Pre-assessment
The blog is a well-developed and well-written presentation that includes a discussion of the pre-assessment, innovative differentiation strategy, and assessments for tracking learning without grammatical/spelling errors
For my DP1 students, we spend one quarter on Vladimir Nabokov's "Lolita". In order to get the most out of the students right from the start, I will create a preassessment that can be used in the first week which will allow me to divide the students into three groups.
I have chosen to create a written quiz pre-assessment as it will allow me to understand the depth of student understanding- for example, one of my questions asks about ways to interpret a text. I expect that some students will know we can interpret a text culturally, but most of them won't be able to list more than one or two ways. Those students who have a developed enough understanding of a high concept question like this will undoubtedly be well versed in my more basic questions, which ask them to identify and explain various literary devices. This means that I will have a low level group who are unable to discuss literary devices, most likely these will be ESL students who need to learn new vocabulary. I want them to practice their oral skills, so I will also expose them to a few of the more difficult devices, provide multiple examples from the text for each, get them to demonstrate some competency in analyzing them, then have them teach the class. What I'd like to do is reinforce to the students that they can learn from anyone, even ESL students. Often, ESL students are spending too much time learning basic vocabulary instead of getting into the meatier stuff, and I think that is bad for their self-esteem and for class cohesion. I plan on showing the whole class the same excerpts of the harder devices that I had previously gone over extensively with just that group, and asking them to analyze the excerpts, identifying the device and author's purpose. I have no doubt that they will be able to give a surface explanation for some or all of them, but I will certainly make sure the presenters are prepared to show off some strong insights that I have little doubt the class would be able to find on their own.
My intermediary group will possibly be unable to answer accurately one or two of the literary devices, but should generally have a good understanding of the basic concepts, and most likely need a short and simple refresher, which the first group will be able to provide through a q&a session at the end of their presentation. However, this inadequate basic knowledge means they also won't have a solid grounding in high level concepts and analysis such as those posed by using Barthes' 5 codes to analyze a text. Instead of giving them a challenge that would mostly fall outside of their zone of proximal development, I'll have them doing basic research into American culture of the 1950's. Considering how good America is at exporting its culture, most of these students will have a firm grasp of contemporary culture, but their task will be to differentiate between the 1950's culture and today's, which should provide a decent enough challenge considering the subtleties and nuance needed to accurately assess those differences/similarities. I plan on guiding this research into a few key zones that Nabokov repeatedly used, such as Sigmund Freud's impact on psychology at the time. Today, I would expect many of them to have heard of Freudian slips, or more likely have heard some distorted germs of Freud's thoughts, such as the obsession with sex and parents, so this will provide an opportunity to explore what today's American pop culture evolved from- and reach some insights into how today's culture is often a reaction to events that preceded it. This should be highly engaging, and even more important, it's contextual knowledge that EVERYONE will need to know, which is why they will be giving a presentation after they have finished their research. They will be given a few excerpts from the text so that they can use them as part of their presentations, but at the end I'll also have a few tricky excerpts presented to the whole class that no one has had an opportunity yet to see. I'll then ask each of the three groups to on their own analyze the text considering the cultural implications. This will give everyone a chance to do some of the same higher level analysis that the upper level students are working on,(while helping me assess the ESL student's analytical skills) but even better, will help expose areas that perhaps the researchers discovered in their preparations, but neglected to mention because they thought it wasn't important. If this works as I hope, the intermediate level will be able to provide the best answers, demonstrating their learning through their research, while also showing the gaps- their failures to make this critical information known to the other students in their presentation.
The High level group should have a strong grounding in the literary devices, a smattering of understanding of the contexts involved, but will be hit or miss on the conceptual based questions. Because of their level, I'll be expecting them to work mostly autonomously. I'll provide a list of resources that I used to create my lesson plans that I'll use for classes in the near future, as well as the condensed results of those resources in the form of PowerPoint Presentations. Their job is to simply teach themselves the material, and then as soon as they do, for each concept, I'll have a few excerpts prepared, ranging from easy to difficult, and as a group they will discuss and work out the proper analyses, creating a short summary of an argumentative essay that they would make- basically a practice outline for the final exam. After I look over each outline for each Excerpt, I'll give it a simple pass/fail, circling segments of the excerpt that were important considering the concept they were supposed to be focusing on to analyze the text but failed to notice. This round robin style of group-work should allow each of them to contribute significantly towards enhancing each others conceptual understandings and abilities to analyze, all while forcing them to internalize the proper outline of a strong argumentative essay.
Link for my Flow chart for Pre-assessment: https://www.lucidchart.com/invitations/accept/46ee6598-730f-480e-bf3c-6c2da16e0f77
Link for my pre-assessment quiz: https://docs.google.com/document/d/16SKzVECGbnni-2CIQ5IfX89TPJwCUH3rplTli0M1kjg/edit?usp=sharing
For my DP1 students, we spend one quarter on Vladimir Nabokov's "Lolita". In order to get the most out of the students right from the start, I will create a preassessment that can be used in the first week which will allow me to divide the students into three groups.
I have chosen to create a written quiz pre-assessment as it will allow me to understand the depth of student understanding- for example, one of my questions asks about ways to interpret a text. I expect that some students will know we can interpret a text culturally, but most of them won't be able to list more than one or two ways. Those students who have a developed enough understanding of a high concept question like this will undoubtedly be well versed in my more basic questions, which ask them to identify and explain various literary devices. This means that I will have a low level group who are unable to discuss literary devices, most likely these will be ESL students who need to learn new vocabulary. I want them to practice their oral skills, so I will also expose them to a few of the more difficult devices, provide multiple examples from the text for each, get them to demonstrate some competency in analyzing them, then have them teach the class. What I'd like to do is reinforce to the students that they can learn from anyone, even ESL students. Often, ESL students are spending too much time learning basic vocabulary instead of getting into the meatier stuff, and I think that is bad for their self-esteem and for class cohesion. I plan on showing the whole class the same excerpts of the harder devices that I had previously gone over extensively with just that group, and asking them to analyze the excerpts, identifying the device and author's purpose. I have no doubt that they will be able to give a surface explanation for some or all of them, but I will certainly make sure the presenters are prepared to show off some strong insights that I have little doubt the class would be able to find on their own.
My intermediary group will possibly be unable to answer accurately one or two of the literary devices, but should generally have a good understanding of the basic concepts, and most likely need a short and simple refresher, which the first group will be able to provide through a q&a session at the end of their presentation. However, this inadequate basic knowledge means they also won't have a solid grounding in high level concepts and analysis such as those posed by using Barthes' 5 codes to analyze a text. Instead of giving them a challenge that would mostly fall outside of their zone of proximal development, I'll have them doing basic research into American culture of the 1950's. Considering how good America is at exporting its culture, most of these students will have a firm grasp of contemporary culture, but their task will be to differentiate between the 1950's culture and today's, which should provide a decent enough challenge considering the subtleties and nuance needed to accurately assess those differences/similarities. I plan on guiding this research into a few key zones that Nabokov repeatedly used, such as Sigmund Freud's impact on psychology at the time. Today, I would expect many of them to have heard of Freudian slips, or more likely have heard some distorted germs of Freud's thoughts, such as the obsession with sex and parents, so this will provide an opportunity to explore what today's American pop culture evolved from- and reach some insights into how today's culture is often a reaction to events that preceded it. This should be highly engaging, and even more important, it's contextual knowledge that EVERYONE will need to know, which is why they will be giving a presentation after they have finished their research. They will be given a few excerpts from the text so that they can use them as part of their presentations, but at the end I'll also have a few tricky excerpts presented to the whole class that no one has had an opportunity yet to see. I'll then ask each of the three groups to on their own analyze the text considering the cultural implications. This will give everyone a chance to do some of the same higher level analysis that the upper level students are working on,(while helping me assess the ESL student's analytical skills) but even better, will help expose areas that perhaps the researchers discovered in their preparations, but neglected to mention because they thought it wasn't important. If this works as I hope, the intermediate level will be able to provide the best answers, demonstrating their learning through their research, while also showing the gaps- their failures to make this critical information known to the other students in their presentation.
The High level group should have a strong grounding in the literary devices, a smattering of understanding of the contexts involved, but will be hit or miss on the conceptual based questions. Because of their level, I'll be expecting them to work mostly autonomously. I'll provide a list of resources that I used to create my lesson plans that I'll use for classes in the near future, as well as the condensed results of those resources in the form of PowerPoint Presentations. Their job is to simply teach themselves the material, and then as soon as they do, for each concept, I'll have a few excerpts prepared, ranging from easy to difficult, and as a group they will discuss and work out the proper analyses, creating a short summary of an argumentative essay that they would make- basically a practice outline for the final exam. After I look over each outline for each Excerpt, I'll give it a simple pass/fail, circling segments of the excerpt that were important considering the concept they were supposed to be focusing on to analyze the text but failed to notice. This round robin style of group-work should allow each of them to contribute significantly towards enhancing each others conceptual understandings and abilities to analyze, all while forcing them to internalize the proper outline of a strong argumentative essay.
Link for my Flow chart for Pre-assessment: https://www.lucidchart.com/invitations/accept/46ee6598-730f-480e-bf3c-6c2da16e0f77
Link for my pre-assessment quiz: https://docs.google.com/document/d/16SKzVECGbnni-2CIQ5IfX89TPJwCUH3rplTli0M1kjg/edit?usp=sharing
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