Learning Porfolio T2

Profile

How does where you are now compare to the personal profile you shared earlier with your colleagues?

In my initial portfolio I shared two main ides: the first was my view on teaching theory, the second was my understanding of inclusion. 

I described my view on teaching as a circular loop that involves learning, accomplishing, celebrating, and sharing.  This loop also involves making mistakes and unforeseen failures.  What is important about this loop is that we remain honest, and use a critical and creative mind to solve problems and fix mistakes.

After completing my field study in self-assessment, I don't believe mistake is the correct term to use, or that our best learning comes from mistakes.  Definitions of mistakes includes misunderstand, blip, inaccuracy, or error. I believe errors or mistakes are unplanned things that occur, but we know that they are not right when they happen.  Like rear ending someone with our car, kicking someone in a soccer match.  We know we shouldn’t drive our cars into other people’s cars, or we know we shouldn’t kick another player, however sometimes we follow too close or miss the ball.  We know right away we made a mistake.  When a child makes an error in a subtraction problem, they don’t usually know right away they made a mistake.  I now believe that learning needs to involve various forms of reflective assessment.  During these time of reflective assessment, we (or peers) determine areas of improvement for next time.  In additional determining the areas for improvement, the learner must also understand the areas to improve on.  Because of this shift in understanding assessment, I see myself as a more effective teacher now.  Prior to this field study, some of my assessments involved check marks, dots or x’s, and MM's for minimally meeting written at the top of the page.   For the child to have earned a MM assessment, there must have been discrepancies between the work sample and a some type of meeting expectations.  Upon my own reflection, these expectations may not have always been clear.  My quick and simple assessments may not have communicated clearly the areas for improvement.

After completing my initial portfolio I moved my definition and understanding of inclusion from: currently, inclusion in my classroom is a commitment to valuing everyone and to genuinely caring for everyone equally to a commitment to genuinely and unconditionally caring for everyone, but also valuing everyone by promoting their unique strengths and providing universal supports for all.

At the time I wrote this it was my understanding, but had not been put into practice. 

This term I have had the opportunity to put into practice the idea of Universal Designs for Learning.  Some of these implemented ideas include: a multi use computer, flexible seating, small group support pull out time, and movement breaks.

Learning Statement 1

I am learning to see how the individual learner, as their diverse self, positively influences the group dynamic in our classroom. 

The Introduction to Learner Diversity helped look for and see a range of differences in kids, from children with exceptionalities, to children without. 

Prior to this course I was focused on each individual child, and how best to extend their own specific learning using in and all supports available to us. When referring to students, I make a conscious effort to use person first language described by Hutchinson and Moore.

I now also focus on how individual differences can affect the class dynamic as well. This has changed my teaching practice as I spend more teaching time working with the group dynamic affected by the child with the exceptionality and I do my best to make supports available to then entire classroom community. 

I spend time with the group on accepting exceptionalities.  For example, when a child with a behavior exceptionality physically or verbally harms another child in our room, I will often lead a restitution circle. This teaches acceptance and patience of everyone’s strengths and weaknesses in the classroom.  This learning is significant for the students I teach because negative responses to exceptionalities slows down a classroom, causes additional problems. This is also significant because this learning statement is directly linked to the BC Revised Curriculum’s Core Competencies: Personal and Social Competenices.  This learning is important to my teaching because I think it is important to create a caring and kind classroom community.  By having children develop skills to care for each individual’s differences it mirrors practices of good people in the greater school and local community.  This learning is significant for the children I teach because I have such a diverse class, with an even more diverse school.  The diversity in my classroom includes: Metis background, EAL students, ADHD, Behavior, and many children of various unstable family backgrounds.

I also spend time making supports available to all the children in our classroom community.  Examples are: flexible seating (ADHD), word wall (low writers), classroom computer (mirror child with computer), Ab Ed support (not just for Metis), additional support offered to all children (not just for lows), and movement breaks for all.  My PBL group and I were also able to follow this philosophy when planning the physical literacy and SEL program for Jamie.

Capacities

Advocate

I have been working to develop student self-advocacy.  This ties into my learning statement about thinking about the relationships with others, rather than just the person.  If a child is a self-advocate for themselves, communicating their strengths and weaknesses to others in the room, others in the room will be more understanding of each other.  With respect to self-assessment, a student self-advocates by asking questions that they don’t understand.  Self-assessment in itself is self-advocacy as you are defining what you are good at and what you need to work on – you are advocating for your learning.   

Investigate

In this term I investigated Myron Duek’s resource.  He has some wonderful views on assessment that I too believe in.  I agreed how he believes in re-tests, and sometimes only needing to retest portions of the test.  Unfortunately, I found this theory to be more rooted in high school rather than elementary. 

Understand

This is the most involved capacity for me this term. However, for me it was not as much as to understand the relationships, but rather try to look for them and reflect on them. For me to actually understand the connections, I believe I need to become more efficient at the reflection process. I also feel that with continued learning and growth I will be able to notice and better understand relationships among content, student, and learning. 

Field Study & Learning Statement 1

I am learning to engage in regular use of student self-assessment as a reflective process to extend learning and promote meta cognition.

My field study began by questioning how can I use self-assessment to promote learning in a K-12 classroom.  After refining my questions, I set off to question more specifically how self-assessment in math journals using Curriculum Content I statements can extend learning.  I loved what I was doing.  The students were creating their own concise math journal directly linked to the curriculum that was filled in self created evidence of their learning.  After exploring this question, I came across self-assessments that were wrong!  For example, “I can skip count.”  “3, 6, 9, 11, 14, 17, 20, ….”  The child wasn’t aware of their errors and that skip counting by 3’s was an area for improvement.  They were not aware that there were wrong because the students are not comparing their I statement response to exemplars, rubrics, etc.  They may think they know place value or how to skip count, but currently the only feed back they are getting is whether they believe they can (so they write a respond to the I statement) or they believe they don't know how (they don't respond to the I statement).  By looking at their responses I can tell if they understand the concept, and their responses guide my own teaching, but I am not sure how well their responses guide their own learning.

Through mentor support, I had the students document their learning through an “I statement…” and then have a peer assess their self-assessment.  The hope was that this would deepen the peer’s own understanding of the concept, and provide the learner with a safe check of their assessment. 

What learning has come out of my work in this field study?

My own learning focused in this field study is my learning of how to be a better teacher.  As a better teacher, I am focusing on an ability convey curricular information that is learned and understand by students.  Self reflection was meant to be a learning tool to check for understanding.  The way I started out turned out to be a great way of formative assessment, but own its own it lacked the ability to truly assess – determine wrong from right. 

I did learn that self assessment provides the child a safe environment to have their work critiqued.  Children reflected that self assessment is:

·      Free from judging

·      They are not sad if they are wrong

·      They feel proud.

Children reflected that teacher assessment:

·      Makes them scared of a bad comment

·      Makes them worry

·      They worry of being wrong

·      They are sad when they are wrong

Engaging students in self-reflection is important to my teaching because it helps focus my lessons, intentions, instruction, criteria, and assessments. By improving this focus, I believe my teaching is more efficient to the curriculum.  When my curriculum is more efficient, then my learning intentions are clearer, and thus better understood by the students.  Similar to most types of assessment, self-assessment provides me feedback of how my learners are understanding concepts.  When accurately self assessing, you must clearly understand the expectations, where the evidence is and isn’t in your learning.  Although I feel teaching is more efficient, lessons take longer to complete when a reflective self-assessment is completed at the end.

This has also highlighted the importance of descriptive feedback and opportunities to apply feedback.  Activity, assessment/feedback/, activity to apply feedback, assessment/feedback is a wonderful way to show learning.  (math – subtraction).  This also helps answer the question – how does a child know if they have learned something?

This has not shifted my thinking around inclusive education, but it has helped be see it more in action. For example, when a child does a peer assessment on someone’s else’s work they have the opportunity to see other people’s strengths and weaknesses, and provide positive feedback – thus practices communication respect for individual differences.

Self reflective learning is significant for the students I teach because they are Montessori students.  Montessori children are self-sufficient, self motivated, and used to using many of the Montessori materials.  Many of the Montessori materials are self correcting or have a control of error, meaning they provide feedback right away.  This is also significant for the students I teach because it provides some children with a safer avenue to critique their learning.  In a reflective work sample, many of the children preferred self reflection over teacher reflection because no one judges them, they won’t be sad if they are wrong.

I really appreciated Brookfield this term because by applying his 4 lens reflection I became a more thoughtful and aware teacher.  I participated mainly in the autobiographical lens, and the lens of the student.  I also had a few opportunities to have the feedback through the lens of other teachers.  The lens’ became a part of the children’s learning too, as I had them engage in more self and peer assessment, not just assessment from me.  My autobiographic lens mainly look for the form of late night writing on paper, blog entries of thoughts and insightful web links, and a whiteboard brainstorm.  Brookfield told us that good teaching requires that we go beyond self reflection. When activating the third lens by looking to peers for mentoring, I was able to receive some innovative solutions for teacher problems.  For example, while team teaching with a neighboring teacher I learned more about reporting and reflective questioning promotes for children and families to complete. Simply by learning more about Brookfield I am engaging the 4th lens. Most importantly Brookfield suggests that the most important aspect is actually applying the feedback from all four lens and making a change in ones teaching. 

Where do I go from here?

This term I focused on various reflection, but as I learned, reflection doesn’t always correctly confirm that we truly know something.  Perhaps, next term I will focus on making future learning statements, or the process of applying the reflection feedback and showing growth.

An initial idea I have to work through this idea is to have the kids engage in a math specific genius hour where they decided a math concept they wanted to learn and walk them through the process of goal setting, exploring, learning, documenting, sharing, etc.  This would take the idea of self-assessment and push to another level. 

Completing this portfolio was the best reflection and synthesizing of information.  However, I feel like I still have not gone deep enough.  Going forward into next term, I hope strive for deeper reflection.  To do this, I will ask for the final portfolio matrix' at the beginning of the term.