Thinking Made Visible: Generate Sort Connect Elaborate

As the school year begins, I am excited to practice with some of the Thinking Routines discussed in Making Thinking Visible.  Following the authors' advice, I identified the type of thinking that I wanted to elicit from my students and then chose a routine to correlate with the type of thinking I desired to see.  As a result, I tried the Generate-Sort-Connect-Elaborate routine.  I wanted to see what prior ideas and knowledge my students had when working with our first quarter essential question: What does it mean to be healthy?

I had students individually work through the first three steps (Generate, Sort, and Connect).  Instead of giving the entire task at once, I broke this up into three distinct steps, only explaining the step that the students were currently working on.  After a bit of preliminary modeling, students were able to complete this task independently.  

A student works on her individual chart.

Once they had finished, I had them get into groups of 3-5.  They then combined all of the ideas from their charts into a larger chart that could be hung on the wall.  While monitoring the conversations, I was excited to hear students disagree about where a certain element should be placed during the Connect phase.  These conversations resulted in increased understanding and more nuanced Connections.  

Using the individual charts, the group collaborates to Sort their ideas.

After Sorting, this group works to identify Connections.

In addition to providing me with a snapshot of their current thinking on this topic, I also plan to return the charts to the groups periodically throughout  the quarter and have students further Connect and Elaborate to see how their thinking on the topic has deepened. The thinking made visible through these charts will also help me to identify missing perspective that could be addressed through articles or other media that will further stretch their current conceptions.

To see this Thinking Routine in action, check out this teacher's webpage.  She has a video of using Generate-Sort-Connect-Elaborate with her students.

Self-Diagnosing with Assessment Dialogues

One difficulty I have experienced with implementing more effective feedback strategies is that for my 11th and 12th grade students many of the quick feedback techniques are more appropriate for comprehension types of tasks, not for tasks that require an assessment of quality.  Chappius, thankfully, offers a few recommendations for getting students to self-diagnose first, so the teacher can then "tailor [his] comments to offer as much or as little help as the student truly needs" (pg.79).

Her first suggestion is to use an Assessment Dialogue form which has students explain their strengths and areas they need to work on, has teachers explain strengths and areas to work on, and then has students write out a plan where they explain what they will do now.  I have used another type of form with my students, but I think I like this one better.

Her second strategy is two color highlighting.  Students use the scoring rubric and highlight in yellow how they think their product lines up with the performance indicators.  The teacher then does the same with a blue highlighter. The text that is green signifies the areas that the teacher and student agree on; no further comments need to be made on these areas because the student already understands their progress.  The teacher could then provide additional feedback on those areas that were significantly varied.  This would save be quite a lot of time and energy, especially when I assess drafts of longer essays.

Making Thinking Visible

Some of the reading I have done dealt with identifying miscues or misconceptions that students hold and helping them to confront these ideas through meaningful and timely feedback.  However, I did not receive much guidance as to how to identify these.  Now I feel like I have a little more tangible help. For the last week, I have been reading Making Thinking Visible by Ron Richart, Mark Church, and Karin Morrison. The book is replete with "thinking routines" that if practiced will help to make students' thinking visible so the teacher is able to see it.  I am hoping to try out a few of these routines in my classroom next week when the new school year begins. 

Occurs During Learning: the second characteristic of effective feedback

For those that know anything about formative assessment, this second characteristic of effective feedback is a necessity.  In this section Chappius asserts that:

Feedback can encourage students to see mistakes as leading to further learning if you plan time for students to take the actions suggested, before asking them to demonstrate their level of achievement for a mark or grade.  The time we spend giving feedback may be wasted if we do not build in time for them to act on it. 

For this to work optimally, the classroom climate has to shift so mistakes are welcomed in as much as they result in opportunities for further learning.  They provide information about miscommunication, missteps, and gaps; all of which can be corrected with further instruction and practice.

Because feedback can be time intensive, it is so important to use it effectively.  Time must be built in.  Nothing is more important than ensuring that students have learned the material- not coverage, not a pacing plan.  Nothing.  I like to move quickly, so to remind myself of this idea, I am printing out a turtle to hang on my back wall.  This way I will see it while I am teaching and remind myself to slow down, model, check for understanding, reteach (if necessary), give students adequate time to practice and improve.  And then, only then, move on.  Anything worth teaching is worth teaching well. 

Photo from fredsharples

Directing Attention: the first characteristic of effective feedback

Chappius offers a key question in this section: "Can this student take action on the basis of this comment?" (pg.60).  Inherent in this question is differentiation.  Some students in the class may be able to take action, but can this, individual, student on whose paper the comment is written take action.  By "this comment" Chappius is pointing back to her earlier statement that effective feedback should point to success, which is genuine and specifically linked to intended learning, and/or point to intervention, which should "identify a correction, describe a specific feature or quality that needs work, or point out an ineffective or incorrect use of strategy or process."  Does the feedback I wrote on the paper do this for my students?  Does it provide each with information about what he/she did well and what he/she needs to do next?  Or do I just try to give them enough information to justify the grade that they were given?

This last question gets to the heart of the verb of Chappius' key question: "take action."  Students need to be given opportunities to take action- what formative assessment is all about.  If the feedback does not create opportunities to take action, the feedback is worse than worthless- it is a waste of time.

Strategy 3: Offer Regular Descriptive Feedback

Chappius gives 5 characteristics of effective feedback:
1. directs attention to the intended learning,
2.  occurs during learning,
3.  addresses partial understanding,
4.  does not do the thinking for the student, and
5.  limits correctives to what students can act on

Taken together, these five characteristics are a useful distillation of much of the other reading I have done in the area of feedback.  Since Chappius lists Brookhart as a source, this does not come as a surprise. However, I do want to take the time to visit each of these five in turn to see what additional insight I can glean.

Photo by Phil Roeder

Highlighting Work that Misses the Mark

Yes, yes, I have heard it before.  It is important to show models of the learning target so students are able to conceptualize what the finished product will/should look like.  However, based on the reading I have done over the past several months, there seems to be some disagreement when it comes to sharing weak or poor examples of a learning target.  Some say that weak examples are unnecessary and serve no real purpose for students who should be focusing on quality.  Contrarily, Chappius asserts that showing students models of weak work helps them to understand problems to avoid.  I do not make a habit of using models of poor work, but after thinking about Chappius' argument, I can see how it can be helpful.  However, I think it is only helpful if students are actively engaged with understanding, evaluating, and explaining what makes one sample weak and another strong.  If they are able to explain what makes a certain writing piece weak or less effective, they are more likely to avoid similar shortcomings in their own writing.