Supporting Students before Instruction Support Students Before Instruction

Supporting Students before Instruction

Support Students Before Instruction • Develop learning targets and criteria for success. • Determine critical background knowledge. • Pretest to obtain data on student background knowledge. • Anticipate what students may find confusing. • Determine key vocabulary and pre-teach it. • Teach students soft skills needed to be successful. (note taking, how to read text, graphic organizers, etc. • Fill in missing background knowledge.

Learning Targets • Are student-friendly descriptions of what the students are to learn. • Learning targets are designed to be taught in one to two lessons. • Targets must be measureable. • Targets must be written in language students can understand. • Targets should allow for scaffolding?

Criteria for Success • The criteria for success focuses on what students will be doing during the learning process. • The criteria for success provides an understanding of what quality work should look like. • The learning targets should be met after achieving the criteria for success.

Formative Assessment Plan Grade/ Subject: OBJECTIVE: Learning Target Criteria for Success Collecting Evidence 1. Documenting Evidence What misconceptions do you think students might have? What will you do to address the misconceptions to move learning forward (e. g. , how will you adjust instruction, what descriptive feedback will you provide)?

Pretest • To determine critical background knowledge. • To activate students background knowledge. • To determine students mastery points of the objective. • Test does not have to be paper pencil.

Anticipate Confusion • Consider special students. • Consider students past performance. • Consider historically difficult concepts or assignments. • Consider data from pretest. • Consider data from ongoing assessments.

Teach the Vocabulary • Effective vocabulary instruction increases student achievement by 33% • Determine the vocabulary students need to access the content. • Students must interact with words in a variety of ways. • Develop strategies to teach the vocabulary. • Vocabulary instruction must start 2 days before you starting new unit.

Six Steps to Vocabulary Instruction Students receive a brief, informal explanation, description, or demonstration of the term. Students receive an imagery-based representation of the new term. Students describe or explain their term in their own words. Students create their own imagery-based representations for the term. Students elaborate on the term by making connections with other words. Over time, teachers ask students to add new information to their understanding of terms and delete or alter erroneous information. Marzano 2003

Teach the Soft Skills • Note taking strategies: Students know how to capture on paper the information they should focus on. • Reading strategies: reading informational text vs nonfiction, or fiction. • Organizing strategies: Examine the content and select an organizing strategy consistent with the thinking skills involved.

Activating and Creating Background Knowledge • To activate prior knowledge, use strategies that help students link what they know already with what they have learned: KWL, Outlines, Anticipation Guides etc. • Use strategies to create missing background knowledge: Use video clips, books, websites etc. • Caution: You can’t teach everything students are missing.