February Strategy Sharing: Application

With a focus on Application, Strategy Session #4, was a great opportunity to hear about some of the cool projects that students are engaged in across the curriculum, allowing them to demonstrate what they have learned. A few examples:

• The 3A Cohort got to hear about the process Doug Hundley's students engage in when designing a set for an upcoming production

• Chinese teachers Haiyang Jian and JZ Jiang both shared about movie projects they’ve done that have been popular with students. You can see the real-world model that Haiyang used here: it's a commercial that aired on CCTV that highlights seven values connected to the Chinese New Year celebration.  JZ posted her project handout in the Schoology discussion, including the scoring guide.

• James Linzel brought examples of his Innovation students' Electric Car Designs. The 3B cohort had lots of questions about the process and how he used the makerspace for this project.

In addition to the many examples of assessment tasks that require students to transfer their learning in meaningful ways, there were also some strategies shared that could be used across a variety of content areas.

Tom Musk shared a graphic organizer that he had originally gotten from Science and then modified. The idea is to get students thinking about historical events (such as the Scientific Revolution) as Systems, identifying inputs, outputs, etc. I could see potential to use a version of this schema in a variety of content areas. Tom's example is posted on Schoology in the Application discussion.

Simon Williams had some great ideas for facilitating peer feedback that he uses in his theater classes. In "Center of the Universe", a student (or students) stands at the center - like the sun - and the other students position themselves around that student as planets, with their proximity indicating how warm or cool they felt about the student's performance. Verbal feedback and discussion about why students had the reaction that they did results in the performers thinking about what they might change. A twist he had on the "Spectrum" strategy is "Grape to Raisin", where students indicate on a continuum how juicy a performance was. The continuum can be drawn on the whiteboard and students can point with their eyes closed, so they are not influenced by their peers in their rating.

Thanks to everyone who shared! Also, check out the bulletin board in the mailroom for templates that you can use with some of the Active Learning Strategies. Digital copies of Anticipation Guides, Word-Phrase-Sentence, Three 3s in a Row and more are available from your instructional coach! You can also find them on Schoology in the "One Stop Strategy Shop" Templates folder.