GenParenting

Parenting resources for all who love and care for children

Teaching Engaged Students

Teaching Engaged Students

This post is eighth of a series based on excepts from my book on Student-Engaged Assessment: Strategies to Empower All Learners by Laura Greenstein and Mary Ann Burke (2020). You can purchase the book from Roman and Littlefield for charts, examples, and worksheets on how to engage students to become owners of their learning successes.

Teacher Examples of Engaging Students in a Classroom

Mr. Kee likes to introduce a new lesson with a story that cultivates interest and attention, raises curiosity, or presents a mystery about the topic. Sometimes, as he uses an image or object to introduce a new concept, he also models a think aloud. One time, he showed a picture of an ending or outcome of an occurrence for students to ask questions about what it is and how it came to be. Another time he asked his middle schoolers about the Little Red Hen’s process of decision making.    [Read more…]

Engaged Student Assessments

Engaged Student Assessments

This post is fifth of a series based on excepts from my book on Student-Engaged Assessment: Strategies to Empower All Learners by Laura Greenstein and Mary Ann Burke (2020). You can purchase the book from Roman and Littlefield for charts, examples, and worksheets on how to engage students to become owners of their learning successes.

What Do Engaged Students Look Like?

Teachers have observed that engaged learners:

  • Find motivation and personal meaning in learning and assessing.
  • Rely on verified practices and routines for practical and participatory assessment.
  • Display indicators of engagement including interest, purpose, and resolve.

Engagement is at the heart of motivation. This applies to preschoolers playing tee ball as well as to adults in the workplace and teachers in the classroom. When 3rd grader Torrance says he is not interested in playing ball but wants to ride a horse, his father says they can’t afford riding so he has to play ball. As a result, he’s disengaged and wanders around the outfield without purpose.

After reading about “boring” poets and traditional poetry forms in English class, Keenan hastily decides he loathes poetry, so he writes an original rap to describe DNA. When his teacher returns his “poem,” the note says that it doesn’t align with the school’s writing standards for supporting claims with evidence. Here’s a small segment of Keenan’s poem in which he explains deoxyribonucleic acid, it’s structure, and purpose.

Listen to a story that I’m going to tell.

How DNA is found inside all your cells.

In your hair, blood, skin, and lungs as well;

Even got some DNA to help me smell.

My DNA is not for your replication.

Use your own nucleic a’ for your mutation.

 Keenan’s wants no part of your creation.

I need my DNA for life’s duration.

[Read more…]

How Teachers Use Students to Assess Learning

How Teachers Use Students to Assess Learning

This post is third of a series based on excepts from my book on Student-Engaged Assessment: Strategies to Empower All Learners by Laura Greenstein and Mary Ann Burke (2020). You can purchase the book from Roman and Littlefield for charts, examples, and worksheets on how to engage students to become owners of their learning successes.

Example of How Academic Standards Are Applied to Individualized Student Assessed Learning

As teachers increase their use of students to assess their own learning, lesson plans can include the academic standards that will be used in various project-based learning activities. The table below illustrates how specific academic standards can be integrated in various subject areas. Once the standards and activities are defined, teachers can assess each students’ learning readiness. Additionally, students must clarify how each standard can support a learning intention. Once students define a learning intention relevant to specific standards, they are able to identify how they will demonstrate their learning outcomes and rely on their own selection of resources to support their learning successes. [Read more…]

Giving Tweens and Teens Freedom with Responsibility

Giving Tweens and Teens Freedom with Responsibility

“Wash the plate not because it is dirty, nor because you were told to wash it, but because you love the person who will use it next.” – Saint Teresa of Calcutta

Wanting Freedoms

When my children were little, they couldn’t wait to tie their shoelaces by themselves. They couldn’t wait to brush their teeth by themselves. And they couldn’t wait to put on their clothes by themselves. Now that they are both in middle school, they can’t wait to use their own credit card, get their driver’s license, own their own car, and live in their own house all by themselves – all of which are out of reach for them at the moment! So how does the transition from childhood to adulthood happen? What should a parent do during the tween and teen years before their kids become a young adult at age 18? [Read more…]

The Middle School Distance Learning Experiment

The Middle School Distance Learning Experiment

A three-part reflection series on parenting middle schoolers during the pandemic on the home front, facing political realities with pre-teens, and practical considerations regarding school re-opening.

My youngest daughter entered 6th grade with the distance learning model in the Fall of 2020 and I am now the parent of two daughters in middle school. Having been a middle school classroom teacher for ten years, I’m well aware of the typical middle school experience for adolescents. Granted, middle school is already a life-changing experience for students in and of itself, but having to experience it during a pandemic is uncharted territory for everyone – parents and students alike. Talk about a paradigm shift! Indeed, this is the great middle school distance learning experiment! [Read more…]