Читать книгу Giving Students a Say - Myron Dueck - Страница 24

I clearly recall the days when I was training to become a teacher and had an advisor who instructed me to write on the board the objective for every lesson. Although the goal of making the learning intention clear was a noble one, this step by itself falls far short of being a comprehensive approach to sharing the learning targets. I have visited many classrooms where the teacher has written out the learning goal on the board or stapled it to a fancy poster. This learning "snapshot" is a form of sharing the learning intentions with our students, but too often the target is disconnected from the overall plan. Students cannot possibly glean from a single objective the contributing ideas, concepts, and procedures. And to be clear, sometimes a lesson or an activity is more effective if the learning target is not posted (Wiliam, 2018). Take the following example.

I wanted to address the global inequities of population distribution and wealth with my grade 6 students, so I concocted an interesting, and rather disturbing, human geography activity. First, we shoved the desks aside, and students worked in groups to create rough outlines of the earth's continents using masking tape. One group marked out North America, another group Asia, and so on. The students had two criteria: (1) as a class, use all our available floor space, and (2)within their groups, accurately mark out the relative size of their assigned continent. It was some organized chaos, that's for sure, but eventually we had a planet on the floor.

Once we had created the map of the earth, each group had to determine the population distribution of its continent. For instance, the Africa group members used a reference book to determine that they represented about 17 percent of the world's population. Next, we discussed as a class how we would distribute the number of students in the class to reflect the proportion of people who live on each continent. We calculated on the board how many students would represent the population of each continent—so, for example, 6 of the 33 students in the class would represent Africa. Next, I assigned the students to the various continents—randomly, to signify the fact that we do not choose where we are born. Once our planet was populated, I introduced the notion of gross domestic product (GDP) and held up a bag of 100 gold chocolate coins I had brought in. Needless to say, once I started distributing the wealth according to each continent's actual GDP, the inequity became clear, and students started either celebrating or protesting. The two kids standing in North America received 27 coins to represent that continent's 27 percent of the world's GDP, whereas the six kids standing in Africa were handed a mere 2 coins in total to reflect their GDP. Gross inequity.

I led this unit-opening activity before sharing the learning target as a way of hooking students' interest and spurring them to launch their own exploration into a related topic. In cases such as this, waiting until after the learning moment to establish the learning target can actually make the activity more powerful.

Implication for assessment: Supply students with a comprehensive unit plan and the information necessary to cocreate learning targets. Decide when to refer to the unit plan in accordance with the activities planned.