Professional Competencies #3, #4, and #5

Key Questions
1. What are the important things to learn about children early in the school year?
2. What strategies and techniques can a teacher use to learn those things about children?

Part One

Background Orientation
A primary aspect of a teacher’s job is to implement the official curriculum in the jurisdiction in which she or he works. It is usually the goals and outcomes of that curriculum for learners against which his or her work is measured and for which he or she is held accountable. Finally, that curriculum provides the goals against which students must be assessed, evaluated, and reported upon. Thus, it is important for a teacher to understand the official curriculum well, as well as to begin learning to use it as a framework for assessing children and as guidance for planning instruction for children’s learning. While curricula vary from jurisdiction to jurisdiction and while they are revised from time to time, the curriculum you will be working with is the current version of the Quebec Education Program (QEP) which was revised in the late 1990s and is still in the process of being implemented in Quebec schools.

This current curriculum is a major departure from the curriculum that preceded it and is also far-reaching in its implications. Because of the scope of the document, it can be challenging to get a good understanding of its basic aspects. To help with that task, here is a brief orientation around the key structural aspects of the curriculum.

General Purpose:
The key driving factor behind this reform is greater success in school for more students. An unacceptably high drop-out rate among students in Quebec schools prompted the need for a major change in approach. The following four aspects of the new curriculum are designed to foster this one primary goal, particularly by providing teachers and schools with more (1) flexibility and (2) power to make their best professional judgments to foster children’s learning and development.

Curriculum:
This aspect is the usual sense of a curriculum—content, learning objectives, etc. The Quebec curriculum is characterized by several key traits:
• The focus is on outcomes for students to master more than on content for teachers to teach.
• The outcomes have been narrowed down to a few, essential ones. The result is that the outcomes are broad in nature (and can feel vague), but are the ultimate, important goals for schooling. (While the document looks very detailed and thick, the basic outcomes are few in number.)
• Those outcomes are formulated as competencies. A competency is defined as “a set of behaviours based on the effective mobilization and use of a range of resources.” A range of resources usually include knowledge, skills, and values. Thus, competencies are complex and progressive, and very much like the abilities needed and used in life, usually more “process” than “product” goals.
• In addition to the usual subject matter competencies, this curriculum has also targeted cross-curricular competencies (Intellectual, Methodological, Personal and Social, and Communication-related) as well as Broad Areas of Learning (Health and Well-Being, Personal and Career Planning, etc.), all deemed as being important in life and learning. They are developed only through the subject areas, not separately on their own.
• Although the curriculum seems to create more “pieces” and sub-sections, it encourages integration of children’s learning, by encouraging integration across subject areas and requiring integration of cross-curricular competencies and broad areas of learning with subject area competencies.
• The official curriculum represents only 75% of the total curriculum. Local schools can create up to 25% of the curriculum in order to better build on students’ backgrounds and interests, provide better learning opportunities, etc.

Learning Process:
It is unusual for a curriculum to suggest preferred learning processes on the part of students, and thus preferred teaching approaches on the part of teachers, yet this one does so by recognizing a great deal of the results of research on children’s effective school learning as well as trying to match a learning process with the development of competencies. The program usually refers to learning as an “active process”. That phrase usually connotes several characteristics of learning activities:
• Students are active in the sense of having to think, figure out, test, problem solve, reach decisions, etc. (In sum, students begin to share in a teacher’s traditionally active role.)
• Learning is often concrete, “hands-on,” and related to real-life problems.
• Attempts are made to build from and link with what students already know, particularly by linking with the world that students know and the interests they already have.
• Learning is often collaborative as children create much of their own intelligence by explaining to others, testing out hypotheses with others, learning from others, etc.
• Many learning activities are more real-life and purposeful.

Such a recommendation suggests more student-centered approaches to teaching.

Organization for Learning:
This curriculum also changed the structure and organization of schools, as well as expectations about the roles of teachers.
• Schools were organized in two-year cycles, with end-of-cycle competencies for learners to achieve, in recognition of the fact that competencies take time to develop
• Cycle teams of teachers were given greater leeway in how to organize their students for learning, how to approach their teaching, what specialized, local curriculum to develop, etc. (Some common, though not necessary, outcomes include teachers “looping” for two years with the same students as a way of providing better continuity for students’ development or greater use of teams of teachers being responsible for students.)
• This curriculum expects a greater degree of professional decision making and dialogue among teachers about how best to promote their students’ learning. The curriculum specifies learner outcomes, but leaves to teachers a great deal of the decision making about how best to help learners achieve those outcomes.
• Although officially not a part of this curriculum, related legislation has devolved greater powers to local schools generally in regard to policies, budgetary expenditures, particular focuses to develop, and so on. Ultimate decision-making authority resides in the school governing board (made up of elected parents, staff, and community representatives).

Evaluation Approach:
• It targets the curricular competencies.
• It favours authentic evaluation based on performance in real contexts.
• It favours holistic evaluation.
• It is used formatively to provide feedback to learners and to inform teaching, as well as to reach summative judgments about learners.
• It favours shared responsibility for evaluation (teacher, peers, self, other adults)

Summary:
This curriculum attempts to make learning more concrete and life-like, particularly by being more pluralistic or differentiated in order to better address the diversity among students. The flexibility of the program means that the way in which it is implemented in different schools may look different in certain ways. Above all, implementation of this curriculum is not a simple, one-step process, but rather a long journey of understanding and refinement.

Readings:
The Quebec Education Program. Copies are available in your schools and it is also available on-line at the Ministry of Education of Quebec web site.

In addition, the Ministry of Education has recently published end-of-cycle rubrics for each major competency in the QEP. These helpful complements to the QEP should also be in your schools.
QEP competency rubrics English [.pdf]QEP competency rubrics French [.pdf]

School report card if possible.

Task:
Make a rough, initial assessment of one class of your students vis-à-vis the curricular competencies for which you are responsible for your students. (That is, the cross-curricular competencies and the subject area competencies for the cycle you are teaching.), using the kind of four-point scale from weak to strong development used on many report cards. One sample format is offered at the end of this assignment sheet or you may use a copy of the report card used in your school. While the competencies will be broad and vague, use the QEP to read “backward” into the features of the competencies, the nature of their development over the elementary years, etc. in order to better understand them.

This task is obviously a foreshadowing of the official report card to be done in late November and it should help you to begin to assess your students early in the school year—though you will feel that you do not have sufficient information on your students to make good judgments yet (hence, the use of the terms “rough” and “initial”.) However, the real purpose of this task is to start sensitizing you to the nature of the QEP as guidance for your goals for students as well as a framework for evaluation of their learning. As such, the task should provide you with helpful awareness as a basis for your upcoming planning and teaching in an “outcomes-driven” manner (as opposed to an “activity-driven” manner).

N.B. Do not use students’ actual names. Instead, use initials, numbers, made-up names, etc.

Means:
Review the QEP document, in an overall way as well as for those particular areas of the curriculum that you are responsible for, noting the major competencies that you are responsible for. Then use a number of informal techniques to try to begin assessing students’ level of development vis-à-vis the curricular competencies. Some possible means are as follows:
• Observation
• Conference/Interview
• Questionnaire
• Anecdotal records
• Checklists/Rubrics
• Working with students individually and in small groups
• Reviewing collections of students’ work

By all means, also discuss your emerging assessment with your CT. In fact, accomplish the task with her, to whatever extent she is interested and available, since she is engaged in somewhat the same task at the beginning of the year.

Due Date:
End of Week 4

Sample Assessment Sheet for ST in Cycle 2, Responsible for ELA and Math
(place student “names” in appropriate boxes)

Part Two

Background Orientation
  It is still often a first reaction to think of assessment of students’ learning and development as something to do at the end of our teaching episodes, in order to check whether or not the students “got” what we were teaching. However, assessment of children needs to precede all of our teaching since all effective teaching is planned around and targets the actual children in our class—their academic levels, their learning styles, their social dynamics, their emotional needs, etc. As such, this knowledge about our students forms one of the two major bases upon which to build our planning and teaching for them. (The other base is the official curriculum that we are implementing.) While our ongoing interaction with children during the school year will continue providing us with more and more insight to our students, enabling us to plan more and more effectively for their learning over time, it is also important to learn as much as possible about our students early in the school year in order to avoid inappropriate activities that may frustrate or bore children and to ensure positive and satisfying experiences for children in their early encounters with your teaching. Such knowledge also helps provide a baseline against which to measure children’s learning and development during the school year. (Remember that the first report card on your students is due in approximately 11 weeks!)

A major trend in recent decades has been a greater acknowledgement of the diversity among children along several key dimensions—academic, language background, intellectual, social, emotional, etc—and an attempt to assess them in a diverse way, trying to honour the diversity among them and trying to discover their strengths, as well as shortcomings, as learners. Such a broad, multidimensional approach to assessment also forms a base for attempting to diversify our teaching to better match our students’ academic levels, learning styles, social profiles, emotional profiles, etc. (rather than having them trying to adjust to us quite so much).

Many STs in the past would rush into teaching lessons before assessing their students well and after a lesson would often comment, “I didn’t realize the activity would be so hard for so many students” or “I didn’t realize that the children didn’t know how to work together” or “I didn’t realize that I shouldn’ t have put those two boys together.” This assignment asks you, within the limits of your situation, to assess one class of your students in general ways along several key dimensions. The goal is to be better prepared to plan your future teaching for them more effectively—and to avoid some of the problems experienced by past STs.

Readings:
EDEE 355, numbers 7-10 (Cruickshank, Bainer, & Metcalf, “Getting to Know Your Students”, Kauchak & Eggen, “Student Diversity”, Crowhurst “Assessment and Evaluation, and Kellough “Assessing and Reporting Student Achievement.”)

Task:
For one of your classes, assess the children in general ways along several key dimensions, grouping or clustering students as you identify their traits, abilities, etc. A suggested list of possible dimensions is as follows (see readings #7 and #8 for background and examples of these dimensions):
• Children’s home and community background (family, social situation, languages spoken, etc.)
• Academic ability, across different subject areas
• Social profile (social abilities, dynamics within group, issues, etc.)
• Kinds of intelligences (see reading #8)
• Kinds of learning styles (see reading #8)
• Personal traits/emotional profile (history, strengths, needs, etc. as a learner in school) (see reading #7)
• Students’ interests and strengths (e.g., sports, hobbies, background, etc.)
• Health status
• Special needs as learners

Means:
While some of this information will be available from existing sources (e.g., school records, last year’s teacher, etc.), you are encouraged to create your own assessment of the children through a number of informal means. A partial list of those informal means follows (see readings #9 and #10 for examples of many of these techniques).
• Observations (especially in the classroom, but also beyond—playground, hallways, with other teachers, etc.)
• Interviews (possibly one-to-one, but could be in groups of 2-3 to put children more at ease)
• Questionnaires
• Certain classroom activities (e.g., writing an autobiography, keeping journals or logs)
• Collections of children’s work
• Anecdotal records
• Check lists/rubrics
• Parents and other adults
• Working with children individually and in small groups

N.B. It is not possible to assess all the above dimensions using all the listed techniques. Simply choose several from each list that interest you and which your classroom situation will allow. Different schools and teachers will emphasize different dimensions. Always proceed with your CT’ s blessing and enlist her in the process to whatever extent she is interested and available.

Report your findings in table or chart format as much as possible. Those formats will vary and will depend on what you are focusing on. (See sample formats at the end of this task sheet.)

The goal of this assignment is to begin systematically gaining insight into the diversity among your students, particularly along some dimensions that you might not consider, particularly to discover some strengths and preferences among them that you might not have noticed otherwise, and finally to see how your children will probably be grouped differently along different dimensions. (For example, the group of most socially able children may well not be the same group of academically stronger children.)

N.B. Never use children’s real names in sharing any of these insights publicly, that is, beyond those adults responsible for the children’ s learning. Other possibilities are initials, numbers, made-up names, etc.

Date Due:
End of Week 4

Sample Formats for Whole-class Assessment