Teaching strategies/activities

Assessment 3:  Major assignment 

Overview of assignment

What is this assignment about?

It is an opportunity for you to demonstrate what you have been learning and what you now understand and what you can apply in relation to being able to plan a sequence of learning experiences or lessons.

The Learning plan needs to answer these questions:

1. What do I want my students to learn, and how can I express my aims and learning outcomes clearly? (Learning Outcomes)

2. How can I organise my teaching so that my students have the best chance of learning? (Teaching strategies/activities)

3. How have I enabled my students to be assessment capable? (Assessment for/as Learning)

3.How can I find out whether students have learnt what I hope they would learn? (Assessment of Learning)

5. How can I estimate the effectiveness of my unit, and use the information to enhance students’ learning? (Evaluation)

The assignment involves you in a lot of thinking and planning even before you put pen to paper to complete the three templates:

                  Part 1 – Planning Template (worth 20 marks)  

                  Part 2 – Analysis Template (worth 8 marks)

                  Part 3 – Reflection Template (worth 12 marks)

Part 1 – Approximately 900 words

Use/fill in the Planning Template provided to demonstrate how you would plan a learning and teaching sequence (a learning experience) that includes the use of a graphic organisers (GO) constructed by the students – not by the teacher – and the cooperative learning structure – Publish: Circle: Refine (1:4:P:C:R) – and a set of assessment tools. 

                  Firstly, Select a Year Level and Stage and a ‘bite sized’ selection of any KLA content  area you are most familiar with to teach the selected Year level group of students.               

                  Second, select a set of  three ‘learning outcomes/achievable goals”, two from a KLA content area that your Year or Stage level students need to achieve (related to the content area) and one that deals with the social goals of cooperative learning. Refer to either the National Curriculum documents or NSW State syllabus documents to guide your choice of up to three learning outcomes – provide both the curriculum number and its description that matches the content/learning you want your learners to achieve. One of the achievable goals must relate to students learning collaboratively – this goal/outcome will most likely not be stated in your Key Learning Area in which case you must compose such a goal in the content of the learning you intend to plan.

                  Hints:

Take care that the learning outcome/achievable goal align well with the content you have selected and with an assessment task you include; the whole purpose of engaging your learners in the lesson/learning experiences is so that they can achieve these outcomes.

Be also very careful that you pitch your learning experiences to the students’ level of capability – given you may have had little teaching experience to date, this may prove difficult – a close reading of the content appropriate for the Year level/Stage your learners are at, should guide you.

                  Third, now complete the Planning Template headings in the construction of a sequence of learning activities/tasks – these may spread over a few lessons time slots. it is very difficult to determine time frames as it all depends on the level of your learners and  how you organise the learning around your choice of a graphic organiser# that students will construct and a predetermined cooperative learning structure: Publish: Circle: Refine (1:4:P:C:R), but a rough guide is that it could spread over one to three lessons depending on the Year level and the activities you engage the learners in. (Please keep in mind your word limit when deciding this.)

Ensure you label (in brackets) where in the lesson steps the five CL Principles are operative – at this stage just name the CL Principle in brackets to the activity or part of the activity where you believe it is evident – later in the second template – the Analysis Template – a fuller description of just three (Positive Interdependence, Individual Accountability and Group Processing) CL principles will be required.  

 #A graphic organiser can be chosen from any of those you have read about. You do not have to construct this graphic organiser for the assignment but you should include a diagram showing the structure of the GO if it is not one mentioned in the lectures or textbook.

## Integrate the designated Cooperative Learning Structure – Publish: Circle: Refine (1:4:P:C:R)(Further details about the CL structure has been provided within the Assessment tile.)

More details regarding the Cooperative Structure will be provided in lecture materials and readings

Every step in the lesson does not have to be described in great detail — an abbreviated summary will do – but not dot points – as your assignment marker needs to be able to follow what the students will be doing. You must make it clear in your description that you understand how to use the structure correctly and where and how the student-constructed graphic organiser is incorporated. A description such as: ‘Students engage in the Cooperative Learning Structure, Publish: Circle: Refine (1:4:P:C:R)s for 20 minutes’ does not show us that you understand how to implement these structures inside a learning context.

In the process of using these learning tools your students will engage in different cognitive processes (types of thinking) you will recognise these from Bloom’s Taxonomy (BT) – Remembering, Applying, Analysing and Evaluating etc. You are expected to demonstrate and identify two types of thinking – particularly the higher order levels.

Your planning should also draw on students’ Multiple Intelligences (MI). When you have completed your Learning Plan look back to ensure that the students are engaged in a variety of thinking tasks and that you have provided opportunities for them to activate a variety of intelligences (according to Gardner’s MI framework).

You should also indicate where assessment takes place in the learning plan via a brief labelling of the type of assessment (more details of the assessment can be provided in Part 3).

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