Lessons Learned

Instructional Technology - International Education - Wellness

Category: Rubrics

Wellness Assessment

Here are a few ideas to think about when it comes to assessing the wellness of your students:

  • Rubrics: Work with your students to design a rubric for each strength and PERMAH pillar at an age-appropriate level. The rubric creator, Rubistar, can help with this process. Here is a sample rubric for grit written for high school students.

  • Survey: The Institute of Positive Education provides a survey to measure students with their PERMAH and Character Strengths. It is for students ages 8-18.

  • Visible Thinking: Harvard’s Project Zero researchers provide thinking routines and other approaches to help students make their thinking visible. Several strategies have students sketchnoting, mind mapping, journaling, etc., to make their thinking visible for reflection and assessment purposes. Several thinking routines were listed here under the PRIME and SECONDARY strategies.

And there is a growing market of commercially offered wellness assessment tools.

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Self-Directed Learning with Rubrics, Benchmarks and Learning Plans

I was thinking about the post I wrote about Student Created ICL Project Plans to connect further to our hope for student ownership and directing of their learning. Project planning gets students to think about how to design their projects, especially when using technology. To make plans even more meaningful, to get further student reflection and eventual deeper understanding, here are a couple more ideas that one could include in the project planning process.

For some time now, teachers have been working with students to help create rubrics. So let’s add rubric creation as another component to the ICL project planning guidelines. Another step could be the addition of student-created benchmarks working from the teacher-provided ones. By having the students unpack the official benchmarks and rephrase them in their own words, they further their understanding of what their projects should demonstrate while helping improve the design of what they plan to do.

One strategy to help expand and define the benchmarks could be to use a mind-mapping tool. Students populate the map with the provided benchmarks while adding their learning goals. As they proceed in the research and learning product creation process, they can return to their mind map to further define and expand the benchmarks as their understanding deepens. Once the projects are completed and shared, the students can use the finalized rubric to assess their work.

Connecting to Personal Learning Systems is having students design and construct their learning plans. American public schools have been doing this for students with special learning needs for a long time. Some schools have taken the idea and expanded it to all of their students. We increase student agency and ownership of their learning by creating a system that puts the student at the center of the design process. A learning plan template with lots of scaffolding and a construct that supports student self-reflection makes this work.

The plans would need a lot of upfront design work to provide an individualized template for each grade level. They would have common structures such as goal setting, personal mission statements, interests, etc. The school’s core values and other themes (e.g., wellness, community involvement, etc.) could also be woven into the structure of the plans, thus providing another learning mechanism to support the school’s culture and the portrait of a graduate profile.

Connecting the learning plan to the portfolio would build in the action steps and reflection scaffolding to guide students to follow through on their plan. A strong wellness/life skills integrated curriculum would develop the strengths and dispositions needed for students to own and direct their learning.

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Computer Cameras and Presentation Skills

They complained, giggled, and balked but finally started their presentations. Three eighth graders stood in my classroom in front of their MacBooks, speaking out across the room as the laptop built-in video cameras recorded their speeches directly to iMovie. To graduate from Institute 1 (grades 7-8) at Hsinchu International School, all 8th graders must give an end-of-the-school-year forty-minute presentation to fellow students, parents, and judges where they give examples of their learning demonstrating growth in our five student learning outcomes. With their “Exhibition” evening fast approaching, we realized that the MacBooks could become versatile feedback and learning tools.

After the initial recording session, the 8th graders reviewed their videos while making notes about their presentation skills. Whether it was poor eye contact, low voice output, or killer smiles, the students faced undeniable evidence of their weaknesses and strengths as public speakers.

We could have used a camcorder and had the students take turns presenting, but this would have meant taking time to transfer footage from the camera to each student’s laptop. Students would also spend even more time sitting and watching classmates present when they could practice themselves and get immediate evidence of their progress. While we set aside time for whole-grade practice sessions, we hope that our version of the valuable technique of videotaping presentations will help our many ESL students feel more comfortable speaking and push them to practice more independently.

A coinciding use of the MacBooks occurs in our 7th grade Language Arts class, where Thomas Perkins has his students construct a presentation skills rubric. The students first worked to create the rubric on paper. Now, they are “laptop” videotaping themselves, presenting each criterion at the different score levels. Score a “4 out of 4” on the teaching rubric for Thomas in having his students engage and learn about presentation skills by using thinking skills at the top of Bloom’s Taxonomy. Thomas also gets bonus points for using technology to support and enhance learning.

This was first posted at U Tech Tips.

Design & Communication

Design and its importance in communication

Using good design techniques was one of the themes that ran through our ICL curriculum at my previous school. Both the library media specialist and myself, as the instructional technologist, worked to include the teaching of design techniques in any lessons that involved student-generated projects. A big part of our ICL focus was on how our students communicate their learning. In today’s world, where advertisers and social networking sites can overwhelm our eyes and ears with information, it is essential to challenge our students to analyze the delivery systems’ design and think about how they can be improved.

We partnered with teachers in curriculum meetings to build a design component into the rubrics for the common assessments. This ensures that the design lesson will be taught and assessed. Here is an example found in a 5th-grade science unit.

As I worked through the recent K12 Online Conference, I found a presentation dedicated to teaching design in our schools. The author is Dean Shareski. Think about visiting the conference page and downloading his presentation.

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