Evaluating Learning: AEE 412 Weekly Writing #8

If there is one phrase that I think makes most students at the very least cringe, if not break out in tears, it's the following: "Alright class, clear off your desks except for a writing utensil, it's time to take the test/exam/quiz/etc..."

Evaluations and assessments can sometimes feel like necessary evils in a classroom - students usually don't want to take them and teachers don't necessarily want to grade them, but everyone knows they're required to show proof of learning. Now while assessments in some form are required to show evidence of student performance in our classrooms, there's no right or wrong answer as to how we can deliver our assessments. There are many different forms and types of evaluations and assessments, especially depending on if they are being used as formative (during learning) assessments or summative (final, at the end) assessments. 

Equal Testing =/= Fair Testing

Some assessments may be performance or skill based; others can be project based, focusing on the process and end-product of a project. In-class questioning, ticket outs, writing assignments, informal check-ins and of course the almighty test/exam/quiz are also all types of assessments, and any of these can be utilized based on your preferences and your students' learning styles but what is really important regardless of assessment type are the questions - "Does this assessment accurately test my students' knowledge and/or skills that I wanted them to learn? Is the assessment fair for all of my students? And what other factors could prohibit my students from performing well on the assessment?"

Answering these questions can be difficult depending on the type of assessment chosen, but necessary to ensure that they are really measuring student learning based on the learning objectives you had for the lesson/unit. You also want to make sure that your assessments are fair for all your students, but that does not always mean that all students need to take the same exact assessment. In my junior year of high school, my American History teacher would give everyone what appeared to be the same exam at the same time to complete during the class period after we had finished a unit. However, if you looked the exams side by side, you could see that there were usually three different versions of the exam with differing amounts of multiple choice, true/false, short answer, and essay questions, but all of the exams tested on the same content. When I came back as a college student and he showed me this, he said he used the different exam formats based on the students' ability to perform on each type of test and that he would adjust which format he gave each student depending on his perception of how they were grasping the material (if a student seemed to be struggling with certain information they got Test C, Test B, etc.). He utilized this technique because he said at the end of the day he was able to determine if all of his students had comprehended the basic information he wanted them to, and he was able to minimize the number of poor class grades due to assessments.

This question tests a student's ability to read and answer questions, but not necessarily the content taught.
There shouldn't be loopholes in our assessments for students to find.

In addition to determining if our assessments are evaluating our students' comprehension of the learning objectives, and determining the fairest way to evaluate all of our students, we also need to know what other factors can impact our students' performance on assessments. Test anxiety is typically the biggest factor impacting student performance on assessments and can be influenced by many different things. While this is usually associated with the traditional written tests/exam/quiz formats, anytime a student feels "tested" they can become overwhelmed with their stress and anxiety, negatively impacting their performance. This testing anxiety can be impacted by the student's internal feelings towards testing, their ability to strategize and prepare for the assessment, the other students' behaviors/attitudes towards testing and possibly the performance of their peers, and the teacher/classroom atmosphere. Teachers should be calm about assessments, stressing their importance on the students' learning growth and less about the grade, without downplaying its value too low. Teachers should also be positive about assessments - teachers who are upset on test day make students stressed on test day. Teachers can also teach students strategies to prepare for assessments and manage stress which can help students walk into an assessment less anxious and then continue to decrease their anxiety during the assessment. If teachers decide to use different assessments for different students, they need to also remember to not draw attention to these differences or the reasons for them, as that could lead to the other students assigning a stigma to that student, increasing the testing anxiety. This is something that I think my history teacher did very well as it was never apparent that there were multiple test forms because he made them all look the same and he individually passed them out so you didn't notice anything different. This also meant that if you struggled on one unit and shifted to a different format for the next test to help, you didn't know it so you (as the student) never felt dumb based on the test format.  

The biggest take-away I have from our readings is that as long as we remember to address those three questions above (Learning Objectives, Fairness, Other Impacting Factors) the assessment format does not matter. What really matters is that we remember that we are teaching our students content and that we will use various forms of assessment to evaluate their grasp of the content. We are not teaching our students how to do well on assessments and then also teaching content. Student learning is our first priority, not the ability to perform well on standardized tests (though if our students understand the content well, they should perform well on the tests).

To help us move forward in our teaching careers, I found the following three resources that I think can be helpful when thinking about and/or developing evaluations and assessments for your students: Here is a link to tips and strategies for students, parents and teachers relating to reducing test anxiety. This is a list of over 20 different strategies teachers can use everyday in their classrooms as assessments. See the table below for a great chart connecting types of learning objectives with example assessments:

Problem-Based Learning (PBL): AEE 412 Weekly Writing #7

As agricultural educators we not only want to teach our students content knowledge and technical skills, we also want to teach them what are referred to as 21st Century Skills - communication, cooperation, and critical thinking. One of the key techniques we can use to teach our students critical thinking is by using problem-based or problem-solving learning. This past week and this coming week we focused on this technique and how we can use it in our classrooms. Essentially this technique shifts the transfer of learning from teacher-to-student to student-to-student-to-teacher, by providing the students with a scenario or problem related to the class's content that the students must develop solutions to and teach the class.

In class we discussed the various ways this could be used in an agricultural classroom, depending on whether you were utilizing it as a single solution or multi-solution problem, and whether it was simple or complex. Examples included: having students solve a trouble-shooting issue with an engine in a small gas engines class, discovering what is causing illness/problems in animals or plants in the program (of course if it's serious, you take care of the issue first without telling your students the cause/solution), or in an environmental science or agricultural issues class present the students with an issue such as global climate change and have students develop possible solutions.

As you can see based on just the few scenarios above, problem-based learning can come in many shapes and sizes in the classroom, which means it can be adapted to any classroom and any content. But how do we truly implement it in our classrooms? How do we set up our students so that they have the necessary skills and content knowledge so that they can successfully develop solutions to the problems we present them, without giving them too much and defeating the purpose of the problem-based learning approach? How do we know that we're presenting the information at a time and in a way that's relevant? What if a student presents a situation related to their crops or livestock at home, or even a current news topic that is a great opportunity for problem-based learning but I haven't set my students up yet to be able to use it.

Problem-based learning is a technique I would love to use in my classes, yet I am struggling to incorporate it into my lesson plans without shifting to a project-based approach. I'm sure in the next week we will learn more about both of these approaches and how to properly set up our lessons to incorporate them but for now, it's still a little confusing. I know I have been in classes where problem-based learning has been utilized but I don't think I've seen the set-up beforehand to understand how it worked. Some resources I have were this Illinois Ag in the Classroom link to several inquiry-based lessons. They are written for a younger grade range but I think they could be modified to complement high school or middle school lesson plans. Everyone should also check out some of the NAAE Teachers' World workshops during National FFA Convention, based on their descriptions some of them should incorporate problem-based learning but I'm sure all of them will be helpful. 

Hopefully this week we can decipher the "problems" related to setting up your students to be successful in problem-based learning.

Individual Teaching Techniques: 412 Weekly Writing #6

The past few weeks we've learned about effective teaching characteristics, planning and designing curriculum, interest approaches, and student engagement. We've discussed the multiple intelligences, learning modalities, learning styles and cognitive levels (good ol' Bloom's). Most recently we've discussed how all of our learners are different, and how different teaching techniques can best reach all of our different learners, specifically the use of effective questioning and group teaching techniques. This past week we introduced individual teaching techniques.

There are many different reasons to utilize individual teaching techniques, but they all stem from the same important principle - all learners are different. As educators, even if we had a specialized class where all of our students are homogeneous in some characteristic, they are never going to all learn 100% the same way. Even students characterized at the same academic level (track) will all learn differently based on the multiple intelligences and multiple modalities, and multiple cognitive levels will be addressed throughout your content so your students can learn the information you want them to. Students also need variability just to comprehend what they are learning. Students can typically only pay attention to a specific topic for approximately 1 minute per age (so 10 minutes for a ten year old), capping out at about a 15 minute attention span so you as the teacher have to switch things up just so you're students can naturally pay attention, so avoid activities that take longer than 20 minutes if there's no variability because students will zone out and lose focus (just ask anyone in my cohort who went to the almost 5 hour CPR and First Aid training....).

This need for variability, differentiation, and individualized learning is why a variety of teaching techniques are needed, and the individual teaching techniques can not only address this need but also other needs of our students and other accomplishments we want them to strive for. These individual teaching techniques encourage our students to become more independent, and dig deeper into what they're learning. They learn how to utilize multiple opinions - knowledge transfer is not a one-way street from teacher to student, it should be a multi-lane highway where students are teaching and learning from each other and the teacher (and the teacher can be learning from their students as well). They should learn how to analyze and evaluate information, including what they gain from their peers and teachers, and what they discover on their own, and finally teaching students how to learn. 

Teaching student how to learn through the use of individual teaching techniques may at first sound a little crazy (then again you find me an agricultural educator who isn't at least a little crazy), but to me it also makes perfect sense - the best expert on how we best acquire knowledge and comprehend learning is always going to be ourselves. So once you teach your students how to learn, they can discover what works best for themselves and learn how they can be active in their own learning and gain the most out of any learning experience.

So once we understood the goal of individual teaching techniques, our textbook discussed five different techniques: supervised study, experiments, independent study, student notebooks and sheets (information, assignment, and skill). All of these strategies can be utilized in various ways in your agricultural education program but what stuck out to me was how all of these techniques are utilized through the Supervised Agricultural Experience (SAE) portion of our program. The SAE itself is primarily an independent study conducted by the student, and allows a student to dig deeper into whatever area of agriculture they are interested in, but the student is also under the supervision of either an employer or parent in addition to the teacher, through SAE visits to check student's progress, making it also a supervised study. SAE projects can be experimental in scope, but students also incorporate experiments whenever they have to make decisions about a project, from which feed or equipment to use or which record-keeping system to utilize. Record-keeping also brings in the techniques of the student notebook and the various sheets that can be used as students keep track of their activities, their skill development, their finances and their day to day contributions towards their projects.

After reading about these various techniques, I know that it is important to utilize all of them in the classroom, in cooperation with the group teaching techniques, but I also know that in order to have a fully integrated intra-curricular program, we have to encourage our students to participate in FFA opportunities and develop their SAE projects because those are the pathways where they can dig deeper and discover their individual passions. To help with this and encourage more discussion on these topics, check out the National FFA website to learn more about SAE's and check out this Pinterest Board link for lots of creative ideas on how to use interactive student notebooks in your classroom.

Unit Plan - First Time, But Not the Last Time

So much planning. It feels like this year, and the next few, are days of constant planning. For the past few weeks, the days have been filled with writing various lesson plans for labs and FFA conferences, and with our first adventures at the big obstacle - unit plans. Through writing this first unit plan and beginning to work on my others, I've learned that unit plans are almost a necessary evil - they are really helpful and great to write cohesive lesson plans from, but when you're just starting out they can be really intimidating, especially since we my not know exactly what it is we want to teach yet, or for how long, etc.

There are so many parts to a unit plan that add to its intimidation, the lesson titles and objectives, materials, unit goals, resources, academic (not just agricultural) standards, unit evaluations, not to mention all the adaptations, accommodations, enhancements and connections, but I think the hardest and most important part is at the top of my unit plan - the unit rationale. The rationale, the "why are you teaching this?," "why does it matter?," the justification of why that unit is part of your instruction.

Writing the rationale for my units can be both the easiest and hardest part of preparing the unit plans, but is the best resource for writing my lesson plans for that specific unit. For my first unit plan, I wrote my Intro to Ag Careers for my 8th Grade Agriculture Rotations. This unit is the first of three units all of my 8th graders will go through and it was difficult to write it at first because I'm only providing them with a brief intro on agriculture before we spend the rest of the unit focusing on career preparation and long-term planning. I had to constantly remind myself that this unit was for 8th graders so I could be careful to not teach over their heads, but I also wanted to point them in the right direction so they could pick the right high school classes (of course, preferably agriculture classes) to set them down the path towards the education and/or career path they choose.

After having my peers review my unit plan and talking it out with several people I feel pretty good about how my unit plan is right now. I didn't have too many revisions suggested by my peers, most had to do with being careful when writing lesson objectives. One suggested revision that I really appreciated was to provide details on each of my unit assessments. Having to really think through what each assessment is, how many points it counts towards in a student's final unit grade, and where it fits in each lesson was really helpful, and prompted me to make some changes to various assessments and lessons that I think really improved the clarity of my unit.

Or your unit plan...

Writing these unit plans is difficult but I can already tell after writing the first draft and then writing one of my lesson plans for this unit that the process becomes much easier. The connection is clear, now I just have to figure out how to write all the lesson plans for all my units, which can be a little difficult since I'm not teaching an entire course, which means I'm not deciding the final assessments or course objectives.

Unit Plans: 1 down, 14 more to go!

May the odds be ever in our favor.