Products show the teacher what the students know and gives students the oppurtunity to express their learning. Clearly communicating expectations for quality, processes, and work habits while coaching throughout sets the framework for students to have successful learning products. Some guidelines are suggested on page 88 to help facilate projects. On very useful suggestion is to use formative and summative evaluations while students are working on the project. Formative evaluation allows the teacher to know where the students are on their projects and monitor their learning. Formative evaluation also ensures students stay on track because their work is constantly evaluated. Summative evaluation at the end looks at the whole picture of the product to see the total amount of student learning. Another good suggestion is to make sure students have examples of the different ways they present the information. For example, if students are to put together a web page about a topic they have been studying than students need to know what qualifies as a good web page.
Which of the guidelines for successful products have you used in your classroom? How did you use them and were the successful?
Is there something you have done differently in your classroom that successfully faciliated a DI product?
How would you vary a project for struggling learners differently than one for advanced learners?
I have tried using several of these in my room. We have tried to focus on real world problems as a way to bridge between school and real life. I have also used tip 5 to help students use all their time by giving them a daily grade of 0-5 depending on the effort they used during the project this promotes them using all the time available and not putting it off.
ReplyDeleteI have also tried a tool where they are responsible for having a timeline set up where they "check in" and give progress so that I can monitor and make sure they are you schedule. They also had a checklist in order to have an order to go through instead of jumping all over the place.
I would pair the advanced learners with a struggling learner and in turn create a better learning experience for both.
I like #4 and I know that I need to add more check-in dates to prevent procrastination. I did this on my last project (with honors), but I can easily add this to regular projects in all classes. I guess it comes down to grading - it's easier to grade the final product and not little steps along with way. Any ideas on how to do this would be great!
ReplyDeleteI think Isaac's idea of paring is great, but I have been that successful kid paired with a lazy student and I hated it every time - I hated doing all the work and him earning the same grade as me for doing nothing. Each student must have a specific task in the project in order for this to be successful, but I still think teachers might have to grade each part separately or give an individual grade and a group grade. I'm still torn on this one.
Issac- Your check list sounds like a wonderful idea to keep kids working on what they need to accomplish.
ReplyDeleteApril- I don't know how to do the little peices! I was hoping you would know. I've tried rough draft and different sections when having my students do papers and it is frustrating to spend hours grading each detail and then have the second round come back and be almost as poorly written as the first. It is very time consuming and with everything else I have to cover it doesn't seem practical for me to spend a couple weeks on it. I guess this is where student experts come in handy. Maybe one or two kids are excelling and they will review and meet with other student's papers. My AP English teacher would had peer learning groups that would meet, students would bring 3 copies of their paper, to proof read papers and say what they needed to do to make them better. After the peers reviewed each others papers than they were corrected and submitted. Maybe peer reveiwing then correcting little sections or using experts would help offset some teacher responsibility and add more to students.