I have been looking forward to this week's blog post ever since I settled on the idea that I would write about how tabletop role-playing games (RPGs) can better develop oral communication skills. Oral Communications has three overall expectations: listen in order to understand and respond appropriately, use speaking skills and strategies appropriately to communicate, and reflect on and identify their strengths as listeners and speakers. I believe that oral communication is something that is often neglected in favor of reading and writing, which is a shame as I believe good oral communication skills can help to improve reading in writing skills. You can read more about the benefits of oral communication for learning from this article about using formal debates in the classroom. The focus of this post however, is on the use of tabletop RPGs in the classroom to help and improve oral communication skills.
Earlier I have discussed how RPGs can be used to improve reading skills so I won't be spending time here again explaining what RPGs are. If you're curious as to what they are you can read my earlier post on the reading strand or my genius hour on RPGs in the classroom. I wanted to share a TED Talk from journalist, critic and teacher Ethan Gilsdorf who highlights how an RPG like Dungeons and Dragons can help children to become better people. Most of the life skills that Ethan highlights come from the oral communication component that is integral to RPGs. You can watch the video below to get an idea of what an RPG is and also what skills it can provide players.
One of the most important skills for oral communication which is also highlighted as an overall expectation is the ability to listen well. To me this skill goes hand in hand with developing patience, being able to wait and listen for your time to talk next. RPGs help to develop these skills as you must work together to cooperatively tell a story. These skills are highlighted in Brian Fogila's article on how Dungeons and Dragons teaches students patience. The only problem I have with the last two sources is that they use Dungeons and Dragons as their base. For many this name might sound familiar, in terms of the RPG industry D&D is the most recognized game. For students though I feel like this would be inappropriate, not because of the subject matter but because the rules can get in the way of the players/students ideas. To this end I would recommend a less rules heavy and less preparation demanding RPG such as Dungeon World. I believe that these games can help students express themselves creatively and problem solve in a low risk safe space. Although many of them are in fantasy settings this is not a requirement for RPGs. You can find games that are set in historical or a particular mythological settings if that is something you would rather focus on. You can also find games that are more friendly for younger grades to introduce them early without fear of the content. For starters you could always tone down the content of an existing game like Dungeon World, or find a new game. One that I found that I think would be great for younger kids is called Engine Heart, a game where you play WALL-E like robots and the best part about it is it's free and open source.
I have played RPGs regularly now for the past 8 or so years, and I honestly believe that it helped make me, and the people I played with, better at communicating. I will not lie, it is awkward and strange at first but I believe that's more the case the older you are when you start playing. I believe that younger kids are more open to acting as another character and I believe that RPGs can help create a safe low risk environment that allows students to problem solve or act creatively through oral communication.
Saturday, 26 November 2016
Friday, 25 November 2016
Assessment Blog Post 2
The Ontario Ministry of Education document Growing Success for me has changed the ways I view assessment. For me the sections on The Achievement Chart and Assessment for and as learning have offered the greatest change in perspectives. Each subject's curriculum (Math, Language Arts, Social Studies, etc.) has a section detailing the achievement chart categories and what they mean for the specific subjects. In Growing Success though it details what these categories mean more generally such as Knowledge and Understand, Thinking, Communication and Application. The document goes on to explain what the grade levels for these categories entails relating to the provincial standards. To me this is very important as the Achievement Chart helps to form my assessment of learning. The language used in the Achievement Chart is what I would use to create rubrics. To me a standard like this is really helpful for informing how to do assessment of learning in my placement.
All of this being said there are different ways of assessment detailed in Growing Success, namely assessment for and as learning. This is something I still feel I am grappling with to understand better. I understand assessment as learning, it involves different forms of self and peer assessment so that students can better assess their own learning. However, I am not sure when this form of assessment is most appropriate and if it is appropriate for all students at all grade levels. I believe that self-assessment is something a teacher has to model, but I am unsure how. This is something that I would like to look into more, how to model self-assessment of work to students and teach them how to do it. Assessment for learning to me is a bit more confusing. I know it involves diagnostic and formative assessment: diagnostic being assessment of student knowledge before instruction, and formative being assessment during instruction. The problem is that I am unsure how assessment for learning looks like outside of exit cards, anecdotal notes, observations and conversations with students.
Clearly my learning about assessment is not done as I still have many questions left to be answered and explored. I can only try to move forward with an open mind and the ability to adapt to new knowledge and experience when it comes to assessment.
All of this being said there are different ways of assessment detailed in Growing Success, namely assessment for and as learning. This is something I still feel I am grappling with to understand better. I understand assessment as learning, it involves different forms of self and peer assessment so that students can better assess their own learning. However, I am not sure when this form of assessment is most appropriate and if it is appropriate for all students at all grade levels. I believe that self-assessment is something a teacher has to model, but I am unsure how. This is something that I would like to look into more, how to model self-assessment of work to students and teach them how to do it. Assessment for learning to me is a bit more confusing. I know it involves diagnostic and formative assessment: diagnostic being assessment of student knowledge before instruction, and formative being assessment during instruction. The problem is that I am unsure how assessment for learning looks like outside of exit cards, anecdotal notes, observations and conversations with students.
Clearly my learning about assessment is not done as I still have many questions left to be answered and explored. I can only try to move forward with an open mind and the ability to adapt to new knowledge and experience when it comes to assessment.
Thursday, 24 November 2016
Math Reflection Week 10: Probability and Data Management
For this week our class was focused on data management and probability. For me personally I always enjoyed probability and data management, I always see it as kind of a game. For probability this outlook seems obvious as often lessons in probability involve dice, cards and spinners. I always got a certain enjoyment out of understanding the odds or likelihood of certain outcomes in the context of games. To me data management ties into this as it can represent the likelihood of these events in a understandable form. For this week I had the chance to develop a math question with a photo to accompany it. So due to the timing I decided to make a probability question. The question is simple enough, if you were to roll 5 dice and each time you rolled you removed the dice that came up as 1 eventually all dice will be eliminated. If we were to do this process 10 times how many rolls on average will we have to make? I quite like this problem as it can easily become a whole lesson where the students break up into groups with chart paper to keep track of their experiment. I also like it because it lets students use dice as manipulatives. This activity can also be easily extended to incorporate the data management strand by having students graph their outcomes. At the end all the students can come together and the whole class can combine the data to come up with a class average. I have personally designed this lesson with a grade 8 class in mind and as such it best fits those curriculum expectations for data management and probability. You can read through the curriculum expectations here, for this assignment it would be the first and second specific expectation for probability.
In class we had the opportunity to experience other data management and probability activities. My table group was assigned the task of guessing how many times we could toss a ball into a cup and guess the likelihood of those events occurring. We of course got the opportunity to actually toss the ball into the cup, which was fun. I quite liked this activity because its not your typical roll rice or toss a coin probability activity. It nicely incorporated prediction into it by giving us the predictions, with our responsibility being to guess how likely they are to occur.
Both of these activities I feel like can be turned into a lesson easily and are defiantly going on my list of things to consider implementing in a class during my placement. I believe that both activities are great for teaching probability and data management as they allow for the use of engaging manipulatives and allow for collaborative group work. I always loved learning about probability so I would love to get the chance to try and translate that passion and interest into a lesson.
In class we had the opportunity to experience other data management and probability activities. My table group was assigned the task of guessing how many times we could toss a ball into a cup and guess the likelihood of those events occurring. We of course got the opportunity to actually toss the ball into the cup, which was fun. I quite liked this activity because its not your typical roll rice or toss a coin probability activity. It nicely incorporated prediction into it by giving us the predictions, with our responsibility being to guess how likely they are to occur.
Both of these activities I feel like can be turned into a lesson easily and are defiantly going on my list of things to consider implementing in a class during my placement. I believe that both activities are great for teaching probability and data management as they allow for the use of engaging manipulatives and allow for collaborative group work. I always loved learning about probability so I would love to get the chance to try and translate that passion and interest into a lesson.
Wednesday, 16 November 2016
Math Reflection Week 9: Measurement and Digital Tools
For this week in our math course we are exploring how to teach measurements to students. If geometry was my favorite strand in math then measurement was probably my second favorite. Students learn measurement in math in three stages throughout the grades: definition/comparison, nonstandard units, and then standard units. Nonstandard units mean using things like cubes, while standard units is measuring in centimeters or grams. You can explore how this translates to a grade by grade level at the math curriculum here. Throughout the grade levels students perform two overall expectations that are generally the same. First they develop good measurement sense using estimation or physical measuring using a variety of strategies. Second they determine measurement relationships, the relationships among units and measurable attributes among various shapes depending on the grade level. I believe one of the reasons why I enjoyed both geometry and measurement is because they encourage the use of math manipulative. Having something concrete to work with defiantly helped my learning and understanding of units of measurement.
If you want to know what teaching measurements looks like you can watch one of my teacher colleagues present a measurement lessons here. I quite like this activity because it makes good use of math manipulatives, having students cut out images from magazines, having students estimate which ones are larger, compare them by size, and then calculate the area of the images using graph paper as a guide. This lesson also makes use of different means of assessment for and as learning. Her "students" made conjectures and hypothesis while they worked and the teacher gave feedback to these questions. As stated earlier this lesson also makes good use of manipulatives, a great idea for a grade 4-5 lesson who often need these concrete manipulatives. You can find strategies for providing assessment for and as learning in math here. As I stated earlier this lesson makes good use of assessing reasoning and proving and representing. The instructor does an excellent job of providing encouragement for the student's learning asking questions to the students, encouraging communication and having the students share their strategies.
I also had a chance this week to read and hear about my professor's (Rebecca Bunz's) strategies for better integration and evaluation of digital tools in the classroom. I don't really think I have the space to go over everything about her strategy here, nor do I think I would be able to do it a good service in doing so. Instead I would like to highlight one particular stage of her plan that stood out to me. Stage 5 of her plan focuses on searching, finding, and evaluating digital tools, and highlights that teachers need to consider the cost, rating, age appropriateness, user policy, features, and above all play all the levels. I believe that this level of scrutiny is so important to do if you are planning on using a digital tool for instruction. Most important of all though you must consider if this tool will help your students achieve curriculum standards and learning goals. This feeds back into the earlier criteria, that the teacher must familiarize themselves with the tool and determine if it achieves the goals you want, and if does not can it be accommodated. Of course this is only step 5, and although it might sounds important there are other steps you have to take to use step 5 successfully, like establishing a PLC.
If you want to know what teaching measurements looks like you can watch one of my teacher colleagues present a measurement lessons here. I quite like this activity because it makes good use of math manipulatives, having students cut out images from magazines, having students estimate which ones are larger, compare them by size, and then calculate the area of the images using graph paper as a guide. This lesson also makes use of different means of assessment for and as learning. Her "students" made conjectures and hypothesis while they worked and the teacher gave feedback to these questions. As stated earlier this lesson also makes good use of manipulatives, a great idea for a grade 4-5 lesson who often need these concrete manipulatives. You can find strategies for providing assessment for and as learning in math here. As I stated earlier this lesson makes good use of assessing reasoning and proving and representing. The instructor does an excellent job of providing encouragement for the student's learning asking questions to the students, encouraging communication and having the students share their strategies.
I also had a chance this week to read and hear about my professor's (Rebecca Bunz's) strategies for better integration and evaluation of digital tools in the classroom. I don't really think I have the space to go over everything about her strategy here, nor do I think I would be able to do it a good service in doing so. Instead I would like to highlight one particular stage of her plan that stood out to me. Stage 5 of her plan focuses on searching, finding, and evaluating digital tools, and highlights that teachers need to consider the cost, rating, age appropriateness, user policy, features, and above all play all the levels. I believe that this level of scrutiny is so important to do if you are planning on using a digital tool for instruction. Most important of all though you must consider if this tool will help your students achieve curriculum standards and learning goals. This feeds back into the earlier criteria, that the teacher must familiarize themselves with the tool and determine if it achieves the goals you want, and if does not can it be accommodated. Of course this is only step 5, and although it might sounds important there are other steps you have to take to use step 5 successfully, like establishing a PLC.
Monday, 14 November 2016
Language and Literacy: Writing Strand
In my earlier blog post for language and literacy I brought up the use of role-playing games in the classroom to teach reading skills. However, a recent reading has come up that has really grabbed my attention as a prospective educator. This article focuses on the use of persuasive writing in classrooms and how to teach and model persuasive writing to students. The article is called Gradually Releasing Responsibility to Students Writing Persuasive Texts by Sylvia Read, Melanie London-hays and Alicia Martin-Rivas. This text highlights a couple interesting points for me. Firstly it states that students in younger grades never learn or practice persuasive writing, instead focusing on narrative writing skills. Secondly this article displays how teachers can model persuasive writing to a class using a model called IMSCI (Inquiry, Modelling, Shared Writing, Collaborative Writing, and Independent Writing). I will break down what I believe these two points mean for teaching persuasive writing, but I first thought it would be appropriate to relate these ideas to my own experiences writing persuasive research papers during my undergrad. I feel like this is a fair comparison because in the article the students are using the skills of writing outside of language arts class (it's in the context of a science class), and even at a university level I still exercised the basic skills highlighted in this form of instruction.
One resource that I found in my fourth year undergrad as a history major was the Stanford History Education Group, which offers useful intro materials for writing in history and lesson plans. For this post though I want to focus on their intro material, specifically their historical thinking chart (pictured below). To me this chart helps to highlight a lot of what the article on persuasive writing touches on. The article on persuasive writing makes clear that students cannot learn how to write persuasively without first learning how to read persuasive texts. This chart nicely highlights the skills that students at any level have to exercise when reading persuasive texts under the Close Reading section. Likewise, these are things that students have to make clear when writing their own persuasive texts. I also think that teachers can easily use the IMSCI model in a historical writing context by encouraging inquiry and modelling along the lines of close reading, sourcing, contextualization, and corroboration. Like the article on persuasive writing I do not believe that these skills are too advanced for elementary students, but should be taught early. The article by Sylvia Read states that they were instructing a fourth grade class how to write persuasively and got surprisingly good results out of it. I therefore believe that if teachers model how to write persuasively in different contexts (such as science or history as appropriate to the subject) and provide scaffolding with a gradual release of responsibility they can become effective persuasive writers.
One resource that I found in my fourth year undergrad as a history major was the Stanford History Education Group, which offers useful intro materials for writing in history and lesson plans. For this post though I want to focus on their intro material, specifically their historical thinking chart (pictured below). To me this chart helps to highlight a lot of what the article on persuasive writing touches on. The article on persuasive writing makes clear that students cannot learn how to write persuasively without first learning how to read persuasive texts. This chart nicely highlights the skills that students at any level have to exercise when reading persuasive texts under the Close Reading section. Likewise, these are things that students have to make clear when writing their own persuasive texts. I also think that teachers can easily use the IMSCI model in a historical writing context by encouraging inquiry and modelling along the lines of close reading, sourcing, contextualization, and corroboration. Like the article on persuasive writing I do not believe that these skills are too advanced for elementary students, but should be taught early. The article by Sylvia Read states that they were instructing a fourth grade class how to write persuasively and got surprisingly good results out of it. I therefore believe that if teachers model how to write persuasively in different contexts (such as science or history as appropriate to the subject) and provide scaffolding with a gradual release of responsibility they can become effective persuasive writers.
Stanford Historical Education Group. Historical Thinking Chart [Online Image].
Thursday, 10 November 2016
Math Reflection Week 8: Geometry and Lesson Plans
This week our math class got the chance to dive into the curriculum strand of geometry and spatial sense. Geometry and patterning have always been my favorite math subjects growing up, so I excited to see what my fellow student teachers would do with their learning activities. I was not disappointed, all of the learning activity presentations this week were great. The first thing we got a chance to do was plotting points on a grid and connecting them to form an image. You can find that resource here if you're interested. As I stated earlier I really enjoyed this weeks learning activities, particularly the ones which included manipulatives. One activity had us using various polygonal shapes to fit within a large diamond shaped asteroid.
We had to to recreate this shape using different guidelines or restrictions such as it being symmetrical or using at least two hexagons. I love these kinds of activities for students because it gets them working hands on developing their geometry and spatial sense skills. Obviously this activity exercises fairly basic geometry skills, but I believe that it can be modified to fit higher grade levels. The other activity that I liked involved the creation of three dimensional shapes using two dimensional nets. I feel like this is an activity a lot of students have done even outside of math. What I liked about how my group chose the do it, is that we used these rubber tiles and pieced them together to form a cube, pictured below.
I always found cutting out nets from paper, gluing them together, and trying to bend it to fit into a nice cube was always a finicky task. So for me creating it using the nice tile manipulatives saved a lot of frustration. That being said these tiles are somewhat limited. For example if you wanted your students to create square or triangular based pyramids these tiles would not work so well, and in that case paper nets would be best. Still I had a lot of fun getting to manipulate geometric objects in a mathematical context again. Unlike many things in math, knowledge of shapes, their properties, and relations to each other has never really left me and is still something I'm interested in.
We wrapped up our class by discussing the creation of our math lesson plans. It is an assignment that has us getting into pairs and constructing a lessons plan for any grade, on any strand, using the Brock lesson plan template. Many of my classes are having me constructing lesson plans and I'm definitely looking forward to it. Making lesson plans was a skill that I felt I really needed starting this year, so I'm glad I'm finally getting some experience in doing it. Me and my partner will be designing a lesson plan for a grade 4 class that involves the construction of 3D shapes using 2D paper nets. So it ties in strongly with what we practiced in class that week. Progress on this lesson plan has already come along nicely, and I look forward to any feedback on it in the coming weeks.
Michael Feagan. (Nov. 4, 2016). Asteroid Shapes [photo].
Michael Feagan. (Nov. 8 2016), Rubber Cube [photo].
I always found cutting out nets from paper, gluing them together, and trying to bend it to fit into a nice cube was always a finicky task. So for me creating it using the nice tile manipulatives saved a lot of frustration. That being said these tiles are somewhat limited. For example if you wanted your students to create square or triangular based pyramids these tiles would not work so well, and in that case paper nets would be best. Still I had a lot of fun getting to manipulate geometric objects in a mathematical context again. Unlike many things in math, knowledge of shapes, their properties, and relations to each other has never really left me and is still something I'm interested in.
We wrapped up our class by discussing the creation of our math lesson plans. It is an assignment that has us getting into pairs and constructing a lessons plan for any grade, on any strand, using the Brock lesson plan template. Many of my classes are having me constructing lesson plans and I'm definitely looking forward to it. Making lesson plans was a skill that I felt I really needed starting this year, so I'm glad I'm finally getting some experience in doing it. Me and my partner will be designing a lesson plan for a grade 4 class that involves the construction of 3D shapes using 2D paper nets. So it ties in strongly with what we practiced in class that week. Progress on this lesson plan has already come along nicely, and I look forward to any feedback on it in the coming weeks.
Thursday, 3 November 2016
Math Reflection Week 7: ESL Students
This week we had a very informative math class with engaging activities from both our professor and fellow students. This week some of my fellow students took on the role of teaching patterning and algebra to our class. Now many people find algebra to be an intimidating thing. particularly young students, so I am really happy to say that all of the presenters expressed it in a accessible and understandable way. I was particularly fond of one student's presentation of patterning where she taught the Fibonacci Sequence and spiral. Before this lesson I was familiar with the concept of the Fibonacci Spiral in art, but was unaware of the mathematical elements behind it. I therefore found this activity really engaging for me as I got to learn something new that helped expand my schema. I also got to thinking about how I would teach patterning and the Fibonacci Sequence in my class, and got to thinking that maybe you could do a cross curricular activity between art and math where students utilize the Fibonacci Spiral. Just a concept but would be something I would love to look into further.
The subject of teaching ESL (English Second Language) students was also brought up in class. For me as a teacher with plans of potentially teaching abroad to ESL students I was really interested in this. It also corresponded nicely to the virtual career fair on teaching abroad which was going on the day after. We broke down ESL learners into four types: early stage learners, foundation learners, confident users, and fluent users. You can find the document that details what these mean and what strategies teachers can use for them here. Our professor broke us up into groups based on the four types of ESL learners to come up with strategies for teaching them. My group got fluent users, which you might initially think there would be no challenges to teaching these students in English, but there are. These fluent learners often experience frustration due to higher language expectations and can still make errors with more complex or non-standard language such as math. These students can often get frustrated when their language is corrected. Teachers of these ESL students should not be afraid to still work one-on-one with them to ensure their understanding and make corrections.
I feel like the information I have received this week will be valuable when going in to my teaching service. Particularly if I decide to go abroad to teach ESL students I will take the advice I have received to heart and try to make a welcoming and encouraging environment for all ESL students.
The subject of teaching ESL (English Second Language) students was also brought up in class. For me as a teacher with plans of potentially teaching abroad to ESL students I was really interested in this. It also corresponded nicely to the virtual career fair on teaching abroad which was going on the day after. We broke down ESL learners into four types: early stage learners, foundation learners, confident users, and fluent users. You can find the document that details what these mean and what strategies teachers can use for them here. Our professor broke us up into groups based on the four types of ESL learners to come up with strategies for teaching them. My group got fluent users, which you might initially think there would be no challenges to teaching these students in English, but there are. These fluent learners often experience frustration due to higher language expectations and can still make errors with more complex or non-standard language such as math. These students can often get frustrated when their language is corrected. Teachers of these ESL students should not be afraid to still work one-on-one with them to ensure their understanding and make corrections.
I feel like the information I have received this week will be valuable when going in to my teaching service. Particularly if I decide to go abroad to teach ESL students I will take the advice I have received to heart and try to make a welcoming and encouraging environment for all ESL students.
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