My goal for this semester was to implement the Depth and Complexity icons in my classroom in a way that would improve learner agency. I wanted to use the icons to empower students to make choices about demonstrating mastery in a personalized way and in various subjects. The reason for this is that although things are very personalized in my classroom and we focus a lot of student autonomy, the one area that I feel could have more student input is assessment and determining mastery. This is tricky, because while my students set goals and they know how to determine if they have met those goals, many of the assessments we use (like in math, for example) ultimately are graded by me, the teacher. I loved the idea of using the Depth and Complexity icons to prompt more open-ended thinking in my classroom and was eager to encourage my students to use these icons to craft responses that would show deep levels of understanding. My first step was to make the icons visible in the classroom since they were entirely new to my students. After attending the training, I turned the icons into magnets for my white board so I could use them frequently and easily. After this, I began using the icons in conjunction with familiar assignments, when giving directions, and on our weekly agenda. This helped to build familiarity and make students more comfortable with what many of the icons meant. I introduced them to Big Idea, Details, Unanswered questions, Multiple Perspectives, Language of the Discipline, Over Time, Patterns, and Rules. Since this was a shorter-term goal I decided to focus on those symbols - when I implement this in the future, I will start familiarizing students with the icons earlier in the school year so I have more time for them to be comfortable with all of the icons. From there, I added the icons to student assignment documents so that students would link what was being asked of them on specific assignments with the images. After using the icons on student documents and assignments and students were pretty familiar with at least a few of the icons, I was ready to challenge them with open-ended responses and see how this would help them demonstrate mastery in a personalized manner. Knowing that my ultimate goal was for students to choose icons that they thought would best help them to show mastery for a topic, the first step towards that was to ask them to show mastery with an icon that was provided (still an open-ended question). My teammate and I decided to use the "Ponder" frame from our Depth and Complexity training to challenge students to explain two of our main focus areas - Changing Earth and Energy. Students are in the middle of building personalized impact projects linked to these areas based on their interests, so it made sense to have them show mastery of these larger topics. We also knew that we have done many activities this year and learned a ton of content linked to both of these areas, so we were eager to have students show what they knew. Below are some examples of student products, and what was posted as far as expectations: One thing I immediately noticed was that students wrote a LOT when they were allowed to explore a concept in a more open-ended way. My students were able to tie together topics and activities from various points in the year and synthesize information at a higher level than they would have if I would have provided a list of questions. I had a lot less questions about if they had written enough or if their responses were sufficient, because just the use of the icons with an open ended question was enough to challenge students to gauge if they were meeting expectations or not. Finally, I gave students the "Ponder" activity again once they were more familiar with it, but left out the icon so they were able to choose one. We wanted to use this in another different subject area, so my teammate and I chose to see how this would work with our personalized math. For this, I filled in the topics based on what students have recently learned in math (which is different from student to student). We discussed a few options of what icons might work for math and why, and then students were asked to choose an icon or two and write about it with the purpose of demonstrating mastery of that topic. Below are some student samples: Overall, I loved the challenge that this posed for students - asking them to think about what they learned on a deeper level and determine how they could show mastery of that. I would definitely use this strategy in the future to build learner agency, and I look forward to starting it earlier in the school year so that students have more time to be familiar with the icons and use them across disciplines more. I was very pleased with the quality of student responses in just a short time frame of working on this goal this year, so I would be eager to see what heights future groups of students would reach with more time.
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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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