All assignments are due 3/12!!!
Assignment #10: Complete the 4 part assignment format as you read, reflect, and respond to Chapter 10: Cues, Questions and Advance Organizers.
Remember: Although your course packet asks you to post to blog for parts A, B, C, and D…we are asking that you only post part C and D. We’re trying to make the blog easier to read and more user- friendly. Thanks!
A. Self Assessment of Current Beliefs and Practices: This component asks you to reflect on how and why you currently use the instructional strategy of Cues, Questions, and Advance Organizers in your classroom. The intent of this is to activate your prior knowledge of your strategy use so that you can make comparisons as you read the chapter. Below are the questions to help you complete your self-assessment.
• What is your purpose of using cues and questions in your classroom?
• Study the research results in Figure 10.1 for "Cues and Questions." In your experience, what makes some experiences with cues and questions better than others?
B. Read & Reflect “Research & Theory”: This portion of the assignment asks you to read chapter 10 and reflect briefly on your thinking after reading the “Research and Theory” section for Cues, Questions, and Advance Organizers. You may want to consider the point below in your reflection.
• Many teachers who are aware of the research on the use of "wait time" will confess that they do not use it often enough. What do you think are some of the reasons that might explain why teachers do not use this strategy systematically and effectively?
C. Practice: Choose one of the specific “classroom practice” strategies or techniques shared in this chapter to try out with your students (If you are not currently teaching, you may share how you would use this strategy in your classroom). Please post a brief reflection of how this went to the posting labeled Week Ten: Cues, Questions, and Advance Organizers. Click on the “comment” link below.
D. Final Strategy Reflection: Use the following sequence of questions/prompts to reflect on what you’ve learned about both the strategies presented in the chapter and what you’ve learned about yourself as both a teacher and a learner. Please post your brief reflection to the posting labeled Week Ten: Cues, Questions, and Advance Organizers by clicking on the “comment” link below.
How has the information you read in this chapter on Cues, Questions, and Advance Organizers effected your thinking about teaching and learning? What have you learned about yourself as a teacher and learner? Use the following questions to assist you in writing a brief strategy reflection:
• Research confirms that advance organizers are powerful when they help students focus on what is important, not on what might be unusual. All the different types of advance organizers described in this chapter, however, require up-front planning on the part of the teacher. How would you respond to a teacher who complains that there just isn't time to prepare the organizers?
• What will you do to improve the effect of using cues, questions, and advance organizers in your classroom? – Will you make changes?
• How might you monitor the effects of cues, questions, and advance organizers on student learning?
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7 comments:
C. Practice:
The first section about Questioning or accessing prior knowledge was very good. I love using this technique and use it often. I think it really engages students because is basically turning the tables on them. Instead of us telling them what we know, it is them telling us what they know. They really enjoy teaching the teachers! It gives value to what they already know and moving from there. When we ask questions, I like the suggestions of making them about the important pieces, not the unusual or interesting pieces. Another suggestion was to make our questions of a higher level. This makes sense to me! If we ask higher level questions, it puts our students at that higher level of understanding.
D. Final Strategy Reflection:
I have never heard of using Organizers in this way before. I have, of course, used Organizers when writing with students, but not for other subjects. I liked it.
• I don’t think the planning time would be any more or any less. We still plan for our lessons, we would just produce something different. It isn’t a matter of additional planning, but changing our planning. Besides, how long would it take to think of a narrative to tell students? They love hearing about personal experiences! The tornado story was a prime example of that. I bet her students were fully engaged!
• In the future, I would like to make sure I pre-load information to or from students, whether it be with questions, by accessing prior knowledge, or giving them information before-hand to help get them acquainted with the information they are about to learn. It is all about including the students in their learning.
C: Practice
I really liked what the book said about questions being an effective learning tool even when asked before a learning experience. Currently we are studying ancient civilizations in social studies and so the day before we began our study on ancient Chinese inventions I asked the students what they knew about inventions, in particular those from Ancient China. The students didn’t know too much about inventions from the Ancient Chinese but they had some good ideas. I left our discussion at that and then told them we would begin discussing the next day.
Before we began our lesson the next day, I reminded them we would be discussing Ancient Chinese inventions and, to my surprise, the kids knew more about the inventions of the Chinese. They had been so intrigued by me just asking if they knew any inventions that they went home and looked on the internet about Chinese inventions. It was so amazing!!! Questioning before the lesson is something I will for sure use more often.
D: Reflection
I found this chapter to be very rewarding. I loved the examples of questions you could ask students about different topics you may be studying. I also liked the idea of narrative advanced organizers to get students intrigued or engaged about the unit or lesson they are going to be studying. Finally, I really found the skimming as a form of advance organizer to be very beneficial. It is something I will definitely incorporate in my future lessons and as way to get students interested in what they are going to be learning about.
Marisa H.
Cues, Questions and Advanced Organizers
Part C. Practice
This chapter is all about activating a student’s prior knowledge of a subject or topic. After thinking about how I use cues, questions and advanced organizers in my classroom, I remembered a simple teaching tool that I use each time I began a new science unit in my classroom, the KWL chart. The KWL chart is a great cue to get students to generate their prior knowledge of a subject before going into great detail and teaching the subject. I ask the students what they already “Know” about a subject and also what they “Want” to know about a subject before the unit of study even begins. Then at the end of the unit, we complete the KWL chart by writing down what has been “Learned” during the unit of study. This is a great tool to use at the beginning of a unit because it helps students generate information that already exists within their prior knowledge of a subject. This is a simple tool that works great in Kindergarten. I love some of the facts or ideas that students come up with when we explore together what we already know about a topic. I also remember teachers of mine from the past using the instructional strategy of asking questions. My sixth grade teacher would often supply our classroom with a list of questions before we viewed a video on a new topic. We would discuss the questions together, then answer them after we viewed the video.
Part D. Final Reflection
What I enjoyed most about this chapter was that the instructional strategies used were easy to implement in a classroom setting and could take place at the beginning of a unit to generate student thinking. Often times beginning a new unit of study is time consuming and takes a lot of prep work, but it is incredibly important to help students learn what is important about a topic and not what is unusual. It is always fun to provide students with interesting or unusual facts about a topic, but it is equally important to get students to learn a variety of facts about a topic, especially the most important ones. I think that a teacher’s job is to prep the topic of study before teaching that particular topic and to also provide students with an environment where open-ended questions are generated and students provide answers that are insightful and well thought through. I also like to explore themes before each unit I teach. For example, while teaching rain forests earlier this school year, our unit of study revolved around the themes of conservation and protecting endangered animals. While there were many unusual facts about rain forest animals, I tried to keep my instruction focused on the themes of the unit and the most important facts that I wanted students to remember. I think it is incredibly important to remember that even though the prep going into a unit of study using cues and questions may be time consuming, it is most beneficial for students when an instructor asks the right questions and provides the proper “hints” or cues to their students. I will definitely keep this in mind when preparing and teaching my next unit of study.
I used the strategy, Skimming as a form of advance organizer. As in the chapter, I made it very low-key and asked the class to skim their health student issue before we jumped into the unit. Some students looked at the pictures only, as was their level, some read a little bit, and a few knew how to truly skim a text. It showed me that I need to teach skimming before I do this again. I thought it went well. It generated more interest than I thought it would, and it set up most kids in a positive way.
Time is a valid concern for all teachers. I would encourage teachers to vary to the types of advance organizers. Skimming and expository advance organizers require little time to prepare, and narrative and graphic are more time consuming to prepare. If a teacher rotates the types, there will be less prep time involved. Also, saving the advance organizers for next year will save time in the future.
I’ll definitely make changes. In order to be systematic about using cues, questions, and advance organizers, I’ll need to make new lesson plans that include specific questions and cues, as well as advance organizers. Monitoring the effects will be difficult. I’m really not sure how I’ll monitor its effects on student learning. I’d be really interested to hear ideas on how to do this. My best guess is to use cues and questions for a lesson and compare it to a lesson without cues and questions. It seems an inadequate way to compare.
Similar to what Ashley said, I liked what the book said about using questioning to spur students to access their prior knowledge. We often talk about a lesson having a hook; well, I can see how a good question can work as a hook for an entire unit. Our school uses the International Baccalaureate (IB) curriculum, which means that each of our units has a central idea and 3-4 inquiry questions. For example, our current unit is entitled Our Changing Climate and our first line of inquiry is: what determines a climate? We started the entire unit by asking our students this question and recording all of their thoughts.
This week, inspired by Marzano, I decided to take this concept to math. I wrote a big 3/4 on our SmartBoard and asked my students, "What does this mean? What do you know about it?" The main thing I did differently than normal was give them loads of wait time. The results were pretty good. With the extra time to think, not just my top students had something to contribute.
Reflection
It seems strange to me that someone would not want to invest the time to prepare their class for an upcoming unit. However, I think it would be easy to convince them. By activating their students' prior knowledge, they can more effectively teach and therefore avoid having to reteach students later. Using advance organizers also prepares us as teachers for the unit. It engages our prior knowledge of the past years of teaching something.
Similar to what Christy said, I am wondering how to monitor the effects of cues, questions and advance organizers on student achievement. It is easy to see how they affect student enthusiasm and engagement, but not so easy to scientifically assess their effectiveness. Since I work on a team, perhaps I could offer to do the first lesson of our next unit in my colleague's classroom with cues, questions and advanced organizers after having given the same lesson to my students without the cues, questions and advanced organizers. Maybe I should leave this for a doctorate thesis :)
C. Practice
I like to use “hooks” to tickle interest, stimulate questions, and stir discussion among the students. The hook, or cue, relates to a topic that will be covered during that day or within a unit coming up. Students arrive in the classroom and there it is for them to find and think about. It may be a poster, a word written on the board, an artifact, a book, a song at the listening station. What I’d like to add to this process is for students to use post-it notes to post questions and comments generated from the hook, or cue. Before the lesson or unit begins, take some time to review these questions, add other predictions, and have student compose some inferential questions that can be answered during / after the lesson or unit. It would be fun to build on the hook/cue as a unit of study goes on from day to day. Add another piece of the picture, so to speak – more words, another song, additional artifacts, more books, etc. I think this could give an exciting kick to the learning experience and in engaging students. Stir the curiosity and conger up some of those higher-level questions!
D. Reflection
I have used KWL charts to activate prior knowledge and I’ve seen an additional column added and filled in after the lesson / unit is complete – What NEW Questions Do We Now Have? Students volunteer to research these new questions and share their findings during the Class Meeting at the end of the week. I think it’s a good idea to save these charts, keep them in the classroom, and students can read/review them during free reading time, and the charts can be used as reference during other units of study, as tools for a unit/year-end review, a “Look What We Learned!” during this quarter, etc.
It’s important for students to realize what they do already know and to give recognition for their life experience thus far. It’s not just learning from what a book says or what teachers say, it’s learning from your own and others’ experiences. Activating prior knowledge builds connection and community.
In regards to Narrative Advance Organizers, I subbed PE at a grade school the other day. ( Yes, I’ve been back to work for just over a month now. My C 1 fracture is healed and I’m up and at ‘em! Thank goodness. I don’t do sitting very well! ) The kindergartners were to play a tag game, “What Time Is It Mr. Fox?”. I told and acted out a story of a fox coming to the chicken yard at night. My actions and questions held their attention. I worked the process/guidelines of the game in with the story.(If I’d really been accessing my own prior knowledge, I would have remembered to sing them the song, “A Fox Jumped Up One Winter’s Night.”) We began the game and they had so much fun taking on the roles of foxes and chickens! They played with such excitement, and remembered & used the guidelines for safe play. It was awesome!
Hi Everyone,
I just wanted to quickly say that we have enjoyed reading your comments this term. As the term closed yesterday, I wanted everyone to know that they've earned an A and I will post a more detailed comment soon. We are slowly working through all the assignments that have flooded our inbox. :)
Mary
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