6-Step Process to Designing Curriculum: Evaluation (Part 6 of 6)

From Kern et al

By Kim Miklusak

Last semester I took a Foundations of Curriculum and Instruction course at UIC. Our textbook, while a medical curriculum textbook, reminds us that curriculum design crosses education fields and that what we are doing in our classes every year has its grounding in research.  Kern, Thomas, and Hughes in their book provide a 6-step approach to curriculum development.  My goal is to share the theory behind our current practices to serve as a guide as design and redesign our courses.  Earlier steps can be found here.


Step 6: Evaluation & Feedback--the final step!

According to Kern (et al), feedback "closes the loop in the curriculum development cycle" (122).  Gathering evaluative data and feedback from participants helps determine the success of the curriculum and bolster support for it moving forward.  Ultimately the question is: did the design of your curriculum meet your intended goals and resolve concerns brought up in Step 1 of the General and Targeted Needs Assessment?

Benefits & drawbacks of various feedback

The feedback could be formative and ongoing, or summative and final.  It could be based on individual participants or the program as a whole.  It could be qualitative or quantitative.  It could be about the students or from your peers.  However, when it comes down to it, the feedback should be accurate.  So the questions become how do we best gather the information?  Are the questions clear?  Are the results useful?  Are they are on some sort of scale?  Are the questions asked in a fair manner?  Are they replicable?  Are they surveys?  Interviews?  Focus groups?

In Practice:

I know many teachers have developed opportunities for feedback through their year and at the end of their year--especially with increased access to tools such as Google Forms or Schoology polls.  For example, in the past I have asked students before and after our AP exam to rate themselves in various skill and habits of work areas as well as to rank the usefulness of activities I have done throughout the year.  I have used this information to guide planning for the following year.  I know other peers at EG and on Twitter give students more open-ended surveys, allowing broader feedback, as well as specific in-the-moment questions at the start of class or at the end of a unit.  A few years ago we even pulled together a focus group of students to discuss the purpose of school!  You can see their insightful comments in our blog post here!  This was probably one of my favorite moments of the past few years.

Yet as we develop and re-develop our courses every year or every few years I wonder if we truly gather the data we need to consider the effectiveness of our courses.  We can use AP and SAT data, grades, test results, etc.  Does that data help us?  Do we use it to guide our instruction and assessment?  Furthermore, do we ask the students?  I recognize that sometimes they aren't aware in the moment of the usefulness of some things we do, so in some cases their feedback isn't quite as valid as we'd like.  But in those moments I wonder if we've done enough to explain to them why we're doing what we're doing, which is feedback in and of itself!  

In the end I encourage everyone to ask their students for feedback at the end of the year and to analyze data as an individual, as a team, and as a subject if possible.  What you ask and how you ask it should be in whatever manner is most comfortable to you.  But you may be surprised at how useful what the data and students have to say is when it comes to redesigning your course!

Please feel free to share other insights and ideas based on your experiences in the comments below!

A Year in AP: Student Positivity (Week Twenty-five)

By Mark Heintz

Context

I have two main focuses as I write this weekly blog. Two driving questions that I have in my mind while making decisions.  They are:

• How do I know if my students know? 
• How do I get them to know if they know?  

Whether that is a skill or content, I want to know if they know it.   I no longer think it is acceptable for me to guess or get a feeling on whether or not they know it. Getting the students to know if they know it is downright hard, but I am really attempting to get to a point where the students can recognize their understandings or progress on their skill levels and content knowledge.  Therefore, the purpose of this year of reflection is to see how I make progress towards these two goals and elicit feedback from staff, students, and hopefully people who follow along on the journey.  You can read how last week went here.

Week Twenty-five: Answer the Question

This week the content focus was primarily on land-based empires from 1750-1900. Here were the standards for this week:

1. Understand how old empires dealt with the changes in the global distribution of power. 

This week's skill focus was still centered on analyzing charts, maps, and texts and pulling evidence from documents to support a claim.

1. Write one cause/effect, and one comparative short response that reflects an understanding of essential content.
2. Analyze charts, maps, graphs, and texts.
3. Write a thesis statement, contextualize a prompt, and draw evidence from two documents to support the thesis.  

Cite Specific Evidence

First, how do I know that the students know the content and how to do the skills?

This semester, I am including, or trying to include student's perspective on the week.  For this week's post, I asked two students to document their learning on the standards.  It was a great week to do this, for I missed two days this week due to a family emergency.  I shared a Google Doc to document their progress.  Each day,  I looked at the shared document to view their understandings of what took place during the day.

Bradley and Rodolfo volunteered to document their learning and reflect this week.

Bradley: This in-class exercise further helped to bolster my use of implementing documents into the paragraphs. It also most definitely helped with the “corroboration” piece of the writing. All in all, it was a great help.

Bradley: This particular in-class assignment of writing a contextualization paragraph really helped to refresh my memory. It had been a while since we had done one, so it was a great refresher.

Here is what Rodolfo had to say:

Understand how old empires dealt with the changes in the global distribution of power.



Rodolfo: This exercise boosted my confidence on how to contextualize and correctly explain my evidence. Although my group had some trouble figuring out what to do, we managed to all be on the same page in our writing. I find this very helpful and I do have problems formatting occasionally and it helps to know my elbow mate knows what they are doing.



Rodolfo: We practiced more document analyzing and at that point I felt very comfortable in my writing and it just flows, kind like when I talk. It has been a while since the last the class did a short answer question, but it was relatively easy. The acronym ACE is very effective and it always helps to know that.

My Reflection and Impact

The previous week ended on a snow day.  This week was also a four day week due to an extended President's Day observation.  Because of two shortened weeks back-to-back, there was a little lack of cohesion in the content.  It always rattles me a little bit, but lately less so because I have been moving away from the content driving the course.  I have been moving to recognizing patterns over time.  Looking back on the week, I was able to address patterns across older, land-based empires dealing with European powers.  Even though the students lacked some of the specific content knowledge because of the missing days in each week, they understood whether or not an empire will adapt to the changing global climate.  The weekly reflection continues to serve as a reminder that I am still making huge accomplishments in moments of disruption.

Bradley wrote, "This in-class exercise further helped to bolster my use of implementing documents into the paragraphs. It also most definitely helped with the “corroboration” piece of the writing." I have been attempting to have the students corroborate their evidence.  It has been a tough process to get them to do this.  But when they do, their argument is so much stronger.  Having Bradley document his current understanding of this is very encouraging.

I continue to have students sit in groups of four. I constantly rotate groups. I do this to build a sense of trust amongst all of them and not a sense of comfort with the few of those around them. It exposes students to different writing styles and people to give feedback to and from. Rodolfo stated, "This exercise boosted my confidence on how to contextualize and correctly explain my evidence. Although my group had some trouble figuring out what to do, we managed to all be on the same page in our writing. I find this very helpful and I do have problems formatting occasionally and it helps to know my elbow mate knows what they are doing." While this could become a crutch, it is great to see the students feel that community sense. It is not easy to establish the culture of collaboration in the classroom. When it happens, it is nice to see that the students recognize it.

Overall, a very exciting week.  It is refreshing to see the students see such positive things in February.  They are continuing to improve their writing skills and I look forward to seeing what the students can accomplish in the final week of the unit.

Read week twenty-six here.

A Rewarding and Demanding Lesson

By Kristen Gierman

Historical documents are tricky.  They are full of baggage.  Historical context.  Higher level vocabulary.  Perspective.  Author’s purpose.  You name it, they are HARD to digest.  But that is no reason to shy away from them in the classroom.  In fact, I sit here writing this blog because challenging my students to break down arguably the most difficult document they have seen thus far culminated in one of the most demanding yet rewarding lessons of the school year.

As my world history classes focus on the rise and fall of governments during the time period after World War I, we turned our attention to the Middle East.  What happened to the region after the Ottoman Empire came crashing down?  What role did the League of Nations play? How might this impact the region today?  These are all questions I wanted my students to consider, however, I did not want to simply answer that for them.  Instead, I wanted to release this responsibility of learning to the students.

This took some careful planning and pre-reading strategies to make it all come together.  To start the lesson, students were teamed up and competed in a Quizlet Live that included eight “difficult” terms they might not know or might not have ever seen yet would encounter during the course of the period.  Words like sovereignty, tutelage, and mandate are no walk in the park for any sophomore.  However, allowing students to work together to gain some familiarity with the terms shifted the conversation from “I have no idea what these mean” to eventually building some confidence in what used to be unknown or unrecognizable.  

After creating a historical context for the lesson, the students worked to decipher the potential meaning of the political cartoon seen below.

The claims produced by the students echoed the criticisms of the League of Nations’ decisions and ultimately set the stage for the Big Kahuna of this entire lesson...analyzing and understanding the language of Article 22 of the Covenant of the League of Nations.  

For anyone, this would appear a daunting task but the students got after it!!  After modeling some word substitution thanks to the help of the Quizlet, the students worked with their partners to take each sentence and put it in words they could understand.  Not only did they strive to complete this challenge but I found them more engaged in the process and seeking my feedback to confirm their understanding of the text.  

I even laughed a bit as students, who regularly do not want to do work, busted it to prove to me that they were “Ivy League” material….only to conclude class by announcing their future attendance at Stanford University. :)

All jokes aside, it was rewarding to see the students grapple with their understanding of a document that was arguably “out of their reach.”  I am confident that they can make an argument as to why the mandates were created in the Middle East by the League of Nations and I look forward to the next step of the process where they connect these concepts to the rise of independence movements in the region.

"It's Given ME My Own Voice" S1E11 of the WeAreEG Podast

Nic Baggetto is the editor-in-chief of the Elk Grove High School newspaper The Guardian.  As a senior at Elk Grove High School, he has evolved both personally and as a writer through his experiences.  He shares some of his favorite stories that he has written, as well as how much he has learned through this process.  He intends to pursue a career in communications to continue his passion for writing and film.

Nic mentions some favorite articles in the podcast.  Here are some of those, as well as a few other noteworthy and recent ones:

Sci-fi Film Arrival Overlooked Amidst Changing Genre

Filmmaking requires extensive planning, patience

Police reforms help reduce numbers of fatal shootings by Chicago officers this year

Nic's Flicks (Pt. 1)

The music in this podcast was provided by

    Podington Bear, "Funk" from his Dance album (Creative Commons License 3.0)

    Podington Bear, "Golden Hour" from his  Springtime Album (Creative Commons License 3.0)

    Podington Bear, "Movin On Up" from his Bon Voyage album (Creative Commons License 3.0)

    Podington Bear, "Arboles" from his Encouraging album (Creative Commons License 3.0)

A New Way To Connect and Learn Across Schools: The Collab Lab's Virtual Learning Cohort

By Linda Ashida

Imagine starting your day collaborating with a group of nearly 30 educators and students, from 10 different schools, from the comfort of your own learning space. Imagine the new connections, learning––and fun!––the conversation could lead to!

That is just what happened in the first meeting of the Collab Lab's Virtual Learning Cohort. Taking advantage of District 214 schools' daily common professional learning time from 7:15-8:10 (before 1st hour classes begin at 8:15), we used Zoom to connect virtually across schools. 

Our group included twenty-two staff and two students from D214, four educators from neighboring districts, and a middle school teacher from Texas! In a mix of whole-group and small-group break-out conversations, we enjoyed exploring and sharing ways to involve students and encourage them to take the lead in their own learning. And, since we were talking about student voice, it only seemed fitting to include students. We were so happy our two Collab Lab Team students, Freshman Natalia Habas and Senior Nathan Beltran, were willing to start their school day an hour early to join us!

A tweet from Kim Miklusak captured what the experience looked liked, showing the synchronous video chat and how we used the "Share Screen" function to share resources and models of work. 

During both the whole-group and break-out video chats, we also interacted via text chat. One of our participants, Bob Schuetz, volunteered to monitor the chat. Much like a Twitter chat host, Bob welcomed participants, shared highlights, and responded to participant comments and questions. Just the small sampling from the chat below reveals the great way it added another layer of conversation and sharing with the group.

The comments in the chat also reveal how impactful it was to have students in the group––how inspired we were by their insights––reminding us how important it is to foster student voice in our classrooms, too.

Before ending our session, we took a few minutes to reflect and consider a "Call to Action" before we meet again next week: Connect with another participant in the group; share a resource in our Curated Resources Doc; try something new, capture and share "Pictures of Practice" from our classrooms . . .  

It was great to make new connections, renew some "old" ones, and learn together without leaving our own "home base." We were inspired by new ideas and resources, and we're looking looking forward to the conversation in the weekly meetings to come! 

Natalia and Nathan were happy to be included and they stopped by the Collab Lab in person to to debrief with Bob and me and let us know that they would be inviting more students to join us next week! They are pretty great!

We are grateful for a District 214 Innovation in Teaching and Learning Grant to support The Collab Lab's vision to expand collaborative learning experiences across our schools with a  Zoom Pro account and our new Collab Lab Zoom Room.  Look for future blog posts to learn how we will use our Zoom Room to invite colleagues from other schools to join us virtually in the Collab Lab for Teaming on Tuesday workshops, cross-district learning exchanges, and more!

If you are wondering about Zoom and how you might use it too, we'd love to talk to you! It is incredibly easy to use. In just a few minutes you can create a free account and, with little or no training use it in much the same way we did to connect across learning spaces, schools, the country––and even the world! There are so many possibilities. And maybe you have ideas for us, too. Stop by the Collab Lab or drop us a line; we'd love to brainstorm with you!

A Year in AP: Student Insight and Work Flow (Week Twenty-four)

By Mark Heintz

Context

I have two main focuses as I write this weekly blog. Two driving questions that I have in my mind while making decisions.  They are:

• How do I know if my students know? 
• How do I get them to know if they know?  

Whether that is a skill or content, I want to know if they know it.   I no longer think it is acceptable for me to guess or get a feeling on whether or not they know it. Getting the students to know if they know it is downright hard, but I am really attempting to get to a point where the students can recognize their understandings or progress on their skill levels and content knowledge.  Therefore, the purpose of this year of reflection is to see how I make progress towards these two goals and elicit feedback from staff, students, and hopefully people who follow along on the journey.  You can read how last week went here.

Week Twenty-four: Answer the Question

This week the content focus was primarily on European Imperialism from 1750-1900. Here were the standards for this week:

1. Students will understand the causes of Imperialism in the 19th Century.  We are learning to understand why & how Europeans took over other places around the world.
2. We will show that we can do this by Listing three methods used by Europeans to imperialize between the years 1750-1900.List three reasons Europeans used to justify imperialism between the years 1750-1900.

This week's skill focus was still centered on analyzing charts, maps, and texts and pulling evidence from documents to support a claim.

1. Write one cause/effect, and one comparative short response that reflects an understanding of essential content.
2. Analyze charts, maps, graphs, and texts.
3. Write a thesis statement, contextualize a prompt, and draw evidence from two documents to support the thesis.  

Cite Specific Evidence

First, how do I know that the students know the content and how to do the skills?

This semester, I am including, or trying to include student's perspective on the week.  For this week's post, I asked two students to document their learning on the standards.  It was a great week to do this, for I missed two days this week due to a family emergency.  I shared a Google Doc to document their progress.  Each day,  I looked at the shared document to view their understandings of what took place during the day.

Katia volunteered to document their learning and reflect this week.

Here is what Katia had to say.

Katia: The past 2 days, we've been completing a checklist to get through all the documents for the DBQ we’re going to write tomorrow (next week if there’s a snow day [there was a snow day]). You need to read the documents and get 100% on a comprehension quiz before you get a code that unlocks the next document. I think this is beneficial to me because writing the actual DBQ is generally easy for me, but understanding what the document is trying to depict is the challenging part. It was logistically confusing to everyone at first, but overall the concept of the activity was effective and we’ll see how it helps us write the actual essay.  

Me: I wrote a blog a few years ago about the structure of the lessons Katia described.  You can read it here: Lock and Key Methods.

Katia: First thing on the agenda today was a familiar, short Schoology quiz in which we have to decide whether a component of the DBQ meets all the requirements to receive a point. In this case, they were thesis statements for the African response DBQ. These can be pretty tricky when you’re not sure how picky to be, and it gets subjective based on the person. I guess that just shows how blatant we really have to be with our writing so there is no doubt to the reader that we’ve included each little checkmark. We also discussed a lot about the prompt and how these essays are going to be laid out based on these examples, which helped out a ton in writing the actual DBQ. Believe it or not, essays are much easier when you know exactly what you’re trying to talk about!

Katia: It was time to start writing the actual DBQ. To group the documents into 2 different arguments, my partner Dino and I looked through the document quizzes we’d taken last week to see which had promoted violence and which promoted diplomacy. Relying on those quizzes made it easier than it has ever been. Based on the class discussion, we also tried to implement a cause-and-effect type reasoning, outside information, and redundancy of using the prompt over and over again. As I mentioned previously, we really have to be obvious with what we are trying to write. I felt really good about this writing and I know exactly where we’re going to go with it when we pick it up again, which is a pretty rare feeling. If we could train ourselves to analyze the documents like we did when we took the quizzes, it would make a huge beneficial difference.

My Reflection and Impact

This week was interrupted by a snow day, which meant that the student did not get to finish writing the entire DBQ until the next week.  Despite the loss of the day, students were able to analyze all or most of the documents.  Another student was supposed to reflect this week, but he was sick a few days and the snow day impeded his ability to do that.

Reflection: I wish I would have written a weekly blog years ago.  More importantly, I wish I would have included the student perspective years ago.  I love Katia's insight on the process. She stated, "writing the actual DBQ is generally easy for me, but understanding what the document is trying to depict is the challenging part." Katia typically does great in the class and does not seem challenged by most of what we do.  But I love that she provided some insight into what works and gets her to dive deeper into her learning. 

Katia commented on the writing which highlights the subjectivity of writing.  "These (thesis statements) can be pretty tricky when you’re not sure how picky to be, and it gets subjective based on the person. I guess that just shows how blatant we really have to be with our writing so there is no doubt to the reader that we’ve included each little checkmark." The difficult part of teaching the course is that writing is subjective, yet the College Board attempts to standardize the test.  This is difficult when students are working towards mastery, yet have a specific audience they are writing towards.

For me, the biggest takeaway from the week is working on getting students to reflect on what is working for them.  I hope they walk away with a greater sense of what type of learner they are.  Albeit, they are a course that has a very rigid curriculum.  Through reflection, I hope they reveal how they learn and can help me focus on that skill set in the future.  

Reviewing the week, the students were in a state flow.  They did not really need me.  I had set up a learning plan, which is still very teacher directed and another issue to address later, that gave the students a strong purpose, allowed the students to work at their own pace, and be challenged.  It is great to see the students working together towards a common goal and not need me to validate their learning as much.  

Read week twenty-five here. 

Literacy Strategies: Teaming on Tuesday Round-Up

by Quinn Loch

This morning a handful of teachers met for Teaming on Tuesday and we shared and discussed literacy strategies that can be used to help engage students daily. I shared a few strategies including some that I use on my daily warm ups in AP environmental science. Here is a link to the document that list a few of the strategies that were shared out.

It was great to hear from colleagues about how they incorporate literacy strategies in their classrooms. Kim Miklusak shared how she uses pre-reading strategies in her english classes. One of the many strategies she uses has students write their thoughts on specific themes large post-it notes around the room that peers can then give feedback to. Mark Heintz has been blogging weekly about the strategies that he uses in AP world history. His latest post can be found here.

Our conversations led to some great questions and reflection on how to consistently build student literacy skills. I look forward further collaboration to help finding new ways to engage students with text.

Here are a few resources that provide text or other content:

1. http://www.turnersgraphoftheweek.com/ provides weekly (and relevant!) graphs, diagrams, and infographics that students can break down and analyze.
2. www.newsela.com provides access to articles based on category and reading level
3. www.news.google.com - You can create custom categories of news articles by key word if you're looking for current events that related to a specific topic