Visuals

Using VIsuals in the Classroom

One important learning objective in reader’s workshop for fifth graders is the ability to make connections to activate background knowledge before reading and during reading a text. There are three main types of connections students should be making in order to garner the highest level of thinking while reading. They should be making text to text, text to self and text to world connections. Last year students would regurgitate the types of connections they should be making but had a difficult time applying it to their own text. This year, I increased the amount of visuals while teaching this strategy in order to give students the optimal amount of support to apply it independently. In order for my visuals to support all learners, I try to have a combination of pictures, text and sentence starters. The goal is to have students identify the correct connection and apply it to a text.

The first set of visuals I used are the visuals on the promethean board alongside hand signals. The text to self visual on the promethean board shows a picture of a book with an arrow pointing to a child. I covered up the text surrounding it and had students turn and talk about their best guess about what a text to self connection might mean based on the words and the visual. My EL learners (and really generally all my learners) explained to me that they knew text to self connections meant that there is something in the book that reminds them of them because the picture was pointing from a book to a person. This informally showed me that the picture assisted them in understanding what this meant. The second visual I used was the text to text connection with a book pointing to another book. I repeated the same process and my students were able to easily make the connection that when the book was pointing to another book, there was something in common between two books. The third visual I used on the promethean board was the text to world visual. Using the same process, students were able to figure out that there was something in the book that related to the globe or world around them. The next step was aiding them in understanding what a connection actually is rather than having them just know the types of connections that can be made.

In order to understand what a connection is, we used hand signals. I showed them making a circle with my index finger and thumb with both hands and connecting them to understand what a connection is. I asked leading questions to help them use this visual to understand what a connection is. “What do you notice about my two hands are doing?” Students responded with “Both hands are coming together. Both hands are connecting together.” This led us to understand that a connection is when two things come together and there might be a relationship between the two (a word we have been working on in class). Doing a physical visual rather than just something on the board made it a little more hands on for students to understand.

Now that students were able to use visuals on the board and physical hand actions to understand what connections are and the different types of connections, I introduced a new visual to help students apply the strategy on their own. The third visual was the “Making Connections” anchor chart. This visual had a combination of images and sentence starters. Something that was really difficult for students last year was understanding how to start sentences to make connections. For example, if they knew that there was something related between their life and the text, they would often just say something like “I ride a bike” rather than “This is like my life because I also like to ride bikes in the summer”. The idea behind this visual was to give students a push on creating complete sentences with a little more complexity to their ideas. In this way, the image supported the sentence starters. As I modeled a read-aloud, I used this anchor chart to show students how to make effective connections. I paused during the reading and made my hand signal to show that I had a connection. I mentioned that there was something connected to the world from the book. I had a student come up and point to the anchor chart to show me where I could look. The student would point to the picture of the world and explain that there since I had a connection to the world around me, I had to use sentence starters from the globe section. Then I modeled using the sentence starter on the visual “This reminds me of when I watched…” to make my connection. This modeling helped students understand how to use and interact with the visual to make connections. Dan Meyers shows how visuals can aid a more inquiry based lesson in math (https://www.edutopia.org/visuals-math-curriculum) and the power of having students analyze pictures to deepen learning. This is the type of strategy I tried using in this reading lesson.

While independent reading, students were making connections in their “Connections Log”. There were three visuals on the top of their connections log to remind them of the connections they could make. They were encouraged to use that as well as the anchor chart posted in the room to make their connections. Looking at the connections log and exit slips, these visuals effectively supported students in making connections. The connection log shows that students were taking sentence starters from the anchor chart visual and applying them to their own connections. For example, the first piece of evidence shows a student using the sentence starter “This is like my own life because…” “This character reminds me of myself because…” “This reminds me of when I read a book…”. She was also successfully able to identify the correct connection she was making which shows me she used the anchor chart pictures to not only identify the connection but also use the sentence starters accompanied by the picture to apply her connection. The same is true for the other two students’ work.

The second piece of evidence that showed me the visuals aided students in making connections is the exit slip. Students were asked to make one connection with the class text we were reading (“Wonder”). Looking at the exit slips students were making a lot of text to text and text to self connections and specifically using sentence starters to aid them. They were also able to identify the correct type of connection (placing them in the correct box). The students’ work states “Auggie (a character in the book) is like Harry Potter in the book Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets because they both get bullied a little.” She clearly used a sentence starter from the visual and the picture on the anchor chart to help her identify a text to text connection. My data tracker shows that 16/20 of my students were able to identify and apply connections.

The visuals supported my EL learners (about 80% of my class) through pictures and sentence stems. Understanding what connections actually are through hand gestures supported my more hands on learners. However, I’m not convinced that the visuals helped push my advanced learners (or all my learners). Next time, I would add examples to the visuals to increase the depth and complexity to the connections. So rather than just “This is like my life because I ride a bike in the summers too” providing an example like “This is like my life because I ride a bike in the summers and it reminds me of the rush I feel when I get exercise, just like how Auggie felt excited when he rode his bike”. I would support this example with a visual of a person plus a sign that showed emotion and action to show that they can combine the two to make a more powerful connection.

Visuals on Flipchart/Smartboard

Visual on anchor chart

Evidence--Connection Log

Conferences

Conferences are coming up this Tuesday and Wednesday for Green students and the theme is goal setting. The first conference will be used to work actively with families to set goals together around math, reading, and language proficiency. Students will be actively involved in the process (as will families).  I plan on beginning conferences welcoming families to the classroom (not diving straight into data). Ultimately, I want to make sure the time together establishes a space to form relationships with families, is informative for where the child is academically and socially, and allows for a collaborative environment to set goals.  My hope is that the two goal setting sheets will advance this process.

The “Grade 5 Goal Setting Conferences-Green Central” artifact shows one strategy for beginning to set goals with families. The first part shows attendance which is important for families to see visually how often their child is attending school. This sets up a good time to discuss the importance of attending school, assess whether there are potential troubles with transportation that I can help support in, and a good space to generally talk about why attending school is important for the student at the conference. I imagine using this part of the sheet as a 5 minute discussion between me, families, and students.

The second part of this sheet shows data for reading, math, and English language proficiency. I would use this time to explain to both students and families what each of the data pieces tell us about the student’s proficiency in the core subjects. The document helps break down the different ways we monitor proficiency and visually shows students and families where we hope to have students in December, February, and end of the year with the goal of having students make 2 years growth. This part can become overwhelming and the explanation of all the tests can be monotonous. In order to decrease teacher talk during this time and not overwhelm families with pure data, I will explain the end of the year test (MCA) and the steps we are taking to reach proficiency through the other tests listed on the form.

The last part of the sheet touches on social/emotional strengths. This part was intentionally created with strengths listed rather than negative aspects (pays attention vs. has trouble focusing). This will allow space to discuss qualitative strengths rather than purely focusing on data. I will also ask students during the conference to self-assess themselves in this area in case I have missed anything.

Once families and students have an understanding of where the student is academically and socially/emotionally, we will collaboratively set goals. At this time we will utilize the other conference planning sheet below. Starting with strengths will help set the discussion in a way where we can utilize the strengths to set goals. This will be done collaboratively, with minimal talk on my part. I will open the space for students and families to list strengths and I will record them. Then we can go on to setting goals in math, literacy, and social/emotional. Again, this will be goals that families and students have so they will be leading most of this part of the conference. The next step is to create student, family, and teacher strategies to reach the goals. I will ask the student to lead the student portion, families to lead the family portion, and I will conclude with my strategies from a teacher perspective. This sheet is created with carbon copies so the families will be able to take a copy home with them to remember the goals we came up with.

These two goal setting sheets will set the foundation for ensuring families are plugged into the work that their students are doing and strategies to meet goals. The conference goal setting sheets provide a bridge between teacher led conferences and student/family led conferences. My goal is to have students ultimately leading their own conferences. This way of introducing families to quantitative and qualitative data will allow for all voices to be heard so that during the next conferences we can utilize these sheets to have students inform families on how they are progressing toward their goals. According to an article from Edutopia, there is evidence that student led conferences provides a sense of empowerment for students. I ultimately hope to lead conferences in this way (http://www.edutopia.org/practice/student-led-conferences-empowerment-and-ownership). The conference setting sheets will serve as a bridge to reach that goal.  I plan on using these sheets as I confer with students about their goals throughout the year ensuring that the two conference sheets have longer impact than just a one-time creation in a structured space.

Strengths
Goals	Math	Literacy/Language	Social/Other
Strategies to Meet Goals
Student Parent Teacher
Student Signature:                                            Parent Signature:                              Teacher Signature:

Grade 5 Goal Setting Conference - Green Central

ATTENDANCE

Days Enrolled	Percent Present	Days Absent	December 2016	February 2017	Attendance Goal
(MM)	(MM)	(MM)			95%

MATH

Assessment	Current Level	Considered Proficient	December 2016 Goal	February 2017 Goal	End of Year Goal Spring 2017	Considered Proficient
MCA	(MM) Spring 2016	350 Meets			(MM)	550 Meets
FAST	(MM) Fall 2016

READING

Assessment	Current Level	Considered Proficient	December 2016 Goal	February 2017 Goal	End of Year Goal Spring 2017	Considered Proficient
MCA	(MM) Spring 2016	450 Meets			(MM)	550 Meets
FAST	(MM) Fall 2016			(MM)	(MM)
F&P	(MM) Fall 2016	S	(MM)	(MM)	(MM)	U/V

ENGLISH LANGUAGE PROFICIENCY

Assessment	Native Language Equivalent	Present Level	End of Year Goal	Current Goal:
WIDA Speaking	6
WIDA Writing	6

Social/Emotional

Attends school every day On time to class Brings all materials Remains seated during class Completes class work Participates appropriately Communicates respectfully Helps others as needed Positive towards learning Pays attention, focus Completes homework Other: _____________________________ Other: _____________________________

Comments:

Feedback

In math we are working on identifying correct operations in multiplication and division word problems as well as finding strategies that we are comfortable with to solve multiplication and division problems. The purpose of this exit ticket was to identify if students were able to find a strategy they were comfortable with to correctly solve a division problem (number 1), see whether students could interpret the difference between a division and multiplication word problem (numbers 2 and 3) and assess whether they could choose a strategy to solve the division or multiplication word problem (numbers 2 and 3). The two learning objectives posted for this lesson were:

Learning objective 1: I can interpret division and multiplication word problems to identify the correct operation.

Learning objective 2: I can use a strategy I am comfortable with to solve multiplication and division word problems.

Feedback-Gisselle

The feedback provided to Gisselle provided her strengths and areas for improvements based on the two learning objectives. I identified her strength in question number 3 as being able to identify the correct operation. This tells me that once she sees a division problem, she is able to utilize a strategy. This strength, I noted would help her with her weakness in number two of incorrectly identifying the operation (LO 1). The leading questions on the exit ticket are provided to encourage her to think about how she thought about the problem. If she was successful in identifying the operation in this particular question then getting her to think about how she knew it was a division problem will aid her in understanding that number 2 is a multiplication problem and not division.

An area for improvement for Giselle is identifying multiplication problems within word problems (LO 1) and finding a strategy she is comfortable with to solve the multiplication word problem (LO2). A part of understanding whether it is a multiplication or division problem is figuring out whether the final answer makes sense in the context of the story. Therefore, I wrote “Does it make sense that Mr. Arnold puts 32 pencils in 56 backpacks and then ends up with less pencils than would be in one backpack?” in order for her to see it would not make sense for there to be 24 pencils in total. Then, I encourage her to start drawing out what the problem is asking her to do. I want her to use her strength from number 3 of identifying the division problem correctly to inform how she is going to draw out the problem. I give her a start by drawing a backpack and putting 32 pencils in there and have her finish the rest. Then my next leading question asks what she is doing. Is it repeated addition or repeated subtraction? My hope is that hint will give her an idea that when she is adding groups of something over and over again, an efficient strategy to use is multiplication (LO2). I would then monitor her thinking to understand what strategy she uses for multiplication (box method is a strategy that our 5th graders should be proficient in) to inform next steps with multiplication strategies.

         

**Note, I also noticed she was unable to subtract correctly. In order to not make the feedback overwhelming for her on this exit ticket, I focused my attention on the two learning objectives but am using what I notice about her subtraction skills to inform math activity routines and potential interventions in the next steps section.

Feedback-Shirley

The feedback provided to Shirley shows mastery of one of the learning objectives which will aid her in mastering the other learning objectives. The strength was that she was able to pick out a strategy she was comfortable with to solve a division problem (number 1; LO 2). She successfully used the “Big 7” strategy with accurate subtraction computation. This strength, I noted, will help her in solving the word problems below.

I identified Shirley’s weakness on the first learning objective. She was unable to interpret word problems to understand which operation she needed to use. The first piece of feedback I provided was to ask if the answer makes sense. So, does it make sense that each student will get more bread than is actually available? That should give her a hint that her answer is unrealistic. I did the same thing for the other word problem. “Does it make sense that Mr. Arnold has one pencil after starting out with 32 in one backpack?” This should get her thinking about how realistic her answer is. The next piece of advice I gave is to draw it out. I started her off in number 2 by drawing the backpacks and pencils in each backpack. The leading question for both number 2 and 3 of “is this repeated addition or repeated subtraction? What operation would you use for either of those” and “are you making groups of things or are you dividing things out” will encourage her to think about the problem within context to aid in understanding what operation to use.

It was interesting to note that Shirley’s strength of knowing how to use a division strategy and weaknesses of doing the incorrect operations might indicate that she has trouble with reading comprehension and/or language. This is something that I noticed in reading as well so there are cross-applications between subjects as well.

Next Steps

Based on the strengths and areas for growth, I will create skill based groupings in our differentiated math rotations. The group that will be applicable to both Shirely and Gisselle will focus on identifying correct operations in word problems. This is based on both Shirely and Gisselle needing additional support in interpreting word problems shown from the exit ticket. They both had a strategy to solve a multiplication or division problem but did not have the comprehension of the word problem to understand which operation to use. This will also extend the learning on the feedback I provided them on their papers. In this group I will begin with manipulatives and tangible word problems that are easy for students to interpret. For example, I will start with a 2X1 division problem that has to do with dividing out blocks between friends. I will use blocks or cubes to demonstrate my thinking about the problem and have them do the same. This way it is tangible, hands on, and tied to context. I will do a similar strategy for multiplication. Once we have mastered the strategy with manipulatives, I will have them try by drawing it out on paper. Each time they find themselves starting to group things and add them, it will be a hint that it is a multiplication problem. Each time they find themselves dividing things out and repeatedly subtracting, it will be a hint that it is subtraction. After they have successfully used manipulatives and the drawing out strategy to interpret what the problem is asking them to do, I will hand out two student exit tickets and ask them to identify the misconception. One student copy will correctly identify the operation and one student copy will incorrectly identify the operation. Leading questions that will be asked:

1.     “Does the final answer realistically make sense?”

2.     Draw it out--

a.“Are you creating groups of things and adding them?”

              b.“Are you dividing things out between people?”

3. “What strategy would be the most efficient to use depending on if you are doing a or b?

They will have to justify their thinking. Through talking it out, I will be able to understand what students are thinking when they identify the correct operation and they will be forced to justify their thinking through a more inquiry based process that is more meaningful to them. Last, I will have them use the strategies we practiced above to revise their exit tickets.

While it was not an explicit focus of the two learning objectives but rather a byproduct of using the Big 7 strategy or division in general, I will create another differentiated grouping based on students who need support with subtraction. My feedback on the exit tickets were not tailored toward this but it is important to note that Gisselle struggled with subtraction. In order to give her additional support, I will start incorporating math routines, creating number lines, and drawing pictures. This will serve as a basis and bridge to doing a standard algorithm approach with borrowing. An example of a math routine that could target subtraction skills is count around the circle as stated in “Number Sense Routines” by Jessica Shumway. In this routine, students count backwards by a certain constant number in a circle while I make it visual on the board.