Assessment, Evaluation & Documentation

Uncovering students’ thinking about thinking using concept maps

Abstract: A method for uncovering students’ thinking about thinking, specifically their meta-strategic knowledge, is explored within the context of an ongoing, multi-year intervention designed to promote the development of students’ thinking dispositions. The development of a concept-map instrument that classroom teachers can use and an analytic framework for interpreting students’ responses is presented. In a preliminary study, the concept map instrument is piloted to evaluate changes in students’ conceptions of thinking after a year’s participation in classrooms where their teachers actively sought to make thinking more visible by noticing and naming the thinking observed as well as introducing and using thinking routines (Ritchhart and Perkins. Educational Leadership, 65(5), 57–61 2008). Concept maps from 239 students from grades 3 through 11 were analyzed. Results suggest that students’ conceptions of thinking do improve with age but also can be substantially developed through a classroom culture where thinking is modeled and rich opportunities for thinking are present. The concept map instrument itself proved to be a robust instrument for uncovering students’ thinking about thinking.

The Qualities of Quality: Understanding Excellence in Arts Education

Many children in the United States have little or no opportunity for formal arts instruction, and access to arts learning experiences remains a critical national challenge. In addition, the quality of arts learning opportunities that are available to young people is a serious concern. Understanding this second challenge: the challenge of creating and sustaining high quality formal arts learning experiences for K12 youth, inside and outside of school is the focus of our recent research initiative, The Qualities of Quality, commissioned by The Wallace Foundation and conducted by Project Zero. The study focuses on the character of excellence itself and asks three core questions:

How do arts educators in the United States including leading practitioners, theorists, and administrators conceive of and define high quality arts learning and teaching?

What markers of excellence do educators and administrators look for in the actual activities of arts learning and teaching as they unfold in the classroom?

How do a programs foundational decisions, as well as its ongoing day-to-day decisions, affect the pursuit and achievement of quality?

Zooms: Promoting Schoolwide Inquiry and Improving Practice

Abstract: A group of teachers and the program director describe a powerful collaborative and interactive teacher research process they developed at their school. The process engages teachers in generating new insights about teaching and learning. This article provides a road map for creating Zooms—documentation panels that are snapshots of classroom life—as unique, concrete models of teacher research. The authors illustrate how constructing Zooms helps teachers focus on children’s learning when so much is going on in a lively classroom. Ben and his colleagues show how they created a professional learning community—a culture of inquiry in their early childhood school that also enhanced staff collegiality. The teachers evolved from individual, reflective practitioners to collaborative, schoolwide teacher researchers. A real strength of the project is its emphasis on the teachers as knowledge creators. The Zooms process builds collaboration in concrete and structured ways and makes schoolwide inquiry key in teachers’ professional development. —Barbara Henderson

A Typology of Classroom Questions

A Typology of Classroom Questions: A look at the types of questions teachers ask and the answers/logic that they produce.

Recalling and reviewing of Knowledge and information

• Terminology

• Procedures

• Content

• Events and context

Procedural: Directing the work of the class

• Going over directions and assignments

• Clarifying

• Checking for attention, agreement.

• Task completion

• Organizational and management related

Generative: Exploring the topic

• Authentic questions or wonders that teacher doesn’t know the answer to.

• Essential questions that initiate exploration of a topic

Constructive: Building New Understanding

• Extending & Interpreting

• Connecting & Linking

• Orienting and focusing on big ideas, central concepts, or purpose

• Evaluating

Facilitative: Promotes the learner’s own thinking & understanding

• Requesting elaboration, reasons, evidence, justification

• Generating discussion among the class to hear different perspectives

• Clarifying and Uncovering

Teaching for Understanding Unit vs. Traditional Unit

What makes a Teaching for Understanding (TfU) unit different than a traditional unit? View an example of a TfU unit and then use this template to transform existing or create new units that leverage the principles of TfU.