I listened as they talked about which speeches they thought would most benefit them. They talked about the portfolio that they have to create as a requirement of the college.  They thought of which speeches would most impress a future employer. They all agreed that the "Tell Me About Yourself" interview question speech was absolutely critical.  They next agreed on the Persuasion speech since it shows how they can convince others of their ideas. Finally, they decided that they would do an Information speech since often in work, they give information to others.  Most of them had already done these speeches on areas in their future career.

Their discussion revealed much about their understanding of their future careers,  their showcasing themselves during an interview, and their analyzing the various speeches we had done.

Do you have your students have input into their final? What criteria is used to select material for the final?  Does it serve a "greater purpose"?

I wonder how often we have our students play outside the school to demonstrate their skills to the public and to listen to their response. How do our social studies students demonstrate their skills to the community? What do our math students do to showcase their learning and get reactions from the people in their town?

Do you focus more on teaching a concept or more on helping the students to move forward in their learning after your initial teaching?

For example, this partial "I can" list can be expanded to include formative feedback

___I can identify items in a topic/situation.

--I can make statements about a topic/situation.

___I can ask questions about a topic/situation

For a Spanish student who has trouble with talking and particularly talking about a topic with a visual, the "I can" statement can be expanded:

--I can make statements about a topic/situation from a visual
by describing
each person by clothing (shirt, shoes) and/or by personal description (tall, thin...),
each object by its description (color- red, shape-round) and what it is used for (There is water in the glass).
what actions are in the picture (shop, buy, sell, walk)
the nature (tree, bird) and the weather (sunny)
by saying as much as I can about any object or person before I go to the next person or object.
by listening to other students as they describe a visual and them imitating them or listening to sample speaking podcast.
by watching the "Spanish speaking" YouTube video where the instructor shows how to speak about a visual as you "read" it

By creating formative assessment "I can" sheets, we already have numerous possible formative feedback from which to select.

Do you do "I can" sheets with formative assessments so your students "Can"?

I have students peer-evaluate by reading each other's paper and underlining the thesis, topic sentences and restatement in the concluding paragraph if these sentences do support the thesis. Students soon realize that often the first sentence of their paragraph does not tell the purpose of the paragraph. Many times they dive into the topic without showing how it relates to the thesis. After they do the peer-evaluation, I offer students the opportunity to rewrite their topic sentences while the topic sentence idea is still fresh in their mind.

How do help improve your students' work?

I have found that if I can give them some "hands-on" hints to improve then they do improve. I used to tell them to look up after each period but I found that many  students just kept on reading.  Now I have them put a large slash at the end of each sentence and, furthermore, I suggest that the slash is in a bold color like red and that it is a big slash. I want them to see that slash and then look up. Now my students do have eye contact as they read their speech. The physical reminder causes them to demonstrate a good speaking technique.

Many students need physical reminders of how to do well.  Words do not suffice.  What physical techniques do you give your students so they can improve?

How do you help your students to improve?

I realized that that is how good teachers teach. They figure out what they want their students to do, they make sure of all the skills involved, and they plan backward so that the students will learn letter by letter so they can be successful. They use formative assessment to verify the students learning

What learning sign have you put out this week?

Is it possible to have higher-level thinking without having been immersed and having memorized Knowledge, or should lists --- formerly memorized by rote --- be provided on tests to help out students who aren't good at memorization?

My understanding of Bloom is that higher-level thinking first requires quite a lot of Knowledge. It is in an integral part of the way the mind works — easier access to this knowledge overall can’t replace rote memorization of the basic details. To make real analysis, synthesis and evaluation, students must draw on their internal databanks. Please: Correct me if I’m wrong.

That's not to say that there shouldn't be preparation. I had a whole Bill of Rights quiz that I insisted my students take. This quiz asked for answers from my students’ rote memorization. They should have been well-prepared for my exam because of that quiz, though I threw in some matching questions later on in the Big Test.

I do know that there is quite a variation in memory capabilities among all students.

Students should be encouraged to work on this by themselves, or with the guidance of another adult. This is a skill that cannot be underestimated, and should not be discouraged by providing lists on the test.

I believe students and teachers benefit when we design assessments that allow students to show us what they can do as well as identify what they cannot yet do.

Yet that that’s the realm of formative assessment, as in a quiz. This should not be the focus of a summative assessment, as in this unit test.

In our digital age, when quick information is a Google search away, is there meaning in memorization? I think there is, and I plan to continue this topic again on another day.

Do you build on students' successes or failures?

I wonder how good we are in our classroom about detecting student learning patterns. Do we grade standards so that we can look at our gradebook/spreadsheet and see how the student is progressing in the standards. Is the student increasing, staying the same, or decreasing in the standard? What about all the students in the class as a whole? Do we see students who need small-group direct instruction and students who need one-on-one assistance before they will be successful? As we have a class discussion, do we carefully note the responses of each student to see which ones add new information, which ones frequently need clarification, etc. As students do activities, do we monitor them so that we can see a pattern in their learning? Does Juan need more structure than the activity provides? Does Connie lack writing skills to be successful in our social studies DBQ?

What patterns do you see in your students? How do you use those patterns to help you better assist them in their standard-based learning?

I wonder how much we provide training wheels for our students as they learn our subject area. Do we provide them with support, scaffolding, so that they can only dip so far before the scaffolding supports them? Do we build in success checks frequently so that we can find out their learning gaps and then help them? Or do we let our students fall down?

Your interpretation of formative assessment will determine your focus in the class. I hope that you will focus on actions that lead directly to student improvement.

I WAS never clear what the word "rigor" meant. Mostly, it seemed to be used either by school administrators or by those teachers who seem to take pride in how hard their courses are. The no-pain-no-gain school of education.

A college professor teaching a math course I took last summer mused that he was also unsure what rigor meant, adding, "I think it means we write things down".

Alfie Kohn tells, in his The Homework Myth, the story of a principal who was asked by a parent if his school provided a "rigorous" education. He hesitated, and added he was unsure until he'd consulted a dictionary. He returned and declared, "Good Lord, No!"

Inspired by this, I too consulted the definition of rigor even in that most traditional and quintessential US dictionary, Webster’s.

Ask me now whether or not my classes are rigorous and I would declare, "I hope not!"

Rigor dates from the early 1300s, the time of The Inquisition.

The Inquisition ruthlessly suppressed any creative or free thought, under the label of "heresy", as well as the likes of a Galileo. Rigor in education seems to simply equate difficulty with quality. Difficulty for the sake of difficulty doesn't seem to promote the enjoyment of free or creative inquiry.

I know teachers who boast of rigor in their courses. Some refer to other teachers as "the slacker teachers". For them learning is about hard work, the harder the work, the better the learning. Kids get off too easy. The way to improve learning is to make it harder and then do repeatedly more of it. They point to their successes with pride but somehow seem to forget those who don't make the grade. After all they didn't work hard enough.

In this harder-is-better world, late or poor homework means an invitation to a mis-named after-school homework "party". Failure to accept the invitation means a referral, detention.

It conjures up visions not so much of the 19^th century sadism of Wackford Squeers and the crushing of the pathetic Smike in Dickens' Nicholas Nickleby, but certainly the pompous Blimber and his academy of Dombey and Son — "a great hothouse, in which there was a forcing apparatus incessantly at work."

In the Dickensian Mr Feeder's class, "they knew no rest from the pursuit of strong-hearted verbs, savage noun-substantives, inflexible syntactic passages, and ghosts of exercises that appeared to them in their dreams".

Before that at Mrs Pipchin's, Dickens describes the pedagogy as "not to encourage a child's mind to develop and expand itself like a young flower, but to open it by force like an oyster".

Difficult does not equal better. Difficult is a relative term. What is difficult for one student may not be so for another. What is difficult for a student this year, may not be 12-months down the line after the brain has gone through another year of development.

The question in the classroom should not be about difficult versus easy, it should be about finding what the Soviet educational psychologist Vygotsky called the zone of proximal development — that place between the actual development achieved by a child on their own and the potential development that they can achieve with the mediation of an adult or other students.

"The trick," said Jerome Bruner (quoted by Kohn in The Schools our Children Deserve), "is to find the medium questions that can be answered and take you somewhere."

Maximum difficulty isn't the same as optimal difficulty adds Kohn.

Too easy and the student feels belittled, too difficult and the student feels stupid, alienated and likely to lose all interest in the subject.

Kohn adds this footnote: "One technique for finding just the right level of challenge for each student is so simple that few of us think of it: let the student choose. As long as the classroom doesn't overemphasize performance, doesn't lead student to think mostly about getting good grades or doing better than others, children will generally seek out tasks that are just beyond what they're able to do easily."

But in the rigorous classroom grades and sorting and ranking students are fetishes. Students who suffer the rigorists are never allowed to forget the grade, that's the point. The percentages and grades are supposed to motivate, when in fact they do exactly the opposite.

Key to finding Vygotsky's zone of proximal development is collaboration with other students or the mediation of an adult in a cultural context. This clashes with another rigorist article of faith, that a child should prove ability in the isolation of high-stakes tests, based on lessons that are taught outside of a cultural context.

Kohn quotes educationist, reformer and philosopher John Dewey; the value of what students do "resides in its connection with a stimulation of greater thoughtfulness, not in the strain it imposes."

Parents would be better served by asking not whether a course is rigorous, but whether or not it is engaging and meaningful.

I think that the total drop water fall  is like the summative tests we give students. The results are given at the end of the year or semester. It has no impact on the students' learning movement within the course. In a formative assessment process, We do not just check the students' progress just once but we check many times. We find out if we have to redirect their movement. We can see small successes steps that lead to the big success in the standard.

Glick wrote :"It is not what the teacher does but what he gets the students to do that results in learning" Our focus should be not on what the teacher does but on what the teacher helps the students to do. The teacher's "best" lecture is not good if it does not help students to do something to learn the standard. Teachers should teach less and have students learn and do more in the class. The more students do in the class, the more teachers can observe them, diagnose them, and offer formative feedback to help the students so that the students can improve drastically in their learning.

Do you focus on teaching or learning?

Right answers do not reveal students deep thinking while errors do.

How do you engage your students in in depth projects where they can show their thinking and their errors?

Once we do decide on our specific learning goal, then we have to decide how we will help students develop that skill.  Just reading  A Midsummer's Night Dream will not accomplish the task. We have to develop specific activities to help students grow in analyzing themes.

Do you focus on content or context?

In elementary, language arts learn give valuable feedback telling several good things and then to give constructive feedback wording like "I wonder what would happen if ...." Middle school schools can identify if parts of a science lab reports exist. They can identify if certain essay writing has a thesis statement and topic sentences. They can share their strategies withe their peers. By late middle school, students should be capable of giving detailed feedback based on checklists, rubrics, exemplars, etc. Again, each comment helps the peer t to improve.

We talk about life long learning and one aspect of that is wanting to improve. Peers can offer valuable feedback. Often peers can word things in ways that are very understandable to the other students as opposed to the jargon of some teachers. Peers can provide feedback more frequently than the teacher.

How to help your students to grow in giving formative feedback.

Do you pass on that information to the next teacher so that he/she can start at a higher level of knowledge of the students. That teacher can focus class and individual instruction so much more with meaningful information. Or does your formative assessment end with you?

How does your school promote such transition of information about students so the teachers can help them to be successful learners?

When will teachers accept a common vocabulary for the good of all teachers?  When will educators become a community of learners instead of educators on different pages? Let's work together to help improve student learning!

Use a district wide Wiki to share  and develop common definitions and provide examples of that definition. Have educators build on the components of that definition.

Every student's paper has been an opportunity for me to improve in my skill and, in my ability to help them more.

What type feedback do you give?

Although no one mentioned doing more in-class mini-writing, I will have them do more write your thesis, identify your major topics and evidence through a graphic organizer. I will model each writing through a think-aloud so that they know the degree of thinking required. I will post an exemplar for them to study. I will build in more time for small groups so that I can work in direct instruction with small groups or individuals during class. I want to build in more stepping stones to success this coming semester. I want them to climb higher than this semester's students and to have less frustration in doing it.

What changes will you make for the next time you teach your course to help the future students better achieve the standards?