating Technology Into the Curriculum
In her 2009 blog post Never Was About Technology?- Time to Focus on Learning? Silvia Tolisano shared the transformation of her beliefs about what technology integration means. After several years, she concluded:
“I was convinced that by helping teachers integrate technology into their lessons (doing the same thing…just with technology) would make the difference… Now, I have arrived at a point in the process where I believe that it is not (never was) about technology. To make a difference, it has always been about good teaching, reflecting and focusing on (relevant?) student learning.”
- How do Tolisano’s ideas conflict with or support with those in How People Learn you just read? (You may want to view her entire blog post before you respond.)
- Be prepared to share your ideas with the group.
Add Technology Integration Strategies and Resources
- Using the ideas you gained in the discussion you just held and the resources below, add directions for the integration of technology into the directions for students in the Student Learning Plan section of your Lesson Improvement Template.
- You may also want to add useful notes on technology integration into the “Teacher Notes” section of the template.
Look for Connections
Let’s explore more deeply how technology supports classroom innovation. Technology supports learning by helping students with:
- Communication
- Collaboration
- Gathering information
- Organizing information
- Expression
- Your facilitator has set up places where you can record your ideas on each of five ways technology enhances learning.
- When promoted by your facilitator, visit each of these places and add your ideas about which technology—available or emerging—students could use to enhance learning.
- Repeat the procedure until you have contributed to all five areas.
- After you have added your thoughts, go back to review the ideas contributed by your colleagues.
- Now let’s debrief this activity.
- When you reviewed your ideas and those of other coaches, did you see any patterns or gain new ideas?
- Are there other ways you could use this activity?
Technology Enhances Learning
Before we go much further let’s recall that the primary reason to integrate technology is to improve student learning.
The “Technology Enhances Academic Achievement” category of the Learning Activity Checklist should help you decide when and how to integrate technology into your improved lesson. You may want to use it as you integrate technology into your lesson.
Consider a New Technology Tool
Think about whether using a new tech tool—one with which you are not familiar—might improve the learning experience for students.
- For any new technology tool you consider adding to your lesson, spend some time exploring the tool to understand how it might help students communicate, collaborate, or create.
- As you explore the tool, jot notes on how the technology enhances learning.
- Microsoft’s Innovative Teacher Toolkit offers educators a variety of free software that is useful for each of the five ways technology can enhance learning. In addition they offer tutorials, ideas on how to use tools in classroom activities, and lesson plans that integrate this software.
- Lesson Improvement Process- page 6 -IntroductionWhat do coaches need to know and be able to do to support teachers’ needs?
- Did the feedback help you improve?
- What was it about the feedback that helped you improve?
- What would have made the feedback more effective?
- Use the Lesson Improvement Process Rubric to reflect individually on the:
- Strengths and weaknesses of the improved lesson.
- Coaching skills: norms of collaboration, use of conflict as a resource, and communication.
- Strengths and weaknesses of the improved lesson.
- Use the same resources to reflect with your lesson improvement partner. Make sure you practice the coaching skills as you discuss your work
Give and Receive Feedback Protocol
In this protocol, participants take turns giving and receiving feedback. By working with a team, participants gain experience coaching a group (one-to-many), thereby broadening their expertise as coaches.
- Locate the Learning Activity Checklist.
- Each lesson improvement team should join with another team for this activity. Look for a team that includes one of your “buddies” from Session 1 and join them.
- Members of Team B describe the student task and standards of their improved lesson to Team A (5 minutes).
- One member of Team A assumes the role of a coach, providing feedback to all members of Team B. The other member(s) of Team A serve as timekeepers and observe the coaching dynamic (5 minutes).
- A different member of Team B describes the student directions and uses of technology in their improved lesson.
- A different member of Team A provides feedback. Rotate coaching roles frequently enough so that each member has an opportunity to practice giving feedback.
- The two teams switch roles: The members of Team B assume the coaching role, and Team A describes and receives feedback about their improved lesson.
- Teams reflect together on their observations and impressions about the coaching experience in both the giving and receiving of feedback. Discuss the contribution to coaching made by all three coaching skills: norms of collaboration, using conflict as a resource, and communication.
What skills and competencies do our students need to be successful in college and career?
How will student success be measured against the selected standards?
Getting Started
Bransford and his coauthors of How People Learn (2000) insist that educators must give learners opportunities to apply what they are learning- to revise and improve the quality of their learning- while they are engaged in learning (p4-25). Drawing on this thinking, our assessment strategies need to be continuous and ongoing rather than relying on an assessment that occurs after the project is completed.
Develop Assessment Plans
Use the resources below to create an assessment plan and add it, and any assessment(s) you are able to outline or create, to the Lesson Improvement Template. Make sure you:
- Align your assessment to the standards you intended to assess.
- Include summative and formative assessment.
- Include rubrics, checklists, and other assessments as needed.
Coaching Tools—Formative Assessment Resources
Formative assessments, conducted throughout the learning process, enable crucial adjustments to teaching and learning. They may include observations, discussions, drafts, self-assessments and quizzes. Whatever the form, students have a chance to apply what they learn from these assessments while engaged in the learning activity.
Assessment Resources provides an example of formative assessment and resources that will help you shape formative assessment.
Create Rubric(s)
Rubrics help students understand what teachers expect of them as they work to complete projects, and how their work will be assessed. Use Assessment Resources to create a rubric to evaluate students' achievement of selected content, 21st Century Skills, and technology standards.
Create Checklists or Tests
Add other assessment methods to provide students with feedback and guidance for completion of the lesson. Some possibilities include:
- Checklists for assessing observable characteristics where the level of performance is difficult to observe, where the level of performance is not significant by itself (as it is a small part of a larger process), where the duration of the observation is short, and/or for yes-no decisions.
- Multiple choice, short answer, and essay questions for assessing knowledge and reasoning characteristics.
Aligning Assessment Plan and Standards
Compare your assessment plans to your standards.
- If your standards call for students to develop higher order skills, do your assessments assess deep understanding.
- Or is the focus on what students remember and can repeat?
What curriculum, technology, information source, and other resources will students need to complete the lesson?
Add Bibliography and Resources
If you have found information or curricular resources that are important to improving your lesson add them to your bibliography and include them in the Teaching and Learning Activities section of the Lesson Improvement Template.
Include any notes about search strategies, copyright, or technology resources other teachers would find valuable to the Teacher Notessection of the Lesson Improvement Template.
The resources below may help you as you add resources.
Curriculum Resources
Identify the specific textbook pages/sections, supplementary written materials, and other curricular resources that are needed for the lesson.
Coaching Tools—Information Resources
In some activities, teachers may want to identify a limited number of Web sites and other information resources for students to use. Identifying specific Web sites for students gives the teacher control over content accuracy and site appropriateness. It also makes the task more efficient for students.
In other activities, teachers may want the students searching for useful Web sites.
Finding Information on the Web will help students and educators find resources more effectively.
Bibliography
If you used print resources, direct quotations, copyrighted images, or images restricted by use only if cited, you should add a bibliography to your lesson template. This is not only best practice, but it models ethical behavior for your students. Use whatever citation format your school district endorses.
Coaching Tools—Copyright and Attribution
It is critical that students understand that text and graphics harvested from the Web are not necessarily part of the public domain, but are somebody's property. As such, the material belongs to the creator and remains so unless clearly indicated otherwise. Students must learn how to obtain permission to use copyrighted material and properly credit others' intellectual property.
The resources on Copyright and Citation should help think through copyright issues, intellectual property and how to give proper attribution for resources used.
Technology Resources
- Identify all necessary hardware (for example, video cameras or science probeware) and software required for the lesson.
- If you have chosen to add a new technology tool to your lesson, make sure that you have specified how it will be used and provided time and resources for students to learn how to use the tool.
- This is a good place to note the need to reserve lap top carts, computer labs, or the need for technical assistance.