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ExploreLearning : Get hands-on, minds-on in math and science

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ExploreLearning Gizmos: Math and Science Simulations That Power Inquiry and Understanding

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Hundreds of online simulations with lesson materials, supporting research-based strategies to build deep conceptual understanding in math and science.

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Professional Learning, Connected - BetterLesson

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Go beyond PD day with personalized professional learning that works. Connected professional learning supports every teacher, every day with the tools and resources they need to help all students succeed.

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Free Online Lesson Planbook Software for Teachers

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PlanbookEdu.com is an online lesson planner that makes it easy for teachers of all grade levels to create, share and print their lesson plans. Other features include attaching files, Common Core Standards and iPad Support.

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On demand math help. Wherever. Whenever. Connect with expert math tutors in under 60 seconds on your smartphone.

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Why building a culturally responsive classroom matters for the success of ALL students

Posted:

Have you ever watched a movie with the sound off? If you were lucky, you could perhaps grasp the plot, but a lot of the details were lost so you probably didn't enjoy or relate to the film as much as you could have if you had been able to hear it.

Being in a classroom that does not take into consideration the various identities of its students means some students aren't able to fully engage with the content even with the best teaching practices. This inability to fully engage hurts these students.

When this happens, every student in the class loses out. Culturally responsive classrooms help all students because the practices of such a classroom expand all students' views of the world and broaden their cultural understandings.

I have taught AVID, a college readiness class, for eight years at a large suburban middle school in Hawaiʻi. Through these years teaching students from multiple backgrounds, I have found there are few ways to go about creating a culturally responsive classroom.

Probably the most important step, is to step back and carefully examine your own biases and stereotypes. If you want to take it a step further, you can ask your students to tell if you're biased in some ways and try to truly hear them out. Students can help you identify your implicit bias, which you aren't even aware that you hold.

For example, one of my students told me that I don't select boys to hand out papers or stamp planners. The comment really surprised me because I didn't even know I never called on boys to help me with these tasks. The thing is, I had not even considered that this might be something a student would notice.

I thought about why I was doing this. I examined my own stereotype that girls are helpers and more agreeable and eager to take on tasks than boys. I have since allowed students to volunteer to do these tasks.

Another student pointed out that I say, "Listen up, boys and girls," when I want to get their attention or that at times I'd have them get into gendered groupings. "But what if we don't fit in either category?" the student questioned me.

I realized I wasn't taking into account my non-binary, intersex, or transgender students when I gave only two options for gender so I've made a conscious effort to say, "Students" when I address the class. So now when I want to separate them into two groups, I avoid saying "boys vs girls." I choose something arbitrary like the color of their shoes.

Some dos and don'ts for building culturally responsive classrooms:

Other actions you might try are getting to know your students' cultures and families, facilitating learning by allowing student choice, using different cultural references throughout lessons, and teaching social justice and code switching.

I've seen a shift in my students since I've made an effort to have a more culturally responsive classroom. I see more engagement from all my students. My room has become a place where students feel like, no matter who they are, it's normal and accepted to be themselves.

Do you have strategies that you've found successful in creating a culturally responsive and inclusive classroom? Share them below-I'd love to hear them!

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Building A Culturally Responsive Classroom - Achieve the Core Aligned Materials

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Have you ever watched a movie with the sound off? If you were lucky, you could perhaps grasp the plot, but a lot of the details were lost so you probably didn't enjoy or relate to the film as much as you could have if you had been able to hear it.

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These types of self-assessment share a common theme: they ask students to review their work to determine what they have learned and what areas of confusion still exist. Although each method differs slightly, all should include enough time for students to consider thoughtfully and evaluate their progress.

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Student Assessment

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By Barbara Blackburn
Although our assessment of students is critical to learning, we also want students to learn to assess themselves. Encouraging students to take measures of their own learning is more rigorous than the teacher providing all the assessment.

As always, with greater rigor comes plenty of support. We can't expect students to immediately grasp what it means to gauge their own academic progress.

Let's look at four strategies that allow students to provide a brief snapshot of their learning, then three that are more detailed.
First, you may want to have students assess simply where they are in the learning process. Although these provide a brief look, you could ask students to expand on their responses.

Triangle Reflection

Melinda Crean, author of Top Notch Teaching, shares a way to have students reflect on where they are in the process of learning. Using triangles, she asks students to choose their level of learning.

Musical Notes/Color Clusters

Carolyn Chapman and Rita King in their book Differentiated Assessment Strategies: One Tool Doesn't Fit All provide two ways for students to share how well they understand the content. Both require students to think about their own learning and identify their progress. In musical notes, students use songs to identify their learning stage.

Similarly, in color clusters, students label their learning progress through a series of colors.

Laundry Day

Similarly, in Laundry Day, students group themselves in four categories derived from detergent brands. With the groupings you can then determine how much re-teaching needs to occur.

You also may want to ask students to provide detail on their thinking, rather than simply gauging their progress.

A Bump in the Road

With A Bump in the Road, students reflect of their learning and identify two to four points where they hit bumps in the road, or struggles. Then they partner with another student to see if they can work their way through their struggle.

Muddy Point Board

With Muddy Point Board, you designate an area in the room or a board for students to use to pin questions they have - the "muddy points" that confuse them.

You may have students do this at the end of lessons, or you may use them throughout the lesson. Not only does this provide you a perspective of their learning, it allows you to customize your instruction to their needs.

Reflective Journals

Another strategy for self-assessment is the use of reflective journals. Former middle school teacher Kendra Alston used journals with her students. She asked students to continually reflect on their learning in their daybooks, simple bound notebooks. Then she asked them to write a reflection on their learning at the end of the nine weeks. Some wrote about specific content they learned; others of her students reflected on how they learned.

You can also use journals for students to reflect on specific information about their subject area. For example, in math, students might focus on explanations.

Your students can write in their journals daily, weekly, or at the end of the month or grading period. Students can also keep their journals online in a blog format, or through Google Docs.

Conclusion

Providing students opportunities to reflect and self-assess is an important part of your instruction. It allows students to take ownership of learning, and reflects a more active, rigorous approach to learning. When you use self-assessment techniques frequently, you're gathering information "in real time" that can help fine-tune lessons and differentiate more effectively.
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A nationally recognized expert in the areas of rigor and motivation, she collaborates with schools and districts for professional development. Barbara can be reached through her website or her blog. Follow her on Twitter @BarbBlackburn. Barbara Blackburn was named one of the Top 30 Global Gurus in Education in 2017. She is a best-selling author of 16 books including Rigor is Not a Four Letter Word and most recently Rigor and Assessment in the Classroom.

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7 Ways to Help Students Self Assess Effectively

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By Barbara Blackburn Although our assessment of students is critical to learning, we also want students to learn to assess themselves. Encouraging students to take measures of their own learning is more rigorous than the teacher providing all the assessment. As always, with greater rigor comes plenty of support.

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What is Bloom's Taxonomy

Bloom's Taxonomy is a classification of the different outcomes and skills that educators set for their students (learning outcomes). The taxonomy was proposed in 1956 by Benjamin Bloom, an educational psychologist at the University of Chicago. The terminology has been recently updated to include the following six levels of learning. These 6 levels can be used to structure the learning outcomes, lessons, and assessments of your course. :

1. Remembering: Retrieving, recognizing, and recalling relevant knowledge from long‐term memory.

2. Understanding: Constructing meaning from oral, written, and graphic messages through interpreting, exemplifying, classifying, summarizing, inferring, comparing, and explaining.

3. Applying: Carrying out or using a procedure for executing, or implementing.

4. Analyzing: Breaking material into constituent parts, determining how the parts relate to one another and to an overall structure or purpose through differentiating, organizing, and attributing.

5. Evaluating: Making judgments based on criteria and standards through checking and critiquing.

6. Creating: Putting elements together to form a coherent or functional whole; reorganizing elements into a new pattern or structure through generating, planning, or producing.

Like other taxonomies, Bloom's is hierarchical, meaning that learning at the higher levels is dependent on having attained prerequisite knowledge and skills at lower levels. You will see Bloom's Taxonomy often displayed as a pyramid graphic to help demonstrate this hierarchy. We have updated this pyramid into a "cake-style" hierarchy to emphasize that each level is built on a foundation of the previous levels.

You may use this graphic for educational or non-profit use if you include a credit for Jessica Shabatura and citation back to this website.
How Bloom's can aid in course design

Bloom's taxonomy is a powerful tool to help develop learning outcomes because it explains the process of learning:

Before you can understand a concept, you must remember it.

To apply a concept you must first understand it.

In order to evaluate a process, you must have analyzed it.

To create an accurate conclusion, you must have completed a thorough evaluation.

However, we don't always start with lower order skills and step all the way through the entire taxonomy for each concept you present in your course. That approach would become tedious-for both you and your students! Instead, start by considering the level of learners in your course:

1. Are lots of your students freshman? Is this an "Introduction to..." course? If so, many your learning outcomes may target the lower order Bloom's skills, because your students are building foundational knowledge. However, even in this situation we would strive to move a few of your outcomes into the applying and analyzing level, but getting too far up in the taxonomy could create frustration and unachievable goals.

2. Are most of your students juniors and seniors? Graduate students? Do your students have a solid foundation in much of the terminology and processes you will be working on your course? If so, then you should not have many remembering and understanding level outcomes. You may need a few, for any radically new concepts specific to your course. However, these advanced students should be able to master higher-order learning objectives. Too many lower level outcomes might cause boredom or apathy.

How Bloom's works with learning outcomes

Fortunately, there are "verb tables" to help identify which action verbs align with each level in Bloom's Taxonomy.

You may notice that some of these verbs on the table are associated with multiple Bloom's Taxonomy levels. These "multilevel-verbs" are actions that could apply to different activities. For example, you could have an outcome that states "At the end of this lesson, students will be able to explain the difference between H2O and OH-." This would be an understanding level outcome. However, if you wanted the students to be able to "... explain the shift in the chemical structure of water throughout its various phases." This would be an analyzing level verb.

Adding to this confusion, you can locate Bloom's verb charts that will list verbs at levels different from what we list below. Just keep in mind that it is the skill, action or activity you will teach using that verb that determines the Bloom's Taxonomy level.

Bloom's Level

Key Verbs (keywords)

Example Learning Outcome

Evaluate
choose, support, relate, determine, defend, judge, grade, compare, contrast, argue, justify, support, convince, select, evaluate.

By the end of this lesson, the student will be able to determine whether using conservation of energy or conservation of momentum would be more appropriate for solving a dynamics problem.

Learning outcome examples adapted from, Nelson Baker at Georgia Tech: nelson.baker@pe.gatech.edu
How Bloom's works with Quality Matters

For a course to meet the Quality Matters standards it must have learning outcomes that are measurable. Using a verb table like the one above will help you avoid verbs that cannot be quantified, like: understand, learn, appreciate, or enjoy. Quality Matters also requires that your course assessments (activities, projects, and exams) align with your learning outcomes. For example, if your learning outcome has an application level verb, such as "present", then you cannot demonstrate that your students have mastered that learning outcome by simply having a multiple choice quiz.

Course level and lesson level outcomes

The biggest difference between course and lesson level outcomes is that we don't directly assess course level outcomes. Course level outcomes are just too broad. Instead, we use several lesson level outcomes to demonstrate mastery of one course level outcome. To create good course level outcomes, we need to ask ourselves: "what do I want the students to have mastery of at the end of the course?" Then, after we finalize our course level outcomes, we have to make sure that mastery of all of the lesson level outcomes underneath confirm that a student has mastery of the course level outcome-in other words, if your students can prove (through assessment) that they can do each and every one of the lesson level outcomes in that section, then you as an instructor agree they have mastery of the course level outcome.

How Bloom's works with course level and lesson level outcomes:

Course level outcomes are broad. You may only have 3-5 course level outcomes. They would be difficult to measure directly because they overarch the topics of your entire course.

Lesson level outcomes are what we use to demonstrate that a student has mastery of the course level outcomes. We do this by building lesson level outcomes that build toward the course level outcome. For example, a student might need to demonstrate mastery of 8 lesson level outcomes in order to demonstrate mastery of one course level outcome.

Because the lesson level outcomes directly support the course level outcomes, they need to build up the Bloom's taxonomy to help your students reach mastery of the course level outcomes. Use Bloom's Taxonomy to make sure that the verbs you choose for your lesson level outcomes build up to the level of the verb that is in the course level outcome. The lesson level verbs can be below or equal to the course level verb, but they CANNOT be higher in level. For example, your course level verb might be an Applying level verb, "illustrate." Your lesson level verbs can be from any Bloom's level that is equal or below this level (applying, understanding, or remembering).

Steps towards writing effective learning outcomes:

1. Make sure there is one measurable verb in each objective.

2. Each outcome needs one verb. Either a student can master the outcome , or they fail to master it. If an outcome has two verbs (say, define and apply), what happens if a student can define, but not apply? Are they demonstrating mastery?

3. Ensure that the verbs in the course level outcome are at least at the highest Bloom's Taxonomy as the highest lesson level outcomes that support it. (Because we can't verify they can evaluate if our lessons only taught them (and assessed) to define.)

4. Strive to keep all your learning outcomes measurable, clear and concise.

When you are ready to write, it can be helpful to list the level of Bloom's next to the verb you choose in parentheses. For example:

Course level outcome 1. (apply) Demonstrate how transportation is a critical link in the supply chain.

1.1. (understand) Discuss the changing global landscape for businesses and other organizations that are driving change in the global environment.

1.2. (apply) Demonstrate the special nature of transportation demand and the influence of transportation on companies and their supply chains operating in a global economy.

This trick will help you quickly see what level verbs you have. It will also let you check that the course level outcome is at least as high of a Bloom's level as any of the lesson level outcomes underneath.

Before you begin constructing your outcomes:

Please read our Learning Outcome : Before and After Examples page.

Additional External Resources:

For a longer list of Bloom's Verbs - TIPS tip: You can also use the "find" function (press: Ctrl-f or command-f on a mac) in your browser to locate specific verbs on this list.

To see how Bloom's can be applied specifically to distance education: Digital Approaches to Bloom's Taxonomy

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Using Bloom's Taxonomy to Write Effective Learning Outcomes

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Bloom's Taxonomy is a classification of the different outcomes and skills that educators set for their students (learning outcomes). The taxonomy was proposed in 1956 by Benjamin Bloom, an educational psychologist at the University of Chicago. The terminology has been recently updated to include the following six levels of learning.

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Vocab

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Evidence Chart

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Evidence Chart

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