Introducing RAFT

R.A.F.T. #1 – Antici………pation

Anticipatory Activities are presented with two different purposes:

Activities to ACTIVATE Prior Knowledge
These activities assume that students are
entering the classroom with some knowledge
regarding a particular topic/subject. This
knowledge could even be misunderstood
concepts or beliefs. The point isn’t to correct
or chastise students but to ready students for
learning NEW knowledge. The more a student
is able to connect to old knowledge or correct
misconceptions, the more likely he/she will
retain the NEW knowledge.

Examples:
Anticipation Guides, PReP
(PreReading Plan), KWL’s; Journal
Responses (i.e., recall a time when…);
Semantic Feature Analysis (pluses
indicate what is known, minuses what
is not)

Activities for ANTICIPATING New
Knowledge

These activities assume that students have
never before been exposed to the concept they
are being prepared to learn. Therefore, these
activities help ready students by exposing
students to what is already KNOWN then
adding to their base knowledge with new
information.

Examples:
PACA (Predicting and Confirming Activity),
Visual Prediction Guides, Essential Questions
(if gravity is a force that keeps us from floating
off into space, then why do trees grow up?);
Journal Responses (i.e., write about a time you
had your ideas ignored); Four Corners (i.e.,
stand in the northeast corner if you agree that
we not have an enforced speed limit).

As these activities are introduced, modeled first by the instructor, and then practiced by students,
teachers must remind students that proficient readers predict, access prior knowledge, and use
what is known to construct new knowledge.

Working Backwards to Move Forward

Educators have been using the ideas first forged by Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe (2005) for several years now. Their work, known as Understanding by Design has been used to redesign unit and lesson plans. In some instances, their ideas have been used to rewrite entire curriculums. However this process can be daunting. Often, Wiggins and McTighe can become quite lofty idealists. This is why I turn to a more practical approach after the initial work using the UBD methods has been completed.

As teachers, we are ultimately responsible for assisting students to learn more than they knew the day before and work towards them retaining the essentials. A way to do this is to incorporate the ‘backwards’ design approach while developing the learning targets. Learning targets the essential knowledge, reasoning, skills and products would like students to know, understand, or demonstrate to show understanding. Identifying these will help in the development of the essential summative assessments that will measure student a student’s achievement.

Another step is careful construction of these assessments of learning. If the assessments are constructed in a way that can measure student achievement in multiple ways, i.e., selected response, short response, extended response and/or a performance, then a clearer picture begins to form regarding whether or not the student has exceeded the standard (A), met the standard (B), below the standard (C) or not yet meeting the standard (D). A zero, or a grade of ‘F’ indicates that the student hasn’t learned anything.

If these assessments can be used as pre-assessment tool then assessments for learning, or formative assessments, can be used to monitor student progress towards meeting the standards, then we can begin to identify student needs early and thus provide the necessary assistance right away. Once all of this is in place, a teacher who becomes worried about a student can confer with his or her colleagues that teach a similar group of students (same grade or same curriculum) or reach out to other colleagues outside of the grade or curriculum for additional ideas. In other words, having a professional learning community (PLC) that exists to support the teacher’s desire to have his or her students succeed is an integral part of this process.

If these steps don’t work, then the school or district should have a referral process (RtI) that can review what has and hasn’t worked for the child and offer recommendations to support the child in the classroom. This can be based on the teacher’s record-keeping of the summative and formative assessments. The very last resort would be to pull the student out of the class.

By working backwards like this to reach the individual child, we as educators can begin to make huge strides as we move forward with student progress and support.

Why did RtI Cross the Road?

What is the connection between Response to Intervention (RtI), a content teacher, reading and responding to a student’s needs? No, this isn’t the punch line to a joke. In order for RtI to function, content area teachers, no matter what the content is, have to learn how to accomplish three things:

• Assess each students’ reading and writing abilities as they apply to that specific subject.
• Implement interventions as a classroom teacher to assist those students who did not meet the content reading and writing standards.
• Alert someone after when a student does not respond after multiple attempts at intervening.

RtI is all about providing students with what they need currently rather than waiting until students are assessed using standardized tests. It begins in the classroom and the majority of the work is accomplished via the classroom teacher.

First, content teacher teams need to identify specific reading and writing learning targets they feel the average student in their subject specific classroom should be able to meet at different points throughout the academic year.

For example: “Students enrolled in Physics will be able to successfully comprehend 25% of a content-specific reading passage by the first quarter.” For more on learning targets, please visit http://rhshistory.wetpaint.com.

Second, with the learning targets determined, teacher teams are ready to develop their assessments. The assessments can measure both the content-specific learning target and the reading and writing targets the team has developed. The assessments can be analyzed to identify students who fall well below the identified target. Between the major summative assessments that demonstrate what a student has learned, teachers can monitor the progress of struggling students using formative assessments. Formative assessments are used as a way to help identify specific areas of strengths and weaknesses for students. These assessments should only be between the teacher and the students as means to intervene and correct the problem. They should never be published as an official grade.

If teachers are having difficulty knowing what to do with struggling students, they need to confer with their colleagues and other professional learning community partners. Gathering ideas and suggestions from other teachers and trying multiple interventions in the classroom should all take place first prior to the last step.

The final step is to seek help and guidance from a problem solving team that can provide additional resources and interventions that a general classroom teacher would not normally have access. These could be computer assisted programs, aid-assisted interventions, or teacher-assisted interventions that could take place during a study hall.

In all, RtI begins with the classroom teacher, but can only be effective if the classroom teacher can determine what the student needs at the time.

Thank You!

Wow. I received a tremendous response to the survey and I wanted to thank everyone who contributed their thoughts and opinions. Since you took the time to complete the survey, I thought I would share what the results were:

• 42% would definitely attend an in-house professional development session.
• 76 % would participate if CDPU's were offered.
• 97% prefer during the week.
• 48% preferred either the morning or afternoon while 28% preferred mornings & 24% preferred afternoons.
• 38% would participate once a month, 34% on scheduled PD days, and 28% twice each month

The top five Professional Development Needs:

1. Differentiating Instruction - 64%
2. Reading Strategies - 61%
3. Sharing Lessons - 46%
4. Improving Student Behavior/Motivation - 46%
5. Using wikis, blogs & tweeter in the classroom - 39%

Thank you again for your feedback. I will work with the PDC and other experts to help meet your spoken needs. In the meantime, I encourage you to visit the School Improvement Team Blogs, join a Wiki, share you ideas and seek wisdom from others.

From Building Context to Using Context

I spent a lot of time building context, or prior knowledge, for my students; due in part to the undeniable fact that I was attempting to teach way too much information. Obscure knowledge that I thought was important because I knew it, but I also understood my content – far above what any of my students understood. But I was the teacher right? Why shouldn’t I impart as much of my knowledge upon my eager and attentive students? Indeed. I just forget one very simple and enduring fact: my students had yet to achieve an understanding of my content. Why was I spending time loading their heads with prior knowledge about things that they would never retain?

I’m not saying that building prior knowledge isn’t important; I’m saying we have to know what specific enduring understandings we want students to retain before we decide what prior knowledge they need. And instead of hearing “I don’t know anything” because we’re focused on obscure knowledge, we might hear “I think I know something about that.” Great! Now we just have to uncover what and which students know and do not know that key concept or essential skill I've intended for them to retain.

The easiest method to do this is to use anticipatory activities such as anticipation guides that lists a statement and requires students to decide if they agree with it or disagree with it. For example:

T/F Maps always are designed with North on top and South on the bottom.

T/F East is where the sun sets.

T/F The United States is located in the Eastern Hemisphere.

T/F The Spring and Fall Equinox provide the same amount of day and night.

This allows teachers a very quick formative assessment to determine how much time to spend on which topic(s). Another activity to help student begin using their schema, or what they know, are story impressions.

This involves a teacher generated list of clue words or important phrases from a section of text. Students, knowing where the unit is going, take the words or phrases and write their impression of how they think the words will fit together. Students are utilizing what they’ve already learned during the unit and are predicting what they will learn next. For example:

Context
Understood
Cautious
Knowledge
Enduring
Connections
Anticipation Guides
Powerful strategies
Prior learning

Students who use the above words and phrases can then develop their own paragraph using what they’ve already learned. Then, after a brief discussion and comparison with others, the student can examine the actual text to see how close he or she came; thus bridging that gap between the known and new.

Building context is important, but our real task as a teacher is to provide methods for linking what students have already learned in their life to what they will understand after your class. We have to be cautious with our methods however. If we assume that all of our knowledge about a subject is important we will have a very difficult time saying that our students have understood. Therefore, deciding what will be the enduring skills and knowledge makes it easier for students to tap into their schema to make the necessary connections to improve their understanding. Anticipation guides that begin to build that bridge between the known and new are powerful strategies that will allow students use prior learning instead of feeling frustrated at not knowing anything.