How Parents Can Support Student Learning

This blog is a parallel commentary from the parent perspective on Mary Ann Burke’s November 2, 2021 post “What teachers and parents can do to increase student learning” from her series Student Engagement Assessment: Strategies to Empower All Learners.

Most second-generation Asian Americans were prodded by parents to achieve the “American Dream” by becoming a doctor, engineer, or lawyer, my parents gave me the freedom of choice. My Asian American idea of achieving the “American Dream” was not so much defined by a career, but that a successful life was one in which I had every opportunity to fulfill my destiny. When I was young, my parents encouraged me to pursue my passions, to develop my talents, and to follow the sense of calling in my life. During this season of Thanksgiving, I am eternally grateful for the gift of freedom my parents have bestowed on me.

Student Ownership of Their Learning

Now that my daughters are in high school and middle school, I too, want to pass on the gift of freedom. When children know they have full autonomy of their learning, they will be self-motivated. All the content they wish to learn will have meaning and relevance in their lives. Moreover, children will know that they have full support from their parents. In my family, we regularly have conversations about what they want to learn and what activities they want to pursue. This will set up the expectation that they are the ones who need to take ownership of their learning. Some questions we have used in conversations include:

• What do you want to be when you grow up?
• What particular gifts are talents of yours will you be using to fulfill this potential?
• How can you use your gifts and talents to help others?
• How do you see yourself impacting the world in a positive way with this career?

Student Development of Individualized Learning Intentions

Once we have had the conversation about our children’s future goals, we are able to take the next step to individualize their learning intentions and plans. This is where we talk about classes they need to take or activities to get involved with. Since each person will have different goals and a different path in life, it is important to emphasize here that development of individual plans means taking your time to develop a coaching or mentoring approach with your children.

For example, our older daughter has a strong sense of the goals she wants to pursue. For her, developing learning intentions means that we chart out classes and activities that align with her goals. We check in with her to see that she is doing well in her academic classes and that her activities are providing enough of a challenge to grow as a person. Our younger daughter is still exploring her future options. For her, providing a wide range of learning opportunities will help her discover and develop her strengths. She loves helping people, so her activities include many service projects. To help each daughter articulate her individualized learning intentions, here are some questions we have used in conversations at multiple check-points:

• What is something new that you have learned in your classes / activities?
• What is a success you have accomplished within your classes / activities?
• What do you enjoy the most in your classes / activities?
• What struggles do you still have in your classes / activities?

Applying Standards to Student-Owned Learning Intentions

As a parent, guiding your child for success is not so much a looking at your child’s performance on academic standards. What is critical in this parent-child relationship is that you are looking for personal growth towards in your child’s learning intentions. Towards that end, here are some additional conversation starters that will help assess how to continue making progress towards your child’s goals:

• What can I do to support you and help you do your best?
• Are you satisfied with your current learning experiences, or do you need something different / more challenging / less intense to reach your goals?

May you have much success in supporting your kids to achieve the American Dream!

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 3^rd 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.

Fortunately for Keenan, his uncle is a teacher and explains there are two writing standards that are part of supporting claims with evidence. These include “developing the topic with relevant facts” and “providing a concluding statement that follows the argument.” He also clarifies that poetry can take make forms.

While the standards don’t specifically mention poetry, his teacher is willing to listen as he reasons that writing is about communicating; and his rap clearly communicates some principles of DNA. As a result of his teacher’s aha moment, there are two positive outcomes: higher engagement for Keenan and a deeper understanding of diverse perspectives on writing by the teacher. Additionally, Keenan uses the assignment to learn about how DNA is collected and whether organ transplants can change a person’s DNA.

Another Example of an Engaged Student

Kennan’s third-grade sister, Keanna, gets so excited about his rap, that she asks her teacher if she can write one. The goal and intention is to prepare a summary of their unit on animal adaptations. In it, she is expected to explain the key ideas with evidence. With her brother’s help she writes:

They say penguins and gulls are alike because

Both have feathers and bones from past history.

(The teacher suggests antiquity, so she looks it up and changes her rap.)

Yet, one soars through air, the other through water.

Adaptation means adjusting to some type of change.

Maybe I’ll grow feathers when the climate’s rearranged.

Both of their teachers develop scoring rubrics based on the district’s criteria: clarity of information, organization, use of evidence, focus on topic, and accuracy. They decide to add their own indicators for reflection and creativity. At the dinner table, both students are enthusiastic about this personalization of learning and talk about rewriting their work in response to the feedback they received.

 What Does an Engaged School Look Like?

When students aren’t performing up to expectations, it is typical to start by assessing their academic skills. When the causes aren’t academic, then inattention, mental health, or problems at home are explored. Sometimes, it’s just plain boredom with the repetitiveness or irrelevance of the classroom that leads to a student’s lack of interest and disengagement. However, there are numerous substantiated reasons to make student engagement a priority. An essential component of engagement is that it changes a school and classroom culture of testing and assessing learners to one that is a culture of involvement in learning and improvement in outcomes that include:

Personalizing Learning Is Motivational

• Learning is personalized: There are multiple pathways for achieving goals. Students may decide to display their achievement of the learning criteria in an infographic, model, video, or medium of interest to them.
• Builds trust: Social and emotional skills are the mainstay of learning. Relationships and mutual respect are developed when a child feels their ideas are valued.
• Compels various types of learning opportunities: In an engaged classroom, options for learning are essential. For students who may not have the highest writing scores, relying on images or recordings to show their learning can be just as effective as writing them.
• Recognizes the explicit learning expectations: Students feel more confident when they understand how much and how deeply they are expected to master the learning standards and can see their relevance before starting their learning journey.

Involvement in Learning Is Motivational

• Encourages effort: When a child feels that their classroom is a safe place to express their ideas, they are more willing to reach towards higher levels of learning. They know that mistakes are part of learning.
• Supports intrinsic motivation: A desire to learn is essential. When students are comfortable and interested, they are more apt to take ownership, set goals, and determine a course of action.
• Boosts metacognition: The use of prompts and questions such as “What would you do, and why?” or “What evidence do you have of progress?” helps students dig more deeply into their thinking.
• Leads to ownership of learning: Ultimately students become the owners and proprietors of assessment who take responsibility for their own learning outcomes.

Our December 7th post will explain how students assess their learning outcomes. For more charts, examples, and worksheets on how to engage students to own their learning, you can purchase Student-Engaged Assessment: Strategies to Empower All Learners by Laura Greenstein and Mary Ann Burke (2020) from Roman and Littlefield.

How Students Assess Their Learning Outcomes

This post is fourth 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.

Student Created Success Criteria

Students can vary in how they write their success criteria. At one end of the quality spectrum is the student who says, “I will write a mystery story. I will use adjectives to make it spooky.” Stretching beyond these foundations, another student may write, “I will write and edit a well-sequenced story that includes a coherent beginning, middle, and conclusion, utilize proper English conventions, and incorporate evidence of achieving the learning intention.”

Example of a Student Designed Self-Assessment Rubric

In science, a student-designed science experiment includes a definition of the problem, asks purposeful questions, clearly describes the process, reviewed current state of knowledge, their hypotheses, procedures, and results. The scoring rubric includes criteria for evaluating the statement of the problem, procedures followed, and the accuracy of interpretation of data. The table below shows an example of a student’s self-assessment rubric for evaluating readiness skills and alignment with the learning intention.

How Students Become Reflective Assessors

Assessment readiness requires more than academic qualities. Teachers must also consider students’ readiness that are relative to their academic foundations and motivations to learn. Teachers and their students can also reflect on their physical readiness, self-awareness, learning routines, preferences, and practices that support assessment readiness. Readiness can also be adaptable for individual school communities and schools as some settings rely on pertinent social skills and others focus more self-awareness and metacognitive skills.

As students mature, they develop clearer ideas about who they are and how they think. They also begin to identify their strengths and recognize personal struggles. This development of self-awareness and self-esteem can be fostered by assessments that encourage and guide students in monitoring their own learning.  As students become reflective and flexible assessors, they can begin to personalize learning outcomes. For example, when given a choice to document their learning, Wei decides to make an instructive video, while Fiona illustrates a user’s guide to learning.

When Students Define Their Self-Assessment Tools

One day, Max said to his teacher, “I want to try something new for my project, but don’t want to be penalized for creativity since it’s the first time I’m using Piktochart, an infographic maker.” After a brief conversation, Max and his teacher mutually agreed to count the content ratings of the rubric at 90% and the design ratings at 10%. With the pressure off, Max is inspired to try something new.

In the classroom, numerous elements of assessment have been shown to increase student success. These include:

• Clarity of purpose
• Relevance to the learner
• Engagement
• Authentic experiences
• Personal reflection
• Informative feedback
• Reliance on consistent assessment

Teachers’ Observations of Student Self-Assessor Readiness

Teachers must rely on observing the outcomes (cognitive and emotional) of students’ learning. Students’ internal voices such as “I don’t care” or “I’ll try harder” are made visible through behaviors and products of learning. Sometimes, “Give it some more effort” or “I know you can do better” is often the default response. To boost success, it is more informative for teachers to ask “What do you want to learn about this topic?” or “What support and resources do you most need?” Teachers can clarify a student’s need for guidance by asking, “What is frustrating you right now?” or “How can I help you with your next step?” Developing a constructive outlook is the first step in helping students assess their own learning. Teachers must also consider their students’ assessment readiness through their comments, mindsets, and actions. Self-reflective questions may include:

• What does the pre-assessment data tell the teacher about the students’ knowledge, skills, interests, and readiness to move to the next lesson?
• How does this assessment data align to district mandated teaching standards and content?
• What are various options that students can use to demonstrate their learning outcomes?

Our November 23rd post will explain how students assess their learning outcomes. For more charts, examples, and worksheets on how to engage students to own their learning, you can purchase Student-Engaged Assessment: Strategies to Empower All Learners by Laura Greenstein and Mary Ann Burke (2020) from Roman and Littlefield.

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.

Student Readiness for Applying Standards to Learning Assessments

As students become confident in their abilities to apply academic standards to specific learning activities, they will develop self-confidence and achieve academic successes.

Our November 16th post will explain how students assess their learning outcomes. For more charts, examples, and worksheets on how to engage students to own their learning, you can purchase Student-Engaged Assessment: Strategies to Empower All Learners by Laura Greenstein and Mary Ann Burke (2020) from Roman and Littlefield.

What Teachers Can Do To Increase Student Learning

This post is second 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.

Student Ownership of Their Learning

Student ownership of their learning abilities encourages deeper learning. This means exploring learning through multiple lenses to uncover the complex intricacies of learning. For younger children, it is not attending a field trip to a bee farm, but thinking about what would happen if there were no longer bees in the world. Or perhaps, learning about dinosaurs and then creating a dinosaur that could live in today’s environment. Deeper learning helps students recognize that straightforward information often has weightier and broader meanings: And that it can be fun and creative to delve into these ideas.

When students in Ms. Ems’ fifth-grade class were asked to think about a world with no bees, Aman said, “That would be great, because my sister is allergic.” Amira added, “But, I would really miss honey on my peanut butter sandwich.” Ms. Ems explained the importance of bees in pollination and then asked students to imagine a world without whales, or hate, or even teachers.

Student Development of Individualized Learning Intentions

As students become owners of their learning, they begin by identifying the central ideas of a topic, pair these with big-picture standards, develop local learning intentions, and then plan and personalize those aims and goals. In the past, all the students would have watched a video, gone on a field trip, or invited an expert, such as a beekeeper to visit the class to talk about pollination and the production of honey.

Student-Engaged Classrooms

In a student-engaged classroom, students demonstrate their understanding of the broad learning intentions. For example, students can explain the life stages of the honey bee, the construction of their hives, how bees communicate, their role in pollination, and the production and uses of honey. They can then choose a path and strategy for further learning.

Marcella prefers to work solo and wants to create a precise diagram of the inside of a hive. Chester and Deshi want to work together to present the stages of a honey bee’s life. Chara wants to do “something” with honey but isn’t sure yet. She begins by exploring the source, types, nutrients, and uses of honey.

Each student or group then develops and describes their purposes and strategies for learning. They also consider how they can show what they learned and have it assessed in relation to their learning purposes. Each step in the learning process includes specific and intentional learning actions and also how each action and outcome will be assessed. This doesn’t mean there is a quiz after each step. Students monitor progress, adjust their progress, and display evidence with narratives and reflections.

Applying Standards to Student-Owned Learning Intentions

Today’s classrooms are standards-based places. Learning begins with large-scale standards (i.e. reading for information, solving real-world mathematical problems, planning and constructing explanations, and developing solutions). In relation to the honey bee project, those types of large-scale standards are too broad. They need to be customized so that students can understand the purpose and fine-tune their own learning intentions. Here are some examples:

• Reading for information is the foundation for identifying parts of a honeybee or illustrating their life cycle.
• Solving real-world problems can mean planning design specifications for a beehive or a garden that supports pollinators.
• In science, constructing explanations and designing solutions for vanishing bee populations leads to predicting a world without bees and proposing ways to prevent that from happening.
• Social studies standards can be used to explain how a hive is a culture and each type of bee has a specific role.
• Mapping the places in the world where bees are increasing and decreasing can lead to problem-solving.
• Reading materials can be as diverse as the straightforward “Flight of the Honey Bee” by Raymond Huber, “The Case of the Vanishing Bees” by Sandra Markle or for older students, the multilayered “The History of Bees” by Maja Lunde.

Aligning Learning Intentions to Student-Engaged Assessments

From these examples, you can see how student-engaged assessment can be specific to learning intentions and success criteria while being customizable and flexible. It’s not difficult to stretch beyond traditional standards and assessment methods such as quizzes that ask students to define vocabulary or to sequence the life cycle of bees. Higher level thinking such as critical thinking can be self-assessed using a rubric. Self-reflection of problem-solving skills can rely on an annotated checklist of the steps. Alternatively, students can design and create products such as an “Illustrated Guide to Honeybees” that aligns with the content standards and student learning intentions and also includes an assessment for the audience to complete.

Our November 9^th post will focus on how teachers can use students to assess learning in the classroom. For more charts, examples, and worksheets on how to engage students to own their learning, you can purchase Student-Engaged Assessment: Strategies to Empower All Learners by Laura Greenstein and Mary Ann Burke (2020) from Roman and Littlefield.