1. Teaching All Children: Planning and Assessment
23 February 2010

3. How should we respond to Diversity?
How can we engage ALL students in learning?
Select themes or issues of personal and social relevance that provoke questions that call for investigation
Choice and ownership lead to commitment
Open ended questions stimulate inquiry, active exploration, and discovery.
Collaboration with others generates more ideas
Dialogue about results deepens understanding
Individual representation (writing, diagramming, etc.) encourages reflection

4. The Spiral of Learning and Understanding

5. Focus on an Improvable Object

6. Teaching for Understanding

10. The Role of the Teacher
The role of the teacher is not to teach per se, but rather to create situations in which students learn - in other words, to ‘engineer’ learning environments.
Wiliam, 2004, p. 1.

11. The Roles of the Teacher

12. Students learn best in a receptive, nonjudgmental, community environment that
encourages inquiry and independence
includes a wide variety of materials
provides opportunities for practical activities
is generally complex
connects school experience with the greater world
encourages collaboration rather than competition
values extended expression of individual understandings and beliefs
welcomes the constructive exploration of disagreement

13. Center for Research on Education, Diversity and Excellence

14. Communities of Inquirers/Learners
The emphasis on establishing communities of … practice builds on the fact that robust knowledge and understandings are socially constructed through talk, activity and interaction around meaningful problems and tools (Vygotsky, 1978). The teacher guides and supports students as they explore problems and define questions that are of interest to them. A community of practice also provides direct cognitive and social support for the efforts of the group’s individual members. Students share the responsibility for thinking and doing: they distribute their intellectual activity so that the burden of managing the whole process does not fall on any one individual. In addition, a community of practice can be a powerful context for constructing [scientific] meanings. In challenging one another’s thoughts and beliefs, students must be explicit about their meanings; they must negotiate conflicts in belief or evidence; and they must share and synthesize their knowledge to achieve understanding (How People Learn, pp.183-4)
Plan for:
Classroom Meetings
Negotiation of Themes and Inquiries
Presentation to Real Audiences
Reflective Discussion

15. Learning for Understanding
occurs through: using knowledge to carry out some
is shown in: new and challenging activity in order
to achieve some desired outcome
in a particular situation.
Generative Topics: Themes that connect to students’ lives, stimulate
inquiry, provoke discussion.
Goals for Understanding: “Big ideas”, important concepts, necessary skills,
connections and implications.
Performances of Understanding : Activities that use knowledge for meaningful
purposes, practical and intellectual.
Ongoing Assessment: Provide criteria, give feedback and support,
encourage reflection.
Summative Assessment: A ‘performance of understanding’ that requires
students to draw on what they have understood
to meet some new challenge.
(based on Project Zero Framework)

16. Designing a Curriculum Unit
THEME
(A Way of Orienting Curriculum Content to Students’ Lives and Interests
e.g. Community, Exploration, Water)
“Big Ideas”/”Enduring Understandings”
(see Curriculum Standards)
Activities
(that Allow for Inquiry, Dialogue)
Check with Principles
Launch-----Questions -----Research
Performance of Understanding <---> Assessment
Reflection