We reflect often on both academic content and our behavior. Reflection deepens learning. Here is my summer time reflection about what I would like to include next year (2014-2015):
I have been thinking about how to integrate the following “thinking moves” from “Making Thinking Visible” by Richart, Church, and Morrison:
1. Observing closely and describing what’s there.
2. Building explanations and interpretations.
3. Reasoning with evidence.
4. Making connections.
5. Considering different viewpoints and perspectives.
6. Capturing the heart and forming conclusions.
They are much like the scientific method. I want to incorporate AVID philosophy as well:
W – Writing. Requiring students to consider issues in new, complex ways, contributing to self-knowledge, and helping students to clarify and order experience and ideas.
I – Inquiry. According to the Foundation for Critical Thinking,“thinking is not driven by answers but by questions,” positioning inquiry as foundational to the higher level cognition required for college success. Costa’s three levels of intellectual functioning.
C – Collaboration. High engagement learning strategies involve collaborative activities through which individual students help each other learn, thereby strengthen their own learning. Students are responsible for their own learning; teachers serve as facilitators in a learning community working together for the success of the group.
O – Organization. Management of time and energy and learning to set priorities can make the difference between success and failure for new college students. In addition, students must learn to plan effectively for academic assignments, organizing information and ideas for papers and projects.
R – Reading. Skills such as “reading with purpose”can be scaffolded with more complex activities to ensure that students are connecting reading material to prior knowledge, understanding the structure
of texts, and using text processing strategies during and after reading to improve comprehension.
There is “Portrait of a Kelly Student” to consider:
Persisting through obstacles and challenges
Performing grade level skills in all subjects
Demonstrating critical thinking, problem-solving, and decision-making skills
Ability to think creatively and innovatively
Becoming responsible local and global citizens
Finally, there are Common Core Standards, focusing on the “Six Shifts”:
1. Increasing reading of informational texts
2. Growth in text complexity
3. Emphasizing and building academic vocabulary
4. Providing text-based evidence for answers.
5. Increasing writing from sources using evidence to back up one’s point or argument.
6. Literacy instruction in all content areas.
As I look over these important concepts, ideas, standards, they seem fairly easy to integrate. I want students to be aware of them and hope to make them easy to understand. My plan is for students to use the site, LiveBinders http://www.livebinders.com/ to organize their work as a portfolio. My challenge is to provide meaningful “dividers” to describe the above categories in student friendly terms so they can place their work in the binder based on their own reflection and decision-making processes. Hmmmm. Categories, anyone? I’ll tell you what I like – “Thinking Moves”, WICR (the organization part would be built in to the LiveBinder), and Portrait of a Kelly Student.
What’s obvious and most understandable to the student:
1. Persistence – Examples of how my group and/or I managed to solve our problems in order to get the job done or to understand a concept. (collaboration, building explanations and interpretations, considering viewpoints)
2. Inquiry – How did I use questions to deepen my thinking, to build explanations and draw conclusions? (observing closely, building explanations, capturing the heart)
3. Reflection – How am I reflecting on processes through which I came to a conclusion or reached a decision? How did I incorporate differing viewpoints into my decisions? How have I tried to express myself, my personality, my emotions? (observation, critical thinking, using text to support reasoning)
4. Innovation – What have I done that is new to me? How did I stretch my learning by finding new ways to present my evidence or to think about a problem, and why did I make the choice to do this?
5. Connections – How did I connect my learning, my opinions, myself to the outside world (becoming responsible local and global citizens)?
It seems to me the above categories are a good start. For each written piece, scanned picture or documentation of a project, worksheet, or podcast the student places into the live binder, he/she will need to support organization by deciding where it fits best and provide an explanation for that decision. Some pieces may be placed under more than one tab.