Disciplinary Literacy, Pt 4 - Student goals & reflection
Strategy 4 - Student Goals and Reflection
Welcome back for Strategy 4 in our Disciplinary Literacy series: Student Goals and Reflection. I’m excited to talk about this strategy and how it can encourage your students become owners of their learning.
A reminder a of what we’re doing in this series: we're moving beyond the use of general literacy strategies (although those definitely have a time and a place and can support our students’ learning in our classrooms) and we are thinking about specialized literacy practices. What does it mean to be a reader, a writer, a speaker, a listener, a thinker within the discipline we are in?
We started the series with our "What ____ Do?" anchor charts. (What mathematicians do, what readers do, etc.) Then we talked about us (teachers) as models, as the experts in the discipline - both our thinking aloud modeling and our modeling of how we annotate a text and respond to a text. Most recently, we talked about organizing information - a mindset shift and choice in our semantics that takes students from simply giving them a graphic organizer (“worksheet”) to helping them organize their learning and their thinking in discipline-specific ways. And today we're going to talk about student goal setting and self-reflection.
Engaging All Students in a Learning Community
If you haven't read the two-pager on the website about Engaging All Students in a Learning Community then I would invite you to do that, then click on the link to download and read it. You can find this on the Resources and Publications page of the website. I'm going to lean into that today and make the connection to learning in our classrooms in that learning community.
The Engaging All Students in a Learning Community resource describes a learning community framework or a development cycle. (see graphic below)
Learning Community Framework/Development Cycle
Creating a classroom environment that builds a sense of
visibility, belonging, and self-efficacy for each student.
The very foundation this is built on - the idea of co-creating a learning community in our classrooms and in our schools - is to build a sense of visibility, belonging, and self-efficacy for each student. We want students to develop a sense of self-efficacy as learners, and we want them to understand how they learn and how they utilize strategies for learning. That's where that connection to our disciplinary literacy begins to take shape.
In my previous post on organizing information, this is the standard we looked at as I shared the organizer I use with my students. I created the organizer to help them capture their learning and their thinking in order to move towards mastery of the standard:
CSS.ELA-LITERACY.R1-9.10.2
Determine a central idea of a text and analyze its development over the course of the text, including how it emerges and is shaped and refined by specific details; provide an objective summary of the text.
This is a really big standard, as many of our standards are. Because of this, I want to unpack the standard and help my students see all of the specific skills they'll need in order to master the standard in our discipline of English Language Arts.
That unpacking can look like this:
I have to be able to:
determine
analyze
summarize
understand the central idea
understand the development of an idea
know how an idea is shaped and refined by specific details
produce an objective summary (that’s a key term)
I want to help my students set goals so we're going to look at what it means to have mastered the standards. I want to model and share with them some language around that. I want them to understand they need to be able to say, “I can determine or identify the central idea." “I can analyze how the author develops the central idea.” “I can identify the specific details that shape the central idea.” “I can write an objective summary of the text.”
Instead of me doing all the thinking for my students, I want them to know that we may not master every skill that goes into the standard all at once. It’s important for them to develop the ability to think about and understand what they do have and what they can do. And they need to know what it is they need to work towards.
Student Goal Setting
An example of a student setting a goal might look something like this...
My student might be able to say,
"I can determine or identify the central idea,"
"I can write an objective summary of the text."
“My goal and the area I know I need to work on is to focus on identifying the important details and connecting that to how the author uses those to develop the central idea.”
I'm going to help my students understand this by going back and connecting it to our "What Readers Do" chart. We’ll look at the skills they will work on and make sure that any of these skills we're working on are on the chart because those are things that readers do. (Remember when I said in that first strategy post, “You will continue to develop this chart, it’s not a one-time exercise”?) I'm also going to gear my teacher think aloud, my modeling, my annotating of the text for them. I begin to draw out and show them how I think about a text. I show them how I begin to pull out these different ideas in order to cement my understanding around this text as it connects directly to this particular standard.
That's where the connection begins between all of the strategies that we have been building. That’s where we help our students not just say, "I want to complete my homework," or, "I want to pay attention in class." This is where we help them make that shift into really thinking about, “How do I read and write and speak and listen and think as an expert in this discipline?” And then, “How can I begin to recognize the skills I already have in place and those areas that I want to lean into next to build my skills? Because it's okay not to know everything all at once.”
This is where we help them make that shift into really thinking about, “How do I read and write and speak and listen and think as an expert in this discipline?” And then, “How can I begin to recognize [what I do and don’t know] so I can build my skills? Because it's okay not to know everything all at once.”
Carrying It Through to Other Disciplines
Let’s look at a standard in a different discipline. Here’s a Next-Gen science standard from high school:
NGSS HS-LS2-7,
Design, evaluate, and refine a solution to a complex, real-world problem based on scientific knowledge, student-generated sources of evidence, prioritized criteria, and trade-off considerations.
Again, another really big standard that’s not going to be mastered in one lesson. In this case, the science teacher, wants to start unpacking this and helping the students see all of the things we're going to need to be able to do.
We've got to be able to:
design
evaluate
refine
understand “real-world”
understand what a problem is
And a problem in science is going to be different than the word problem or conflict in my English language arts class, right? And it's going to be different than a problem in math class. This is where we are getting discipline-specific - focusing on academic language as it lives out in our discipline. It’s all starting to connect.understand what “scientific knowledge” means
understand what “student-generated sources of evidenc means
understand what “prioritized criteria” means
understand what “trade-off consideration” means
Examples of goal statements or statements that students might share when they say "yeah I have the skill" are... “I can cite evidence to support my solution.” ““I can identify a complex real-world problem.” “I can design a solution to solve a complex world problem.”
And so, if you’re the science teacher, you can help your students identify: what do they already have in their toolbox? What can they do? What's a goal they are going to set?
Maybe your student needs to get better at citing evidence, so their goal might be "I'm going to work to cite appropriate evidence to support my solution."
TAKING IT STEP-BY-STEP
What we want to do is:
Identify our standard and learning objectives
Use our teacher modeling to share academic language and disciplinary ways of reading, speaking and thinking in our learning goals
Break down the standard/task with the students
What are the skills they’re going to need to be able to do in order to say whey’ve mastered and can meet the standard?Allow students to identify the skills they already have
Have students choose a skill from the list we've unpacked to build as their goal
Our students then become owners of their own learning in the discipline. They are building up self-efficacy.
As always, I'd love for you to share your thoughts. Comment below or visit me at TSB Education Partners Facebook page.
Try this strategy, think about ways of thinking and learning in your discipline. How can you help your students build their own self-efficacy as learners? How can you help them begin to build goals and reflect on their own learning?
If you already do this in your classroom, I would love to hear what has worked for you. Share with us so we can add to our toolbox as well!
I’d also love it if you could share this blog and my Facebook page with your colleagues as well.
Until next time…make it a great day!