posted by:
|
Mack McCary
on March 21, 2000
at 3:30AM
|
subject:
|
Cultural change to support formative assessment/inquiry
|
I'm Mack McCary, Assistant Superintendent in Elizabeth City, NC and co-PI of the MIPS project, Math Improvement thru Problem-Solving, a K-8 project in five rural NC counties. I've been working with classroom assessment for about 10 years, and the issues of how to assess student understanding, teachers' use of questions to promote inquiry, and grading practices have become important topics in our grant. Though we are working with mathematics, it seems like some of what we are learning would be relevant to science as well. Cultural change: During our early work in piloting the Connected Math project at the middle school level, we discovered that teachers believed they were implementing the program when they taught the lessons using the materials, but observation showed that often they unintentionally changed an inquiry task providing a high level of cognitive challenge into a routine procedural task with a low level of challenge. One factor seems to have been how well we had taught children to play the game of school: just play helpless long enough and the teacher, out of caring, will change the task until it becomes easy! A consultant helped us change this culture in several ways. First, she taught teachers a process for reflecting on lessons by videotaping a lesson she modeled, and then leading a reflection discussion. This reflection focused on examining student understanding, whether teacher questions kept the cognitive demands high, and posing what questions would have kept the inquiry at a high level. She then recruited some of the veteran risk takers to allow her to video their lessons and lead a similar reflection process. The teacher-leaders involved felt the videoing was a bit too threatening for novice teachers, so with the consultants' help, they established a practice of asking teachers to keep a reflective journal of the lessons they taught, and bringing the journal and samples of student work to their meetings. Our teacher-leaders have kept up this routine, using department meetings every other week to reflect together on videos, journals and student work, along with alignment, pacing and other issues that come before the group. We have learned from this experience in trying to implement similar processes K-5 in implementing Trailblazers math. At this stage, one of our MIPS teachers-on-loan is visiting schools with a video of herself modeling a lesson, and leading a teacher group to reflect on student understanding and the kinds of questions which will advance student inquiry.
|
|