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More Highlights
from the State Assessment Conference: Some Practical
Classroom Applications
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The keynote speaker for
the conference, Dylan Williams, was engaging and
shared thought provoking and interesting statistics
and ideas. As a research director for Educational
Testing Service, he possesses substantial
statistical information about student success and
student learning. Some of what he shared was quite
surprising. For instance, he shared statistics that
show that students perform more successfully when
they are only given comments on their work and no
marks. He also talked about the importance of
teachers focusing on the classroom context; while
general or theoretical principles for good teaching
are helpful, context, he said, always “trumps”
general principles. He said that as teachers we
should focus on “moments of contingency” whereby we
are constantly monitoring student learning and
changing our teaching to promote or assure that
students are succeeding. When we do this, we are
“engineering learning environments".
He gave a few practical
suggestions I hope to implement beginning this
quarter to promote student learning. One suggestion
he had to prod students to go more deeply into
material is allowing, “wait time” after a student
has contributed in class instead of jumping in right
away to comment. He also suggested a “no hands up”
policy by which the instructor calls on students to
contribute (randomly) rather than letting them
volunteer. He recommended leading class discussions
in which comments go around the class (the
“basketball” discussion method) instead of between
students and instructor (the “table tennis” method
of discussion). Finally, he recommended taking
regular class polls to gather information about
where students are at on some issue under discussion
or some concept the class is learning. Doing these
polls gives the instructor a sense of where to go
with the next step.
Williams’ remarks generally
recommend making students more responsible for their
own learning and also giving them the skills and
instructions to help them be successful. To that
end, I am going to develop study questions on my
class readings that will be homework for students to
complete before the class at which we will discuss
that reading. These assignments will enable me to
call on students to share what they wrote in
response to the questions. I hope these notes have
given you ideas for how to apply Dylan's research to
your own classes. (Sandy Johanson, Philosophy)
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