After beginning the book 10 Mindframes for Visible Learning: Teaching for Success, I am excited to continue reading. The first three mindframes that the book focuses on, "I am an evaluator of my impact on student learning", "I see assessment as informing my impact", and "I collaborate with my peers and students" all helped to further define my personal take on the systems I have in place in my classroom.
In my educational career, I have experienced very different formats of student learning and teacher evaluation. As a new teacher, my lesson plans were scripted up to six weeks in advance and submitted for approval every two weeks. I frequently had difficulty teaching along the very specific lines of those lessons, and at that time I wasn't sure why. However, as a more seasoned teacher in a different setting, I now know that the learning process varies from one child to another just as much as growth varies from teacher to teacher. In their discussion of the first mindframe, "I am an evaluator of my impact on student learning", the authors describe that learning is not linear, and differs based on where each student starts at. This is much more representative of the way that I teach now - my lesson plans are very flexible to allow for moment-by-moment changes, and created each week based on where my students are at. I spend the beginning of the year putting systems in place so that each student knows what his or her own personal goals are and how to work to achieve them, so that when students have time to work they are all aware of what they should individually be focusing on. The most meaningful commentaries to me from the mindframe "I see assessment as informing my impact", were that time on task should really represent the time that a student spends on personalized tasks (tasks geared toward that student's goals and needs). The authors also specified that the focus of assessment should be more on how students perform during the process of learning and benchmarks along the way, rather than just on one cumulative score or grade. I really connected to both of these statements because I support that if a task is not at a student's personal level or that student does not have "buy-in" for that task, they most likely will not be as focused on it as if they were aware of their own personal data and goals and knew that this task would help them reach them. Through the systems that I use in my classroom and through frequent goal conferencing, I am both assessing how they are progressing through the process of learning and I am ensuring that each student maximizes their own time on task. Finally, focusing on collaborating with my peers and my students, I have always felt that this was one of my strengths as a teacher. However, I enjoyed that this chapter reframed collaboration in a slightly different manner. Hattie and Zierer propose that the purpose of collaboration is not just to share learning activities on a surface level, but also to evaluate a teacher's own effectiveness and how students are responding to that teacher's performance. Even if this is something that I have always done, this book outlined it more clearly as not just convenient, but a necessary function of collaborating as a successful educator. Teachers who may have been taught to operate as "lone wolves" may end up being more competitive than collaborative, which I find to be extremely stressful, so I have always enjoyed the collaborative piece of teaching.
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AuthorCourtney Hayes is currently a teacher at Lone Tree Elementary Magnet School in Colorado. She has teaching experience in both primary and intermediate grades, and is passionate about personalizing her instruction to meet the needs of all students. Archives
April 2021
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