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AASL Position Statement on Labeling Practices

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AASL Position Statement on Labeling Practices

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The AASL's stance on classification and shelving practices, labels, and protecting learner privacy supports inclusive policies and practices to eliminate systems that define and restrict access to books such as reading level labels or controversial and stigmatizing labels. The appendix provides guiding questions to consider when developing a library's policies and practices related to labeling.

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An infographic illustrating how having licensed school librarians correlates to better student test scores by enriching the library experience for students and providing training and collaboration for teachers.

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School Library Characteristics that Affect Student Achievement

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School Library Characteristics that Affect Student Achievement

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Keith Curry Lance discusses characteristics of schools that achieve higher student test scores and the role the librarian plays in helping to support teachers and students.

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Chapter 4: School Library Characteristics that Affect Student Achievement

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Ten Things Your Administrator Needs to Know as the School Year Begins

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Ten Things Your Administrator Needs to Know as the School Year Begins

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A list of ten ideas that administrators need to know regarding the different roles of the school librarian and the different roles the school librarian empowers students to become.

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10. That you are a teacher who teaches not content but process. You teach children to be information literate, digitally literate, media literate, and visually literate. The skills that you teach, the dispositions that you help children to develop, the responsibilities that you foster, and the self-assessment strategies that you instill will serve children not only in school but also in life. You are, first and foremost, a teacher!

9. That you are an information specialist, the original, most powerful search engine, able to decipher the most cryptic reference question and connect that child or that teacher with the information needed. You know the resources; you know your patrons, and you connect the two.

8. That you are an instructional partner who works collaboratively with all other educators in the building to teach critical information skills in the context of content curriculum. You are there to partner with that teacher who wants to present a lesson in a different way or who wants to have children create a more authentic product to demonstrate real learning. Because of your participation, the lesson is stronger and more effective.

7. That you are an instructional leader with a view and perspective of the school like no other. You see across grades and across content areas. You work with all students and with all teachers. You are well versed in the latest technologies and are able to integrate them effectively into instruction, and you're able to provide professional development on library resources and technologies for your colleagues.

6. That you are a program administrator who does a tremendous amount of work behind the scenes to make sure that the library program runs smoothly. So much of your job is invisible, and your principal needs to know that.

5. That you empower students to become critical thinkers. Through lessons in the library students experience everything from comparing and contrasting nonfiction and fiction works on the same topic to creating in a makerspace to evaluating information found on the Web.

4. That you empower students to become enthusiastic readers as you do everything in your power to help them develop not only skills in reading but also a lifelong love of reading. You provide books in various formats (print, audio, ebook) and in various genres to meet students' information and recreational reading needs. You host reading promotions, and you stress the joy of reading.

3. That you empower students to become skillful researchers. You teach children to unpack information using text features in books. You teach children how to summarize and how to synthesize, and you teach them the differences in the two. You teach children to narrow topics, develop research questions, and search effectively to answer those questions.

2. That you empower students to become ethical users of information. You teach the concept of intellectual property, of citation, and of giving credit where credit is due. You help children to understand what plagiarism is, and you teach them how to extract and process and synthesize information to create a new product.

1. That school librarians transform student learning and that this is much easier to accomplish with administrative support. An administrator's support can come in many forms: a healthy budget, a schedule that allows for common planning time with teachers, affirmation to faculty of the important role of the library program in the school and in student learning.

If your administrator already knows these things, wonderful! You or a librarian with whom they've worked in the past has demonstrated what a 21st-century school librarian does! If your administrator is not so knowledgeable about the key role that you can play in the instruction that takes place in your school, now is the time to speak up and share. Be the librarian that delivers that message!

Categories: Advocacy/Leadership, Blog Topics, Community, Presidential Musings

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Audrey Church, Leadership Development Committee Chair and 2017-2018 AASL Past President

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Ten Things Your Administrator Needs to Know as the School Year Begins | Knowledge Quest

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10. That you are a teacher who teaches not content but process. You teach children to be information literate, digitally literate, media literate, and visually literate. The skills that you teach, the dispositions that you help children to develop, the responsibilities... Read More ›

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A short video explaining the structure (shared foundations, domains, and competencies) of the AASL's National School Library Standards.

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American Association of School Librarians

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A quick, one-page guide on how to read and reference the AASL Standards for Learners, School Librarians, and School Libraries.

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8 Digital Skills We Must Teach Our Children

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8 Digital Skills We Must Teach Our Children

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An article detailing the eight interconnected areas of digital literacy that should be specifically taught to children in our increasingly digital world.

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8 digital skills we must teach our children

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The digital content they consume, who they meet online and how much time they spend onscreen - all these factors will greatly influence children's development.

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This article explains the process of developing collection maps based on standards. In doing so, librarians see where collections need to grow based on curriculum needs which is helpful for budget purposes.

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Use Standards to Draw Curriculum Maps (Franklin)

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This article provides an updated list of Bloom's Taxonomy verbs to be applied to the digital environment. Additions include: uploading and sharing, editing, linking, and programming.

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from Educators’ eZine --> Introduction and Background: Bloom’s Taxonomy In the 1950’s Benjamin Bloom developed his taxonomy of cognitive objectives, Bloom’s Taxonomy. This categorized and or

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Why Instructional Design Must Focus on Learning Outcomes, Not Learning Activities

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Why Instructional Design Must Focus on Learning Outcomes, Not Learning Activities

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Dale explains the needed focus on learning outcomes, critical thinking, and increasing the complexity of questions rather than "marrying the tool" of a new tech platform or focusing on a single activity.

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It's no secret that kids learn better when teachers provide learning activities that keep them engaged. Teachers work tirelessly to plan engaging lessons that capture and keep the interests of their students, thereby making content more accessible. However, teachers continue to feel the daunting pressure to compete for their students' attention amidst the ever-evolving and rapidly-hanging mass media, social media, and entertainment industry, as these elements do a stellar job of keeping students highly engaged outside of the classroom.

Although it is vitally important for us to know and understand our students' interests and the best conditions under which they learn, there is good news: It's not necessary that we focus our efforts on competing with the devices and activities our students engage in during their downtime outside of the classroom! Recreation, entertainment, and downtime for students outside of the classroom are just that: recreation, entertainment, and downtime. Students expect to come to school to learn and to be challenged (although they may never tell us that).

If we want such activities to produce genuine student growth, instructional design must focus on learning outcomes as opposed to the activity itself.

Nonetheless, students also want to enjoy learning. They want to be intrigued and to generate their own ideas and solutions-as when they predict how the plot will unfold in the next episode of their favorite television series. They want to explore and discover new concepts in uncharted territory-as when they spend countless hours advancing to more challenging and difficult levels in their favorite video game. They want channels of communication that give voice to their opinions and ideas-as when they regularly post and comment on others' posts on social media platforms. And yes, they want to be engaged.

Providing activities that relate to students and capture their interests is a best practice. However, if we want such activities to produce genuine student growth, instructional design must focus on learning outcomes as opposed to the activity itself. Just take a look at the infographic below. What do you notice is different about these two text conversations, where a student shares what they've been doing at school?

Let's look at tools first. There are many tools that turn learning into game-play, simulating online games and game shows (e.g. Kahoot!, Quizziz, Quizalize, etc.) in which students choose correct answers, accumulate points, and earn a score. We often use these tools for reviewing content and formative assessment. Nevertheless, if the pinnacle of the activity is to repeatedly respond to questions that are at low or similar levels of difficulty requiring basic memorization or minimal thought, the activity will lose its novelty. Students may prefer this activity over completing a worksheet, but the impact on learning will leave much to be desired in the areas of productive engagement and student growth.

Furthermore, most recreational games played outside the classroom provide a progressive challenge as students advance through each level of the game. Remember Alex Trebek's Jeopardy? The questions begin with easy, low-dollar questions; the more questions answered correctly in each category, the more difficult and higher the dollar amount for each question. Could we be more deliberate when using game-simulating tools by ensuring we solicit responses from our students that progressively challenge their thinking? Perhaps we could also provide opportunities for students to generate their own questions and use apps like Kahoot as a means to "think-pair-share" their questions to challenge each other! (Students don't have to learn game-design to create a Kahoot quiz and share the code with classmates.)

Could we be more deliberate when using game-simulating tools by ensuring we solicit responses from our students that progressively challenge their thinking?

After discovering how active my students were on Facebook, it was a no-brainer for me to incorporate social learning platforms like Edmodo to facilitate class discussions online. Students would post their thoughts from assigned readings, and respond to posts made by their peers. They'd have lively online discussions about the text. It was great-until I realized the need to evaluate how I was using this resource. Although the activity allowed students to have class discussions in a similar fashion as posting and commenting on Facebook, the activity alone had done little to support academic discourse or to develop inquiry and thinking skills.

Also, unless a subject is discussion-worthy, or of high-interest to students, they're not genuinely interested in writing about it, even if it is through an online platform. The ceiling for engagement shouldn't rest upon the activity itself. I had to ask myself, "What is the expectation of this task, and how will it impact learning outcomes?" I often found that expectations were either too general or too vague, and although I could use language to justify the relationship of the task to learning outcomes, when I was honest with myself, I saw little to no substantial impact on student growth in the way I was using the tool. I had to shift my focus from what I was using to how I was using it.

Hence, I began to craft more meaningful questions that prompted critical thinking and academic discourse through online discussion (e.g. "What might this object from the story symbolize, and what parallels might be drawn from the text to current events today?"). I also discovered the power of using these types of tools as a vehicle for peer-editing and peer-publishing through student blogging. Student motivation skyrocketed when they performed research and published their conclusions on relevant topics when doing so online alongside other classrooms-from other countries! The possibilities were endless!

As edtech expert, Tony Vincent, would say, "Date the tool, but marry the ability." There will always be multiple edtech tools, programs, and products that provide similar principle functions to support student engagement. However, to achieve engagement that exceeds the element of surprise or novelty, which is often necessary as an instructional "hooking" tool, it is imperative that we place the brunt of our instructional design efforts towards building thinking skills and cognitive growth within students.

Student growth is a result of the practice, not the product.

Nira Dale (@MrsDale_Edu) is an Apple Distinguished Educator (ADE), English teacher, and K-12 instructional specialist in Alabama.

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Why Instructional Design Must Focus on Learning Outcomes, Not Learning Activities - EdSurge News

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It's no secret that kids learn better when teachers provide learning activities that keep them engaged. Teachers work tirelessly to plan engaging lessons that capture and keep the interests of their students, thereby making content more accessible.

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Nudging Toward Inquiry (AASL 2009) Video

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Nudging Toward Inquiry (AASL 2009) Video

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Kristin Fontichiaro works through Stripling's Inquiry Model with realistic examples of activities that can be done in each step.

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Provides strategies for school librarians to gently move our K-12 instructional design closer to the inquiry approach outlined in the AASL Standards for the 21st-Century Learner. (Presentation from AASL 2009)

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Teaching Students to Ask Their Own Questions

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Teaching Students to Ask Their Own Questions

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An explanation of the Question Formulation Technique's six key steps that have students developing and asking the questions to guide learning.

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This award-winning book outlines a powerful framework for science teaching to ensure that instruction is rigorous and equitable for students from all backgrounds.

Introducing our new website

Enjoy 25% off all HEP books

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A practical guide to cultivating expansive understandings of climate change and environmental regeneration in K-12 students through classroom instructional practices and curricula.

Harvard Educational Review

In the summer issue, explore innovative thinking and research in education.

STEM Education Reform in Urban High Schools gives a nuanced view of the obstacles marginalized students face in STEM education-and explores how schools can better support STEM learners.

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Harvard Education Press publishes the best books on education research, practice, and policy for leaders, practitioners, and policymakers.

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4 Phases of Inquiry-Based Learning: A Guide for Teachers

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4 Phases of Inquiry-Based Learning: A Guide for Teachers

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A webpage that explains the four phases of inquiry-based learning including big ideas, student and teacher indicators, and example apps to use in each phase.

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by Terry Heick

According to Indiana University Bloomington, Inquiry-based learning is an "instructional model that centers learning on a solving a particular problem or answering a central question. There are several different inquiry-based learning models, but most have several general elements in common:

Learning focuses around a meaningful, ill-structured problem that demands consideration of diverse perspectives

Academic content-learning occurs as a natural part of the process as students work towards finding solutions

Learners, working collaboratively, assume an active role in the learning process

Teachers provide learners with learning supports and rich multiple media sources of information to assist students in successfully finding solutions

Learners share and defend solutions publicly in some manner"

The process itself can be broken down into stages, or phases, that help teachers frame instruction. The model we've created can be used as a guide for teachers, as it includes teacher and student indicators at each stage, ideal "tones" of each phase, and even apps that can support that phase as well.

Inquiry-based learning is an approach that can easily accommodate project-based learning, challenge-based learning, place-based education, blended learning, and other trends in education.
4 Phases of Inquiry-Based Learning: A Guide For Teachers Big Idea: Dive into engaging, relevant, and credible media forms to identify a 'need' or opportunity for inquiry
The first phase of inquiry (often produced by strategies for promoting inquiry-based learning) is one characterized by interaction. This interaction can be:

Student-to-material. This material is ideally obtained through formal (i.e., research) and informal (e.g., reading, social and digital media, collaboration) means. It can be modeled or supplemented by teacher-provided materials

Student-to-peer. This interaction is chosen by teacher or student, informed by need for information and perspective

Student-to-expert (experts within relevant fields at accessible levels)

Student-to-media (digital, text, pure data, etc.)

The nature of inquiry is ideally both curiosity-based and fluid. Narrow criteria, restrictive rubrics, and other traditional artifacts of 'school work' can stifle inquiry at this point of the learning process. The teacher's role at this point in the learning process is focused on resources, modeling curiosity, and cognitive coaching.

Tone: Open-minded, curious, unburdened, playful

Student Indicators: actively skims a variety of media, follows curiosity, responds with awe, dwells with certain media depending on curiosity or perceived utility; seeks out peers for ideas and resources

Teacher Indicators: models curiosity, thinks-aloud when interacting with disparate media, asks probing questions, withholds evaluative statements, provides exemplars, monitors and encourages student thinking habits

Apps: FlipBoard, Pocket, Podkicker, Zotero

Appropriate Questions: What sources of information are available to me? What do others around me know? What's worth studying? What possibilities, problems, or situations tend to interest me? What types of experiences, perspectives, and data are available to me? When am I at my best?
Big Idea: Summarizing, paraphrasing, and categorizing learning with teacher or expert support.
This happens by analyzing data, identifying and clarifying misconceptions, and otherwise 'getting a feel' for the scale, nature, and possibility of selected topics of inquiry.

After skimming, reading, watching, and otherwise interacting with a variety of media, this stage of the inquiry process is centered around students clarifying both their own thinking, and the nature of 'things' around them: ideas for projects, scientific challenges, opportunities for revision, need for design thinking, a new scale to tackle persistent problems, etc.

Thinking patterns are both inward and reflective, and outward and communicated. In that way, students both reflect on their own knowledge, while beginning to identify possible pathways forward.

Tone: Slightly more focused, reflective, independent, cautious

Student Indicators: Paraphrases understanding in familiar language; resists looking for 'answers' and 'solutions'; distinguishes between fact and opinion; evaluates the credibility and relevance of sources; focused on possibility

Teacher Indicators: offers non-evaluative and frequent feedback; provides relevant graphic organizers and other ways to 'frame' student thinking; asks probing questions that focus on student thinking: what they know and why they think they know it;

Appropriate Questions: What's the big picture here? What are the pieces and how do they fit? What's accessible, and what's not? What's possible? Am I missing critical data, perspectives, or opportunities for collaboration that could further clarify my thinking? What do I seem to understand, and how do I know?
Apps: MindMeister, WordPress, Quora, reddit Big Idea: Asking questions to drive continued, self-directed inquiry
The questioning phase is a critical phase of the inquiry-based learning process, if for no other reason than misunderstandings, lack of organization, uneven confidence, or an inability to see the 'big picture' surface here more clearly than other phases.

Students and teachers alike must also be able to trust the nature and patterns of inquiry that are often recursive and iterative: They often move back and forth between phases, and new skills and understandings can be obtained in frustratingly small increments. Inquiry-based learning is more about the process, tone, and instincts of learning than other 'tidier' academic forms, which can require both students and teachers to adjust their measures of progress, quality, and success.

Tone: Creative, confident, interdependent

Student Indicators: Curious, precise with questions, self-monitoring, big-picture thinking, little-picture application

Teacher Indicators: models questioning, thinks-aloud in revising irrelevant or otherwise flawed questions; models use of concept-mapping tools to analyze thinking; hosts QFT sessions and Socratic seminars

Appropriate Questions: What's worth understanding? Where are my knowledge gaps? What is both within and beyond my reach? What have I done in the past that can help me in this situation moving forward?

Apps: Evernote, MindMeister, twitter, Quora, reddit
Big Idea: Designing an accessible, relevant, and curiosity-driven action or product to culminate and justify inquiry
At this final stage of the inquiry-based learning process, learners are focused on design.

Design of solutions to address problems within a manageable scale

Design of logical and curiosity-based applications of current understanding

Design of next steps to extend their own learning pathway

Tone: Creative, restrained, calculating

Appropriate Questions:What now? What audience makes sense for this research? Where can I do 'good work'? What would be 'cool'? What have others before me done?

Apps: Posts, Mextures, Inkist, Google Drive, DesignPad, Foldify

Student Indicators: Clarifies thinking, busy, self-directed, uncertain but efficacious, follows curiosity

Teacher Indicators: Creates 'conditions and means' for collaboration; i dentifies areas for revision, reflects back on entire process (i.e., "how we get to this point")
4 Student Questions For Post-Phase Reflection
After the inquiry-based learning process is 'finished' (for the purposes of classroom work, publishing, grading, etc.), it can be helpful for students to reflect in the inquiry-based learning process through questions such as:

What skills did I depend on?

What do I now understand more deeply, and how do I know?

If I had more time or resources, what else could I have done?

What is the role of inquiry in learning?
4 Phases of Inquiry-Based Learning: A Guide For Teachers; image attribution flickr user woodleywonderworks and usgahumphreys

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4 Phases Of Inquiry-Based Learning: A Guide For Teachers

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The phases of inquiry-based learning can vary depending on context but generally include Interacting, Clarifying, Questioning, and Designing.

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"The Simple Four is a problem-solving research model developed for South Carolina and works with the research and inquiry standard (Standard 6) in the 2007 ELA Academic Standards."

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The Simple Four is a problem-solving research model developed for South Carolina and works with the research and inquiry standard (Standard 6) in the 2007 ELA Academic Standards.

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A visual model of Stripling's Model of Inquiry including bulleted key tasks at each step.

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Cockerille provides tips on how to help students conduct online research effectively.

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There has been a great deal of buzz about research-based writing lately, in no small part because of its emphasis in the Common Core Standards. Indeed, there is an entire strand of the writing standards dedicated to research. From the document English Language arts & Literacy in History/Social Studies, Science, and Technical Subjects (p.18):

Research to Build and Present Knowledge
7. Conduct short as well as more sustained research projects based on focused questions, demonstrating
understanding of the subject under investigation.
8. Gather relevant information from multiple print and digital sources, assess the credibility and accuracy of each source, and integrate the information while avoiding plagiarism.
9. Draw evidence from literary or informational texts to support analysis, reflection, and research

Research-based writing is quite challenging in that it requires complex reading skills. Students must comprehend, analyze, and translate evidence, and they must evaluate sources. And that is just the tip of the iceberg. They also must learn to write well, to structure their writing, to link ideas and evidence, and to connect with their readers.

One thing I find so interesting when I visit schools, or when I'm teaching myself, is noticing what is exactly the same as when I was in elementary school thirty years ago and what is different. When I was in school, we conducted plenty of research projects. There are very few of us born before the new millenium who cannot conjure images of notecards, confusing tomes, and the Dewey Decimal system. There is much that has not changed when it comes to research projects. I remember struggling with the research portion of research-based writing when I was in school, and I see many students now doing the same.

There is, of course, one HUGE thing that has changed about research-based writing: the Internet. Imagine being able to type in a phrase such as "eating habits of the Tasmanian devil" and getting about 14,000 results in .61 seconds. That would have been very hard to believe for me as a girl, as I combed through old volumes of the Encyclopedia Britannica hoping I might find a kernel or two that I could weave into my report.

Here are a few tips for helping students to conduct online research effectively and safely to support research-based writing. Many are based on ideas from Bringing History to Life, in the Grade 4 Units of Study for Opinion, Information, and Narrative Writing, which I co-wrote with Lucy Calkins.

Bookmark appropriate search engines. Although Google is the go-to search tool for many of us, it's not always the most kid-friendy. Try kidrex.org, askkids.com, awesomelibrary.org, and onekey.com.

Try channeling kids to conduct image searches rather than Web searches. Images are more accessible in the sense that one does not need to be at a particular reading level in order to be able to make sense of them. Additionally, studying images can help students to visualize topics they are researching in order to get a better understanding of them. And of course, images encourage analysis and interpretation as students must translate ideas they garner from studying them into their own words.

Teach kids to minimize the words they enter into a search engine. Kids often use too many words when conducting searches, yielding results that are off topic or that lack focus. Many kids enter an entire question, such as: "What kinds of things do kiwi birds eat at night?" While search engines might produce some viable results, the results will be much more targeted if fewer words are entered, such as: "kiwi bird diet".

Many kids (and adults) aren't aware of how to use keywords and symbols effectively to refine searches. Typing a phrase into a search engine without any keywords will yield a list of results that contain the words in the search in any order. Putting quotes around the phrase will yield a list of results in that exact order. Additionally, the keywords "and" and "or" might be helpful. The keyword "and" will return sites with all of the terms (kiwi and echidna, for example), while the keyword "or" will return results with one or the other.

It's ok to go retro - kids still do benefit from reading actual books. One tip: make sure you have a variety of reading material at appropriate levels, and let your students pick they books they read and use for research. If books are too difficult, students will just skim them in hopes of finding a line or two they can understand enough to pluck out and pop into their reports. Incidentally, this is what they often do with websites, most of which are too difficult for many young students.

As my husband, who loves to go on "Wikipedia walks" can attest, the Internet can be a real time-waster. One site leads to another, a list of tens of thousands of websites must be pursued. Be on the lookout for students who have gone down the rabbit hole of web-searching, and limit their time online.

Finally, to ensure that students are thinking, crafting, and composing, and not just parroting or reporting, emphasize ideas in addition to (or more than) facts. As they collect information in their notes, teach students to study information they find online and to sort it, weigh it, and distill it. As they draft, teach students to include their own thinking about the information and some transition phrases to link their ideas to information from published sources (This is important because..., In other words..., This connects with...). Chris Lehman's book, Energizing Research Reading and Writing is a wealth of insightful tips on helping students to distill researched information.

Your Turn

What does research-based writing look like in your classroom/school/district?

What are ways you teach your students to safely use the Internet?

Anna is a staff developer, literacy coach, and writer, based in New York City. She taught internationally in places such as Sydney, Australia; San Pedro Sula, Honduras, and Auckland, New Zealand in addition to New York before becoming a staff developer for the Teachers College Reading and Writing Project at Columbia University (TCRWP). She has been an adjunct instructor in the Literacy Specialist Program at Teachers College, and teaches at TCRWP where she helps participants bring strong literacy instruction into their classrooms. Anna recently co-wrote Bringing History to Life with Lucy Calkins, part of the 2013 series Units of Study in Opinion, Information, and Narrative Writing (Heinemann). She has been a researcher for Lucy Calkins, contributing especially to Pathways to the Common Core (Heinemann, 2012) and Navigating Nonfiction (Heinemann, 2010). View all posts by Anna Gratz Cockerille

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There has been a great deal of buzz about research-based writing lately, in no small part because of its emphasis in the Common Core Standards. Indeed, there is an entire strand of the writing standards dedicated to research. From the document English Language arts & Literacy in History/Social Studies, Science, and Technical Subjects (p.18): Research to Build and Present Knowledge 7.

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A simplified chart detailing the difference between a projects and project-based learning using short, to the point explanations.

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by TeachThought Staff

Projects in the classroom are as old as the classroom itself.

'Projects' can represent a range of tasks that can be done at home or in the classroom, by parents or groups of students, quickly or over time. While project-based learning (PBL) also features projects, in PBL the focus is more on the process of learning and learner-peer-content interaction than the end-product itself.

While some examples of project-based learning might be helpful, it's also useful to understand the big picture: While PBL is a different approach to learning, it's not hugely different from traditional learning from a broad enough perspective. The learning process is simply personalized in a progressive PBL environment by students asking important questions, and making changes to products and ideas based on individual and collective response to those questions. In PBL, the projects only serve as an infrastructure to allow users to play, experiment, use simulations, address authentic issues, and work with relevant peers and community members in pursuit of knowledge.

By design, PBL is learner-centered. Students don't simply choose between two highly academic projects to complete by a given date, but instead, use the teacher's experience to design and iterate products and projects-which often address issues or challenges that are important to them.

The chart by Amy Mayer at the bottom of this post is helpful to clarify many of the important differences between projects and PBL. Ultimately, the biggest difference is the process itself.
Projects
The audiences are generally in the school

Are more about the end-product and less about the learning and process

They are pre-planned and clear

They are based on directions and criteria

They can be done at home without teacher guidance or collaboration

They can be outlined in detail on one piece (or even two pieces) of paper by the teacher

In a project, the 'teacher work' mainly occurs after the work is complete

Are less open-ended and more uniform

Projects are 'turned in' rather than 'published,' presented, or otherwise managed on an ongoing basis (like a business, for example)
PBL
In PBL, the audience is generally outside the school

PBL includes 'need to knows' and progress checkpoints

Input from peers, teachers, community members, experts, and others can help guide and improve the project

The 'teacher work' is done mainly before and during the process itself

PBL Is often based on a driving question and ongoing inquiry, discovery, and iteration

PBL depends on background knowledge, learner choice, technology tools, support from others, and dozens of other factors that result in a process of learning that produces very different results

Image attribution flickr user josekevo; © Amy Mayer, @friEdTechnology, The Original WOW! Academy, www.friEdTechnology.com

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What's the difference between projects and PBL? In PBL, the focus is not on projects but the process of learning through them.

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"The flipped classroom places the responsibility for learning on the students. They cannot be passive attendees, silently sitting through a session, because the instructor is not there to lecture or present, but to support their work." Benjes-Small and Tucker explain the concept of flipped classrooms, their benefits, an example of how to flip a library workshop, and and challenges with flipped environments.

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10 Edtech Tools for the Flipped Classroom

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10 Edtech Tools for the Flipped Classroom

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"Thankfully there are tons of edtech tools that will do the heavy lifting for you, and also walk you through the process." Lynch created a list of ten tech tools that benefit the flipped environment.

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10 Edtech Tools for the Flipped Classroom

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Spread the loveThe traditional model of teachers lecturing in the classroom and students completing practice and homework on their own is changing. Instead, students are learning on their own and using the classroom as a place to dig more deeply into what they've learned.

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Formative Assessment That Truly Informs Instruction

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Formative Assessment That Truly Informs Instruction

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The NCTE outlined what a formative assessment is and is not along with examples of specific assessments that fall under the categories of observations, conversations, and student self-evaluations.

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A list of seven focuses to consider when providing the most effective feedback to students. Without these focuses, feedback is not descriptive enough for students to understand where they need to improve.

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Vol. 70

No. 1

Abstract

What Is Feedback, Anyway?

Feedback Essentials

Progress Toward a Goal

"But There's No Time!"

Advice, evaluation, grades-none of these provide the descriptive information that students need to reach their goals. What is true feedback-and how can it improve learning?

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Abstract

What Is Feedback, Anyway?

Feedback Essentials

Progress Toward a Goal

"But There's No Time!"

Who would dispute the idea that feedback is a good thing? Both common sense and research make it clear: Formative assessment, consisting of lots of feedback and opportunities to use that feedback, enhances performance and achievement.

Yet even John Hattie (2008), whose decades of research revealed that feedback was among the most powerful influences on achievement, acknowledges that he has "struggled to understand the concept" (p. 173). And many writings on the subject don't even attempt to define the term. To improve formative assessment practices among both teachers and assessment designers, we need to look more closely at just what feedback is-and isn't.

What Is Feedback, Anyway?

The term feedback is often used to describe all kinds of comments made after the fact, including advice, praise, and evaluation. But none of these are feedback, strictly speaking.

Basically, feedback is information about how we are doing in our efforts to reach a goal. I hit a tennis ball with the goal of keeping it in the court, and I see where it lands-in or out. I tell a joke with the goal of making people laugh, and I observe the audience's reaction-they laugh loudly or barely snicker. I teach a lesson with the goal of engaging students, and I see that some students have their eyes riveted on me while others are nodding off.

Here are some other examples of feedback:

A friend tells me, "You know, when you put it that way and speak in that softer tone of voice, it makes me feel better."

A reader comments on my short story, "The first few paragraphs kept my full attention. The scene painted was vivid and interesting. But then the dialogue became hard to follow; as a reader, I was confused about who was talking, and the sequence of actions was puzzling, so I became less engaged."

A baseball coach tells me, "Each time you swung and missed, you raised your head as you swung so you didn't really have your eye on the ball. On the one you hit hard, you kept your head down and saw the ball."

Note the difference between these three examples and the first three I cited-the tennis stroke, the joke, and the student responses to teaching. In the first group, I only had to take note of the tangible effect of my actions, keeping my goals in mind. No one volunteered feedback, but there was still plenty of feedback to get and use. The second group of examples all involved the deliberate, explicit giving of feedback by other people.

Whether the feedback was in the observable effects or from other people, in every case the information received was not advice, nor was the performance evaluated. No one told me as a performer what to do differently or how "good" or "bad" my results were. (You might think that the reader of my writing was judging my work, but look at the words used again: She simply played back the effect my writing had on her as a reader.) Nor did any of the three people tell me what to do (which is what many people erroneously think feedback is-advice). Guidance would be premature; I first need to receive feedback on what I did or didn't do that would warrant such advice.

In all six cases, information was conveyed about the effects of my actions as related to a goal. The information did not include value judgments or recommendations on how to improve. (For examples of information that is often falsely viewed as feedback, see "Feedback vs. Advice" above and "Feedback vs. Evaluation and Grades" on p. 15.)

Decades of education research support the idea that by teaching less and providing more feedback, we can produce greater learning (see Bransford, Brown, & Cocking, 2000; Hattie, 2008; Marzano, Pickering, & Pollock, 2001). Compare the typical lecture-driven course, which often produces less-than-optimal learning, with the peer instruction model developed by Eric Mazur (2009) at Harvard. He hardly lectures at all to his 200 introductory physics students; instead, he gives them problems to think about individually and then discuss in small groups. This system, he writes, "provides frequent and continuous feedback (to both the students and the instructor) about the level of understanding of the subject being discussed" (p. 51), producing gains in both conceptual understanding of the subject and problem-solving skills. Less "teaching," more feedback equals better results.

Feedback Essentials

Whether feedback is just there to be grasped or is provided by another person, helpful feedback is goal-referenced; tangible and transparent; actionable; user-friendly (specific and personalized); timely; ongoing; and consistent.

1. Goal-Referenced

Effective feedback requires that a person has a goal, takes action to achieve the goal, and receives goal-related information about his or her actions. I told a joke-why? To make people laugh. I wrote a story to engage the reader with vivid language and believable dialogue that captures the characters' feelings. I went up to bat to get a hit. If I am not clear on my goals or if I fail to pay attention to them, I cannot get helpful feedback (nor am I likely to achieve my goals).

Information becomes feedback if, and only if, I am trying to cause something and the information tells me whether I am on track or need to change course. If some joke or aspect of my writing isn't working -a revealing, nonjudgmental phrase-I need to know.

Note that in everyday situations, goals are often implicit, although fairly obvious to everyone. I don't need to announce when telling the joke that my aim is to make you laugh. But in school, learners are often unclear about the specific goal of a task or lesson, so it is crucial to remind them about the goal and the criteria by which they should self-assess. For example, a teacher might say,

The point of this writing task is for you to make readers laugh. So, when rereading your draft or getting feedback from peers, ask, How funny is this? Where might it be funnier?

As you prepare a table poster to display the findings of your science project, remember that the aim is to interest people in your work as well as to describe the facts you discovered through your experiment. Self-assess your work against those two criteria using these rubrics. The science fair judges will do likewise.

2. Tangible and Transparent

Any useful feedback system involves not only a clear goal, but also tangible results related to the goal. People laugh, chuckle, or don't laugh at each joke; students are highly attentive, somewhat attentive, or inattentive to my teaching.

Even as little children, we learn from such tangible feedback. That's how we learn to walk; to hold a spoon; and to understand that certain words magically yield food, drink, or a change of clothes from big people. The best feedback is so tangible that anyone who has a goal can learn from it.

Alas, far too much instructional feedback is opaque, as revealed in a true story a teacher told me years ago. A student came up to her at year's end and said, "Miss Jones, you kept writing this same word on my English papers all year, and I still don't know what it means." "What's the word? " she asked. "Vag-oo," he said. (The word was vague!)

Sometimes, even when the information is tangible and transparent, the performers don't obtain it-either because they don't look for it or because they are too busy performing to focus on the effects. In sports, novice tennis players or batters often don't realize that they're taking their eyes off the ball; they often protest, in fact, when that feedback is given. (Constantly yelling "Keep your eye on the ball!" rarely works.) And we have all seen how new teachers are sometimes so busy concentrating on "teaching" that they fail to notice that few students are listening or learning.

That's why, in addition to feedback from coaches or other able observers, video or audio recordings can help us perceive things that we may not perceive as we perform; and by extension, such recordings help us learn to look for difficult-to-perceive but vital information. I recommend that all teachers videotape their own classes at least once a month. It was a transformative experience for me when I did it as a beginning teacher. Concepts that had been crystal clear to me when I was teaching seemed opaque and downright confusing on tape-captured also in the many quizzical looks of my students, which I had missed in the moment.

3. Actionable

Effective feedback is concrete, specific, and useful; it provides actionable information. Thus, "Good job!" and "You did that wrong" and B+ are not feedback at all. We can easily imagine the learners asking themselves in response to these comments, What specifically should I do more or less of next time, based on this information? No idea. They don't know what was "good" or "wrong" about what they did.

Actionable feedback must also be accepted by the performer. Many so-called feedback situations lead to arguments because the givers are not sufficiently descriptive; they jump to an inference from the data instead of simply presenting the data. For example, a supervisor may make the unfortunate but common mistake of stating that "many students were bored in class." That's a judgment, not an observation. It would have been far more useful and less debatable had the supervisor said something like, "I counted ongoing inattentive behaviors in 12 of the 25 students once the lecture was underway. The behaviors included texting under desks, passing notes, and making eye contact with other students. However, after the small-group exercise began, I saw such behavior in only one student."

Such care in offering neutral, goal-related facts is the whole point of the clinical supervision of teaching and of good coaching more generally. Effective supervisors and coaches work hard to carefully observe and comment on what they observed, based on a clear statement of goals. That's why I always ask when visiting a class, "What would you like me to look for and perhaps count?" In my experience as a teacher of teachers, I have always found such pure feedback to be accepted and welcomed. Effective coaches also know that in complex performance situations, actionable feedback about what went right is as important as feedback about what didn't work.

4. User-Friendly

Even if feedback is specific and accurate in the eyes of experts or bystanders, it is not of much value if the user cannot understand it or is overwhelmed by it. Highly technical feedback will seem odd and confusing to a novice. Describing a baseball swing to a 6-year-old in terms of torque and other physics concepts will not likely yield a better hitter. Too much feedback is also counterproductive; better to help the performer concentrate on only one or two key elements of performance than to create a buzz of information coming in from all sides.

Expert coaches uniformly avoid overloading performers with too much or too technical information. They tell the performers one important thing they noticed that, if changed, will likely yield immediate and noticeable improvement ("I was confused about who was talking in the dialogue you wrote in this paragraph"). They don't offer advice until they make sure the performer understands the importance of what they saw.

5. Timely

In most cases, the sooner I get feedback, the better. I don't want to wait for hours or days to find out whether my students were attentive and whether they learned, or which part of my written story works and which part doesn't. I say "in most cases" to allow for situations like playing a piano piece in a recital. I don't want my teacher or the audience barking out feedback as I perform. That's why it is more precise to say that good feedback is "timely" rather than "immediate."

A great problem in education, however, is untimely feedback. Vital feedback on key performances often comes days, weeks, or even months after the performance-think of writing and handing in papers or getting back results on standardized tests. As educators, we should work overtime to figure out ways to ensure that students get more timely feedback and opportunities to use it while the attempt and effects are still fresh in their minds.

Before you say that this is impossible, remember that feedback does not need to come only from the teacher, or even from people at all. Technology is one powerful tool-part of the power of computer-assisted learning is unlimited, timely feedback and opportunities to use it. Peer review is another strategy for managing the load to ensure lots of timely feedback; it's essential, however, to train students to do small-group peer review to high standards, without immature criticisms or unhelpful praise.

6. Ongoing

Adjusting our performance depends on not only receiving feedback but also having opportunities to use it. What makes any assessment in education formative is not merely that it precedes summative assessments, but that the performer has opportunities, if results are less than optimal, to reshape the performance to better achieve the goal. In summative assessment, the feedback comes too late; the performance is over.

Thus, the more feedback I can receive in real time, the better my ultimate performance will be. This is how all highly successful computer games work. If you play Angry Birds, Halo, Guitar Hero, or Tetris, you know that the key to substantial improvement is that the feedback is both timely and ongoing. When you fail, you can immediately start over-sometimes even right where you left off-to get another opportunity to receive and learn from the feedback. (This powerful feedback loop is also user-friendly. Games are built to reflect and adapt to our changing need, pace, and ability to process information.)

It is telling, too, that performers are often judged on their ability to adjust in light of feedback. The ability to quickly adapt one's performance is a mark of all great achievers and problem solvers in a wide array of fields. Or, as many little league coaches say, "The problem is not making errors; you will all miss many balls in the field, and that's part of learning. The problem is when you don't learn from the errors."

7. Consistent

To be useful, feedback must be consistent. Clearly, performers can only adjust their performance successfully if the information fed back to them is stable, accurate, and trustworthy. In education, that means teachers have to be on the same page about what high-quality work is. Teachers need to look at student work together, becoming more consistent over time and formalizing their judgments in highly descriptive rubrics supported by anchor products and performances. By extension, if we want student-to-student feedback to be more helpful, students have to be trained to be consistent the same way we train teachers, using the same exemplars and rubrics.

Progress Toward a Goal

In light of these key characteristics of helpful feedback, how can schools most effectively use feedback as part of a system of formative assessment? The key is to gear feedback to long-term goals.

Let's look at how this works in sports. My daughter runs the mile in track. At the end of each lap in races and practice races, the coaches yell out split times (the times for each lap) and bits of feedback ("You're not swinging your arms!" "You're on pace for 5:15"), followed by advice ("Pick it up-you need to take two seconds off this next lap to get in under 5:10!").

My daughter and her teammates are getting feedback (and advice) about how they are performing now compared with their final desired time. My daughter's goal is to run a 5:00 mile. She has already run 5:09. Her coach is telling her that at the pace she just ran in the first lap, she is unlikely even to meet her best time so far this season, never mind her long-term goal. Then, he tells her something descriptive about her current performance (she's not swinging her arms) and gives her a brief piece of concrete advice (take two seconds off the next lap) to make achievement of the goal more likely.

The ability to improve one's result depends on the ability to adjust one's pace in light of ongoing feedback that measures performance against a concrete, long-term goal. But this isn't what most school district "pacing guides" and grades on "formative" tests tell you. They yield a grade against recent objectives taught, not useful feedback against the final performance standards. Instead of informing teachers and students at an interim date whether they are on track to achieve a desired level of student performance by the end of the school year, the guide and the test grade just provide a schedule for the teacher to follow in delivering content and a grade on that content. It's as if at the end of the first lap of the mile race, My daughter's coach simply yelled out, " B+ on that lap!"

The advice for how to change this sad situation should be clear: Score student work in the fall and winter against spring standards, use more pre-and post-assessments to measure progress toward these standards, and do the item analysis to note what each student needs to work on for better future performance.

"But There's No Time!"

Although the universal teacher lament that there's no time for such feedback is understandable, remember that "no time to give and use feedback" actually means "no time to cause learning." As we have seen, research shows that less teaching plus more feedback is the key to achieving greater learning. And there are numerous ways-through technology, peers, and other teachers-that students can get the feedback they need.

So try it out. Less teaching, more feedback. Less feedback that comes only from you, and more tangible feedback designed into the performance itself. And, of course, send me some feedback on this article at gwiggins@authenticeducation.org.

Feedback vs. Advice

› You need more examples in your report.

› You might want to use a lighter baseball bat.

› You should have included some Essential Questions in your unit plan.

These three statements are not feedback; they're advice. Such advice out of the blue seems at best tangential and at worst unhelpful and annoying. Unless it is preceded by descriptive feedback, the natural response of the performer is to wonder, "Why are you suggesting this?"

As coaches, teachers, and parents, we too often jump right to advice without first ensuring that the learner has sought, grasped, and tentatively accepted the feedback on which the advice is based. By doing so, we often unwittingly end up unnerving learners. Students become increasingly insecure about their own judgment and dependent on the advice of experts-and therefore in a panic about what to do when varied advice comes from different people or no advice is available at all.

If your ratio of advice to feedback is too high, try asking the learner, "Given the feedback, do you have some ideas about how to improve?" This approach will build greater autonomy and confidence over the long haul. Once they are no longer rank novices, performers can often self-advise if asked to.

Feedback vs. Evaluation and Grades

› This is a weak paper.

› You got a C on your presentation.

› I'm so pleased by your poster!

These comments make a value judgment. They rate, evaluate, praise, or criticize what was done. There is little or no feedback here-no actionable information about what occurred. As performers, we only know that someone else placed a high or low value on what we did.

How might we recast these comments to be useful feedback? Tip: Always add a mental colon after each statement of value. For example,

"Good work: Your use of words was more precise in this paper than in the last one, and I saw the scenes clearly in my mind's eye."

"This is a weak paper: Almost from the first sentence, I was confused as to your initial thesis and the evidence you provide for it. In the second paragraph you propose a different thesis, and in the third paragraph you don't offer evidence, just beliefs."

You'll soon find that you can drop the evaluative language; it serves no useful function.

The most ubiquitous form of evaluation, grading, is so much a part of the school landscape that we easily overlook its utter uselessness as actionable feedback. Grades are here to stay, no doubt-but that doesn't mean we should rely on them as a major source of feedback.

References

Bransford, J. D., Brown, A. L., & Cocking, R. R. (Eds.). (2000). How people learn: Brain, mind, experience, and school. Washington, DC: National Academy Press.

Hattie, J. (2008). Visible learning: A synthesis of over 800 meta-analyses relating to achievement. New York: Routledge.

Mazur, E. (2009, January 2). Farewell, lecture? Science, 323, 50-51.

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Advice, evaluation, grades-none of these provide the descriptive information that students need to reach their goals. What is true feedback-and how can it improve learning?

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27 Easy Formative Assessment Strategies for Gathering Evidence of Student Learning

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27 Easy Formative Assessment Strategies for Gathering Evidence of Student Learning

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Dyer generated a list of twenty-seven different formative assessments with a detailed explanation of how to implement each one. While each strategy is simple, all provide evidence of student learning to assist in planning how to move forward in instruction.

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A few years ago, I came across "10 assessments you can perform in 90 seconds" by TeachThought and really enjoyed the formative assessment strategies they outlined. Using formative assessment strategies in class during instruction-or "simple assessments," as they call them-is easy and provides the instant feedback teachers need to identify which learners need more help and adjust their instruction and lesson plans accordingly. Visit the blog above to get more detail on the following techniques:

1. New Clothes

2. Dos and Don'ts

3. Three Common Misunderstandings

4. Yes/No Chart

5. Three Questions

6. Explain What Matters

7. Big Picture

8. Venn Diagram

9. Draw It

10. Self-Directed Response

Combining these 10 with 10 others we've blogged about in the past gives teachers 20 great formative assessment strategies for checking on student learning. Be sure to click through to learn more about these formative assessment strategies.

Want more? Here are seven more strategies you can use to elicit evidence of student learning.

1. Entrance Tickets. We've blogged about and explained the Exit Ticket, so why not have an Entrance Ticket? Here, the teacher asks a question at the start of a lesson, and students write their responses on index cards or strips of paper. Answers are used to assess initial understanding of something to be discussed in that day's lesson or as a short summary of understanding of the previous day's lesson. The teacher designs the lesson around the fact that information on student learning will be coming in at the start of the lesson and can be used to improve the teaching and learning in that lesson. Be sure to write the question so it is easily interpreted and analyzed, allows time for you and/or the students to analyze the responses, and leaves space for you to adjust the lesson, if needed.

2. Keep the Question Going. With this formative assessment strategy, you'll ask one student a question and then ask another student if that answer seems reasonable or correct. Then, ask a third student for an explanation of why there is an agreement or not. This helps keep all the students engaged because they must be prepared to either agree or disagree with the answers given and provide explanations.

3. 30-Second Share. With this strategy, students take a turn to report something learned in a lesson for up to 30 seconds each. Connections to the learning targets or success criteria are what you'll be looking for in the language used by the student. Make this a routine at the end of a lesson so all students have the opportunity to participate, share insights, and clarify what was learned.

4. Parking Lot. This is an underused strategy for students and one that can surface questions before learning, as well as during and after. This tool also offers an anonymous place for questions that may be directly related to the content or tangential to the current topic and provide insight into student thinking. Simply save a spot on your whiteboard to write down ideas or questions that aren't completely relevant in the moment but should be revisited later.

5. One-Minute Paper. This might be considered a type of exit ticket as it is typically done near the end of the day. Ask your students, either individually or with a partner, to respond in writing to a single prompt. Typical prompts include:

Most important learning from the day and why

Most surprising concept and why

Most confusing topic and why

Something I think might appear on a test or quiz and why

3-2-1. At the end of the learning, this strategy provides students a way to summarize or even question what they just learned. Three prompts are provided for students to respond to:

3 things you didn't know before

2 things that surprised you about the topic

1 thing you want to start doing with what you've learned

Assessment Reflection. This strategy is a post-assessment reflection completed individually first and then shared in a small group. After an assessment, the teacher provides a list of questions so learners can reflect on their assessment experience. During group discussion, ideas are collected as new information to support students to better prepare for and engage in future assessments. Consider the following or similar questions. You might also use strategies such as Plus, Minus, Interesting, or Plus/Delta.

How engaged were you with this assessment? Why?

What did you feel most confident about? Why?

What did you do that led to your success or confidence?

What was the most difficult part of this assessment? Why?

What would you do differently next time?

What was the most confusing? Why?

What do you know about the topic that the assessment didn't allow you to show?

Dig in

All 27 of these formative assessment strategies are simple to administer and free or inexpensive to use. They'll provide you with the evidence of student learning you need to make lesson plan adjustments and keep learning on target and moving forward. They'll also give your students valuable information so they can adjust their learning tactics and know where to focus their energies.

If you're not quite sure where to get started, the following discussion questions can help.

Questions for teachers

How do you use formative assessment data to inform instructional decisions?

How can formative assessment strategies foster a learning environment of collaboration and engagement?

How do formative assessment strategies elicit evidence of student learning?

What is one strategy you could try tomorrow and why?

How do you use formative assessment data to drive school-wide instructional academic decisions?

How can you model formative assessment strategies in staff meetings, PLCs, and meetings with teachers?

What are three formative assessment strategies you could bring to your teachers and staff? Why do you feel these would be most effective at your school?

Get more formative assessment tips and tricks in our e-book "Making it work: How formative assessment can supercharge your practice."

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27 Easy Formative Assessment Strategies for Gathering Evidence of Student Learning

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All 27 of these formative assessment strategies are simple to administer and free or inexpensive to use. They provide the teacher with the evidence of student learning needed to make lesson plan adjustments and keep learning on target and moving forward.

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Tips & Strategies for Effective Differentiation & Instruction

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Tips & Strategies for Effective Differentiation & Instruction

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This video explains ways to differentiate in the school library environment through process, product, and presentation.

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Tips & Strategies for Effective Differentiation & Instruction.wmv

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6 Scaffolding Strategies to Use With Your Students

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6 Scaffolding Strategies to Use With Your Students

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"Simply put, scaffolding is what you do first with kids. For those students who are still struggling, you may need to differentiate by modifying an assignment or making accommodations like choosing a more accessible text or assigning an alternative project." Alber details six different scaffolding strategies to use with kids to meet them where they currently are in their understanding.

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Support every student by breaking learning up into chunks and providing a concrete structure for each.

What's the opposite of scaffolding a lesson? Saying to students, "Read this nine-page science article, write a detailed essay on the topic it explores, and turn it in by Wednesday." Yikes! No safety net, no parachute-they're just left to their own devices.

Let's start by agreeing that scaffolding a lesson and differentiating instruction are two different things. Scaffolding is breaking up the learning into chunks and providing a tool, or structure, with each chunk. When scaffolding reading, for example, you might preview the text and discuss key vocabulary, or chunk the text and then read and discuss as you go. With differentiation, you might give a child an entirely different piece of text to read, or shorten the text or alter it, or modify the writing assignment that follows.

Simply put, scaffolding is what you do first with kids. For those students who are still struggling, you may need to differentiate by modifying an assignment or making accommodations like choosing a more accessible text or assigning an alternative project.

Scaffolding and differentiation do have something in common, though. In order to meet students where they are and appropriately scaffold a lesson or differentiate instruction, you have to know the individual and collective zone of proximal development (ZPD) of your learners. Education researcher Eileen Raymond says, "The ZPD is the distance between what children can do by themselves and the next learning that they can be helped to achieve with competent assistance."

So let's get to some scaffolding strategies you may or may not have tried yet. Or perhaps you've not used them in some time and need a gentle reminder on how awesome and helpful they can be when it comes to student learning.

1. Show and Tell

Try a fishbowl activity, where a small group in the center is circled by the rest of the class; the group in the middle, or fishbowl, engages in an activity, modeling how it's done for the larger group.

Always show students the outcome or product before they do it. If a teacher assigns a persuasive essay or inquiry-based science project, a model should be presented side-by-side with a criteria chart or rubric. You can guide students through each step of the process with the model of the finished product in hand.

Use think alouds, which will allow you to model your thought process as you read a text, solve a problem, or design a project. Remember that children's cognitive abilities are still in development, so opportunities for them to see developed, critical thinking are essential.

How many of us say that we learn best by seeing something rather than hearing about it? Modeling for students is a cornerstone of scaffolding, in my experience. Have you ever interrupted someone with "Just show me!" while they were in the middle of explaining how to do something? Every chance you have, show or demonstrate to students exactly what they are expected to do.

2. Tap Into Prior Knowledge

Ask students to share their own experiences, hunches, and ideas about the content or concept of study and have them relate and connect it to their own lives. Sometimes you may have to offer hints and suggestions, leading them to the connections a bit, but once they get there, they will grasp the content as their own.

Launching the learning in your classroom from the prior knowledge of your students and using this as a framework for future lessons is not only a scaffolding technique-many would agree it's just plain good teaching.

3. Give Time to Talk

All learners need time to process new ideas and information. They also need time to verbally make sense of and articulate their learning with the community of learners who are engaged in the same experience and journey. As we all know, structured discussions really work best with children regardless of their level of maturation.

If you aren't weaving in think-pair-share, turn-and-talk, triad teams, or some other structured talking time throughout the lesson, you should begin including this crucial strategy on a regular basis.

4. Pre-Teach Vocabulary

Sometimes referred to as front-loading vocabulary, this is a strategy that we teachers don't use enough. Many of us, myself included, are guilty of sending students all alone down the bumpy, muddy path known as Challenging Text-a road booby-trapped with difficult vocabulary. We send them ill-prepared and then are often shocked when they lose interest, create a ruckus, or fall asleep.

Pre-teaching vocabulary doesn't mean pulling a dozen words from the chapter and having kids look up definitions and write them out-we all know how that will go. Instead, introduce the words to kids in photos or in context with things they know and are interested in. Use analogies and metaphors, and invite students to create a symbol or drawing for each word. Give time for small-group and whole-class discussion of the words. Not until they've done all this should the dictionaries come out. And the dictionaries will be used only to compare with those definitions they've already discovered on their own.

With the dozen or so words front-loaded, students are ready, with you as their guide, to tackle that challenging text.

5. Use Visual Aids

Graphic organizers, pictures, and charts can all serve as scaffolding tools. Graphic organizers are very specific in that they help kids visually represent their ideas, organize information, and grasp concepts such as sequencing and cause and effect.

A graphic organizer shouldn't be The Product but rather a scaffolding tool that helps guide and shape students' thinking. Some students can dive right into discussing, or writing an essay, or synthesizing several different hypotheses, without using a graphic organizer of some sort, but many of our students benefit from using one with a difficult reading or challenging new information. Think of graphic organizers as training wheels-they're temporary and meant to be removed.

6. Pause, Ask Questions, Pause, Review

This is a wonderful way to check for understanding while students read a chunk of difficult text or learn a new concept or content. Here's how this strategy works: Share a new idea from discussion or the reading, then pause (providing think time), and then ask a strategic question, pausing again.

You need to design the questions ahead of time, making sure they're specific, guiding, and open-ended. (Even great questions fail if we don't give think time for responses, so hold out during that Uncomfortable Silence.) Keep kids engaged as active listeners by calling on someone to give the gist of what was just discussed, discovered, or questioned. If the class seems stuck on the questions, provide an opportunity for students to discuss in pairs.

With all the diverse learners in our classrooms, there is a strong need for teachers to learn and experiment with new scaffolding strategies. I often say to teachers I support that they have to slow down in order to go quickly. Scaffolding a lesson may, in fact, mean that it takes longer to teach, but the end product is of far greater quality and the experience much more rewarding for all involved.

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6 Scaffolding Strategies to Use With Your Students

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Support every student by breaking learning up into chunks and providing a concrete structure for each. What's the opposite of scaffolding a lesson? Saying to students, "Read this nine-page science article, write a detailed essay on the topic it explores, and turn it in by Wednesday." Yikes!

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What Differentiated Instruction Is and Is Not

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What Differentiated Instruction Is and Is Not

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A detailed table of what differentiation is, is not, and an explanation helps to explain many misconceptions about differentiation with their reasoning.

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Levels of Library Services and Instructional Partnerships

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Levels of Library Services and Instructional Partnerships

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A detailed chart explaining the different levels of library and classroom teacher partnerships.

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Levels of Library Services and Instructional Partnerships

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My Favorite Collaborative Lesson: Learn About Each Other Using Hexagonal Thinking

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My Favorite Collaborative Lesson: Learn About Each Other Using Hexagonal Thinking

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A four day lesson plan that would be a great start to a school year. The lessons hit on keyword searches, copyright, and how to use Google Slides all while building the classroom community through connections between students.

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Inspiration can come from so many places! Sometimes a collaborative project starts with the school librarian and sometimes it begins with the classroom teacher. This project was developed from an idea shared by a classroom teacher. She had listened to Episode 154 from the . In the episode, Betsy Potash talks with Jennifer Gonzalez about how to use this strategy with students. Potash worked in a high school, but we were able to adapt this strategy to make it work for students in elementary too. We borrowed an idea from Terri Eichholz on the Cult of Pedagogy called Hexagonal Thinking: A Colorful Tool for Discussion Engage Their Minds blog post, added a bit of information literacy skills, and a beautiful collaborative project was born!

Grade Level: 3rd Grade

Overview:

This was a four-part project that was used as a get-to-know-you activity at the start of the school year. The idea was to get kids to see all the different ways they are connected to each other. We wanted to build a classroom community while teaching information literacy and technology skills.

Lesson 1: Six Sentences About You

Objectives:

Materials:

Activities:

Assessment:

Students will have created their six sentences and identified a search term for each.

Tips & Tricks:

We found that encouraging students to think broadly about the sentences they created to represent themselves allowed for a richer discussion during the last part of the project. Not just using one theme or topic, such as "I love soccer. I love baseball. I love hockey." Instead identifying a variety of things they like or do.

Lesson 2: Finding Rights-Cleared Images

Objectives:

Students will understand that images are copyrighted.

Students will be able to find rights-cleared images and save them on their devices.

Materials:

Activities:

Assessment:

Students will have six saved images to represent each of their sentences.

Tips & Tricks:

Using a real-life example when explaining copyright allowed students to understand this concept better.

We ended up having several conversations about how the search terms may change in order to find what they are looking for as they started to search.

Lesson 3: Adding Pictures to Google Slides

Objectives:

Students will open a link to a Google Slides template and make a copy.

Students will learn to insert images, create a text box, and adjust the size of each image/text box.

Materials:

Activities:

Assessment:

Students will have a completed hexagon with six images that represent themselves with their name in the middle.

Lesson 4: Connecting Our Hexagons

Objectives:

Students will share what their pictures represent

Students will discuss and find ways to connect their hexagons together

Materials:

Printed hexagons from Lesson #3

Pictures of sample connections

Activities:

Assessment:

Each group will create connections using their hexagon.

Tips & Tricks:

Keeping the groups to eight students or fewer is important. They all want to make the biggest combination they can, like connecting the whole class, but with more than eight they are not able to talk to each other or communicate well.

The conversations that students had were nothing sort of amazing! They made connections and thought more creatively than we ever expected. Although this project included several steps we felt it was worth the time spent because it helped teach skills that they will continue to use throughout the year. Each of the classroom teachers have used Hexagonal Thinking again to teach concepts in both reading and math. There are so many possibilities!
Resources:
Eichholz, Terri. (2022, July 15). Getting to Know You Hexagons for Back to School. Retrieved August 18, 2022, from https://engagetheirminds.com/2022/07/15/getting-to-know-you-hexagons-for-back-to-school/.

Gonzalez, Jennifer, host. "Hexagonal Thinking: A Colorful Tool for Discussion." The Cult of Pedagogy , 11 September 2020. https://www.cultofpedagogy.com/hexagonal-thinking/ .

Author: Kelly Hincks

I am the librarian at Detroit Country Day Lower School in Bloomfield Hills, MI. I have worked as a school librarian for the past eleven years. I was a classroom teacher for four years prior to that. I have worked in charter, public, and private schools. My favorite thing about being a school librarian is the opportunities I have to work both with students and teachers. I love the co-teaching opportunities and connections I have been able to make! I have served on AASL committees as a member and chair. I currently serve as secretary of my state association, Michigan Association of School Librarians (MASL).

Categories: Community/Teacher Collaboration, Student Engagement/ Teaching Models, Technology

Tags: Back to school, copyright, Google Slides, Hexagonal Thinking, images, search terms

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My Favorite Collaborative Lesson: Learn About Each Other Using Hexagonal Thinking -

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Inspiration can come from so many places! Sometimes a collaborative project starts with the school librarian and sometimes it begins with the classroom teacher. This project was developed from an idea shared by a classroom teacher. She had listened to Episode 154 from the Cult of Pedagogy called Hexagonal Thinking: A Colorful Tool for Discussion.

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Collaborative Strategies - Some Ideas to Try!

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Collaborative Strategies - Some Ideas to Try!

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A "cheat sheet" into ways to begin collaborating in the school including conversation starters, day to day strategies, and big picture ideas.

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A Closer Look at Reading Incentive Programs

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A Closer Look at Reading Incentive Programs

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Kohn examines reading incentive programs and their design of having children read to complete a task to earn a prize rather than creating lifelong readers and their effects on the way children read. "Think about it: reading has been presented not as a pleasurable experience but as a means for obtaining a goody."

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(Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1993/1999/2018)

By Alfie Kohn

All those reading incentive campaigns inflicted on elementary school children across the country provide sobering evidence of just how many parents and educators are trapped by Skinnerian thinking. They also illustrate the consequences of extrinsic motivators more generally. Asked about the likely results of "Book It!", Pizza Hut's food-for-reading program, educational psychologist John Nicholls replied, only half in jest, that it would probably produce "a lot of fat kids who don't like to read."

Consider the following excerpt from a recent article in USA Today:

When school let out for the summer, a Philadelphia mother was concerned her 9-year-old son would take a three-month vacation from reading. "He has not learned to love books," Christina Long said then. "He only reads what's required of him." That was before Greg Prestegord learned he could earn packs of baseball cards and other prizes by reading books through his library's summer reading programs. Two days later the avid baseball fan checked out six books. "That's why I'm doing it," Greg says. "I must have a million baseball cards."

The article goes on to note that this summer program is similar to others around the country that offer movie parties, zoo passes, and other prizes to children who pick up enough books. Presumably the librarians who administer them and the parents who support them have the very best of intentions. But if Ms. Long is typical, they are not listening to what their children are telling them. Greg is both candid and unequivocal: baseball cards are "why I'm doing it," he says. Thus, he is still reading (as his mother puts it) "only . . . what's required of him"; the only thing that has changed is that reading is now required to get a card instead of a grade. A program that turns vacation reading into something one has to do to obtain a reward is hardly likely to produce children who have "learned to love books." Quite the contrary.

"But at least he's reading now," Ms. Long might protest. "At least he's being introduced to new books!" And this is true. The reward buys us a behavior - in this case, the act of checking out a book and reading it. But at what price? The quality of performance in general and of learning in particular tend to decline significantly when people are extrinsically motivated (see chapters 3 and 8). Moreover, once the library runs out of baseball cards, children are not only unlikely to continue reading; they are less likely to read than they were before the program began. Think about it: reading has been presented not as a pleasurable experience but as a means for obtaining a goody.

The experience of children in an elementary school class whose teacher introduced an in-class reading-for-reward program can be multiplied hundreds of thousands of times:

The rate of book reading increased astronomically . . . [but the use of rewards also] changed the pattern of book selection (short books with large print became ideal). It also seemed to change the way children read. They were often unable to answer straight-forward questions about a book, even one they had just finished reading. Finally, it decreased the amount of reading children did outside of school.[1]

Notice what is going on here. The problem is not just that the effects of rewards don't last. No, the more significant problem is precisely that the effects of rewards do last, but these effects are the opposite of what we were hoping to produce. What rewards do, and what they do with devastating effectiveness, is to smother people's enthusiasm for activities they might otherwise enjoy.

*

.... As if grades weren't doing enough damage, tens of thousands of schools now use corporate-sponsored reading incentives. At least as disturbing as Pizza Hut's "Book It!" is something called Accelerated Reader. Here, a school purchases (from a corporation called Advantage Learning Systems, Inc.) a packaged program in which students must choose their reading from a list of accepted titles and then take a fact-based computerized quiz on each book in order to earn points and prizes. Many educators who spend scarce funds on this program simply (and understandably) wish to encourage reading. But what matters more than the fact that children read is why they read and how they read. With incentive-based programs, the answer to "why" is "To get rewards," and this, as the data make painfully clear, is often at the expense of interest in reading itself. The answer to "how," meanwhile, at least with Accelerated Reader, is "superficially": they're skimming for facts they will need for the quiz, which is altogether different from the sort of thoughtful engagement we'd like to see kids come to adopt when they open a book.[2]

In 1997, Jeff McQuillan at California State University published a review of the available research on the effects of reading incentives. He found that the few investigations that did turn up positive effects tended to rely on self-selected samples of students, which makes it difficult to draw conclusions about what actually led to the results. Typically, the studies also failed to compare these students to others who were not in such programs, much less to others who were in programs that didn't involve rewards. (For example, other research has shown that time set aside for free voluntary reading in school is effective at promoting both skills and interest). McQuillan concluded that none of the available studies "showed any clearly positive effect on reading comprehension, vocabulary, or reading habits that could be attributed solely to the use of rewards and incentives, and in one case the practice [of offering rewards] may have led to a decline." He recommended that schools spend money on books rather than on packaged programs that offer extrinsic inducements for reading.[3]

*

"Children who see reading as a desirable activity tend to read more frequently and thus develop better reading skills," one group of researchers reminded us. Their 2010 study also found that children who read for extrinsic reasons "have poorer reading skills than do children with lower extrinsic motivation." And this effect proves distressingly durable: Kids with an extrinsic orientation in fourth grade are still weaker readers in sixth grade, and that's true even if their earlier literacy skills are held constant.[4]

No wonder offering kids rewards for reading books reliably backfires. A new study confirms that finding: Children who get a goodie for reading subsequently become less interested in reading. (The only exception in this study was that kids who received a book as a reward remained as interested in reading as those who didn't get a reward at all.)[5] And in a recent multi-district investigation of Accelerated Reader, kids whose elementary schools used A.R. were less excited about books by the time they were in middle school than those whose schools were A.R.-free. A smaller study of third graders likewise found that "reading incentives were counterproductive."[6]

One teacher captured all this research in a succinct slogan: "Reading is rewarding when there's no reward for reading."[7] (Feel free to print that on a poster and offer it to your local public and school libraries.)
NOTES
1 Barry Schwartz, "Reinforcement-Induced Behavioral Stereotypy: How Not to Teach People to Discover Rules," Journal of Experimental Psychology: General 111 (1982): 53 n 5.

2 For a similar criticism, see Betty Carter, "Hold the Applause: Do Accelerated Reader and Electronic Bookshelf Send the Right Message?" School Library Journal, October 1996: 22-25. This article elicited a number of letters to the editor. One fan wrote in to defend Accelerated Reader on the following basis: "If the program is so ineffective, then why are 25,000 schools participating?" In the same issue, however, another librarian reported seeing "parents take books away from children because they didn't have a high point value and therefore weren't worth reading." Other educators have pointed out to me that the Accelerated Reader program has a demoralizing effect on students who don't read as fluently as their peers, driving home their relative failure in a painfully public way.

3 Jeff McQuillan, "The Effects of Incentives on Reading," Reading Research and Instruction 36 (1997): 111-25. Quotation appears on p. 122.

4 Michael Becker, Nele McElvany, and Marthe Kortenbruck, "Intrinsic and Extrinsic Reading Motivation as Predictors of Reading Literacy: A Longitudinal Study," Journal of Educational Psychology 102 (2010): 773-85; quotations appear on p. 781.

5 Barbara A. Marinak and Linda B. Gambrell, "Intrinsic Motivation and Rewards," Literacy Research and Instruction 47 (2008): 9-26.

6 Multi-district study: Linda M. Pavonetti, Kathryn M. Brimmer, and James F. Cipielewski, "Accelerated Reader: What Are the Lasting Effects on the Reading Habits of Middle School Students Exposed to Accelerated Reader in Elementary Grades," Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy 46 (2002/2003): 300-11. Third-grade study: Gayle M. Stanfield, "Incentives: The Effects on Reading Attitude and Reading Behaviors of Third-Grade Students," The Corinthian, vol. 9, article 8 (2008): 99-116. For an overview of A.R. research, see Stephen Krashen, "The (Lack of) Experimental Evidence Supporting the Use of Accelerated Reader," Journal of Children's Literature 29 (2003): 16-30. And here are perspectives on A.R. of a teacher and a children's book author, respectively.

7 This aphorism is by John T. Spencer, a middle-school teacher turned college professor.

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A Closer Look at Reading Incentive Programs

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A Closer Look at Reading Incentive Programs

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Six Literacy Experiences Children Should Have Every Day

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Six Literacy Experiences Children Should Have Every Day

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An article that details six specific literacy experiences that children should have daily in order to "become successful, engaged readers."

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A simplified video explanation of the difference between copyright law and creative commons in terms of producing and sharing content.

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Download/Embed 3 Videos Download 3 Lesson Plans
Designed for Teaching

Use in Classrooms, LMSs & Online

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Designed for Teaching

Use in Classrooms, LMSs & Online

Access ALL Cut-outs Download/Embed ALL Videos Download ALL Lesson Plans Access Current & Future videos Access ALL Video Packs EDIT Our Videos w/ Your Software
Add Logos, New Scenes, URLs

Change the Voice-over

Start a New Project Quickly

Access Cut-outs ONLY
Formats: PNG, EPS, SVG

Hi-Res + Clear Backgrounds

Use in Presentations & Videos

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Copyright and Creative Commons Explained by Common Craft (VIDEO)

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Download/Embed 3 Videos Download 3 Lesson Plans Designed for Teaching Use in Classrooms, LMSs & Online Download/Embed ALL Videos Download ALL Lesson Plans Access Current & Future videos Access ALL Video Packs Designed for Teaching Use in Classrooms, LMSs & Online Access ALL Cut-outs Download/Embed ALL Videos Download ALL Lesson Plans Access Current & Future videos Access ALL Video Packs EDIT Our Videos w/ Your Software Add Logos, New Scenes, URLs Change the Voice-over Start a New Project Quickly Access Cut-outs ONLY Formats: PNG, EPS, SVG Hi-Res + Clear Backgrounds Use in Presentations & Videos

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How Teachers Can Find and Download Safe Creative Common Images for Use in the Classroom

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How Teachers Can Find and Download Safe Creative Common Images for Use in the Classroom

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This article explains the different Creative Commons licenses that may be attached to images and what a teacher would have to do in order to use the image based on the specific type of license.

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How Teachers Can Find and Download Safe Creative Common Images for use in the Classroom

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Whenever students start any multimedia project, they may find simply Googling the images and using the images that attract them the most as an easy way; but educators have the responsibility to teach students to respect copyright. One of the ways that educators can teach their students to respect copyright holders is to teach them about Creative Common Images.

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How to Find Public Domain and Creative Commons Images

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How to Find Public Domain and Creative Commons Images

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This blog post details three websites to use when trying to find public domain or Creative Commons images for teacher use to avoid copyright issues.