TWS Section 7 Reflection and Self-Evaluation

A. Interpretation of Student Learning Students success is very much dependent on if they were in attendance to class every day. Many students are absent in this class, one student has a child of their own to take care of and is excused frequently but many others are habitual absentees. The reason I believe that the students were most successful on the repetition form of abstraction is because it was explained and reviewed twice, at the end of one class period and once again in the next class period. The school bell rang in the middle of the initial explanation of different forms of abstraction so we only started learning about repetition. Also, students were most successful in correctly describing and making connections to writing a paragraph and the ABA choreographic form because due to a fire drill we ended up spending two days on the creation of ABA solos and performance. I see now that reviewing concepts over two days not only solidifies understanding but also reaches the understanding of more students because the attendance is spotty in the intermediate dance class. If a student isnt there one day they are most likely there the next. But regardless of attendance students perform better when they receive information multiple times in different methods. The students also showed large improvement in the forms of abstraction because I was able to use the forms of abstraction in each of the different choreographic forms we discussed. As they created choreography within a certain structure I was always able to go back again to the forms of abstraction to help them create more original movement. Though the words for forms of abstraction were used often and written on a visual poster I never had a poster listing the structures we explored. And though I had a poster for forms of abstraction I dont think I left it up long enough. It was only up a few class periods when I should have had it up the entire time. I feel the greatest barrier to recalling forms of abstraction for some students was being able to spell the terms, this inhibited their recall. If I had the poster up the entire unit and had the students read it and write it when I referred to it I believe they would have been able to spell and recall the forms better. In the future when I do this unit I will have the students write more. This is especially important for the spelling concern and for the English language learners. This unit lends itself very well to supporting and encouraging English acquisition for ELL students. A daily journal could have been set into place that allowed students to start writing about the connections made in the choreography and the written form. This could have allowed more one-on-one time with ELL students and prepared them better for a written quiz at the end of the unit as well as new vocabulary and writing practice. One of the school goals is that every class has a writing assignment each quarter. This shows the effort the school wishes to make to bring students writing literacy up, and this unit could have certainly been utilized better to support students writing ability. Looking at the graph of the performance of two individual students I recognized that whether they were a low performing or high performing student the students increased the success of their performance by 50%. This let me know that the curriculum was an appropriate level and match for the intermediate class. There was something new for everyone to learn and enough basics for the students with less experience to learn. This class needs basics and extensions with every activity because the students are all coming from different levels of experience.

B. Insights on Effective Instruction and Assessment The most successful learning activity was when we sat together as a class and reviewed on the white board what the structure was for a paragraph. We talked about the topic sentence, the following body sentences that expounded on the topic sentence, and the concluding sentence that didnt repeat the topic sentence exactly but relayed the same message. We then labeled each part of the paragraph as A for topic sentence, B for body sentences, and A for concluding sentence. Then I demonstrated for the students my own paragraph and accompanying movement. The movement of my ABA solo was movement they had experienced for the warm-up and was familiar to them so they could point out how they recognized my A was different but still similar to my A. After modeling the assignment I had the students create their own paragraph and create their own ABA solos from them. Some students chose to write their paragraph down, and they were the most successful in remembering and making connections. I will in the future require that everyone do the writing portion as well. This will better help me assess them as well. The least successful learning activity I had was explaining the rondo. The rondo was introduced on the same day as the review for the quiz which was only the period before the quiz. The students had their heads full of so many other choreographic forms they had explored that the rondo sort of fell to the side of their brain. I had the students create lines for a RONDO poem, but I never showed them an example of a rondo poem and what it might look like. This would have given them an idea of how A related to all the other parts B,C,D,E, and so on. Nor did I let the students put their lines in the order of a rondo, I collected their lines and created the rondo poem myself. The students could have had this hand-on experience in building the structure of a rondo and it could have helped them solidify the structure and connections of the rondo. The students lines of the poem were meaningful because we spent a lot of time discussing the topic of the poem after watching a TEDTalk YouTube clip, but the lack of opportunity for the students to create a rondo themselves is evident in their low performance in describing rondo correctly in the post assessment.

C. Implications for Future Teaching In future assessment plans for units I develop I will plan my pre assessment and post assessment together from the start. I created the post assessment after the pre assessment and then ended up with data that did not match exactly. It was still useful but would provide more valid data and information if the two assessments lined up better. I think I wanted to give the students a pre-assessment quiz that I felt they could feel at least a bit successful on. But pre assessment isnt about trying to award points to students; pre assessment is to figure out the patterns of students learning and their current performance level on the given unit objectives. It is okay if the students dont know anything about the unit objectives; it is only validation that the unit curriculum will be worthwhile covering with the students. I should have created my pre assessment more with the end in mind. The students didnt seem to have an internal need to organize the information they were being given. The students were not aware of when the assessments were going to take place and so they did not come to class every day with a clear objective of what they were going to learn or what direction the class was progressing towards. In the future I would like

to give the students at the beginning of the unit a big picture of what they can expect and in what amount of time. I will share with them the unit objectives, rather than handing them out samples of the overall unit objectives each day with my daily learning objectives. This will also help students know that on a certain day they will be tested. I would hope if they knew further in advance when they were going to be having a test that more students would have been in class to take the post test. I believe that the students had a greater understanding of ABA and ABA because of an extension challenge I gave them to create more forms of choreography using letters as has been done with ABA form. Their opportunity to create their own pattern of letters that could be used for choreography solidified the idea of how the letter represents parts of patterns. I will definitely try to create extension challenges for each activity in the future so I can help students apply knowledge in multiple settings and tasks. Methods that worked well and aided student success in recalling the forms of abstraction were a slideshow presentation with visual art examples of the forms of abstractions, a ladder activity where the students developed a motif by a different form of abstraction at each level, and a writing activity where they wrote down in a list the four types of abstraction and a poster that listed them to be read as well. The other choreographic forms and connections tested in the pre and post assessment were not delivered by this many modalities, only through choreography for the spring concert, and one note taking review session before the final quiz. That may be why their performance on describing and making connections to other writing structures was weaker than their performance on forms of abstraction. In my future teaching I plan to create at least two or three different activities I can use to present each unit learning objective to the students. In the future I will laminate posters so I am not afraid to hang them on the wall for the entirety of the unit. One of the things I neglected the most for my students was constant visuals. I would put the slideshow up one day, pull the poster out another, and then never had a poster that organized the choreographic forms we were exploring. In the future I will keep a poster of all the vocabulary terms up throughout the entire unit so there is always a visual resource and reminder for the students. D. Implications for Personal Professional ImprovementIdentify at least two areas for improvement that emerged during this unit. List and describe specific professional activities you will engage in to improve your performance as a teacher in these areas. An area for improvement would be in the rubrics and performance criteria used to assess students who need written tests given orally because they are ELL students who cannot write. As a novice teacher I feel my ability to assess a student with reading or writing disability fairly in comparison to the other students is lacking. I offered the post assessment orally to one student and found that I wanted to coach and teach rather than administer a quiz. I knew the student understood the concepts from observation of their physical performance so I was convinced they should be able to verbally describe the ideas to me but their performance was less than satisfactory to me. So then I was left with the task of awarding the individual student points on the same scale as the other students who took the written quiz. This is a situation I can improve my methodology in. There must be a way that you can fairly score students who need a quiz given in another form. Maybe there is a way to synthesize observation of performance and a verbally written quiz into a rubric that awards points with the same expectations of the written quiz. I have asked my cooperating teacher about this and she said shes asked the same question at faculty meeting many times and no

one has had an answer. When I receive my own teaching position I would start a PLC group for assessment. And specifically ask for a project to look at creating rubrics and assessments for orally administered quizzes. In this unit we look at technology, particularly the use of cell phones. I tried to incorporate the use of cell phones to create choreography and found that my activities did not produce the results from students that I had planned for in my learning objective. Students were supposed to use cell phones to direct dancers in their choreography and performance in front of a group. Though the students had fun and tried something new the objective was not reached and the most that came out of this exercise was a discussion on how distracting cell phones can be. This led to a good civic discussion on appropriate cell phone use but I had hoped that the technology could be implemented more to engage students in higher order thinking. I will engage in more workshops that discuss and model ways to effectively help students engage in the use of technology themselves in the dance class room. I would love to take a workshop or attend a conference on 21st century skills. Possibly the Instructional Leadership in the 21st Century Conference put on by the BYU Public Schools Partnership (I could attend this to help with the aforementioned assessment dilemma as well.) Or maybe I would find some ideas at the ScreenDance workshop at the University of Utah in June with Simon Fildes.