Three Easy Ways to Use Tech for Formative Assessment in Any Classroom

By Paul Lawrence

I have a confession to make.

I taught for a long time before I really knew what the difference was between formative and summative assessments.  For most of my time in the classroom, formative=quiz and summative=test.  They were essentially the same thing except that quizzes were shorter, came before the test and could be popped if I wanted to get a groan from my class.

I graded quizzes and tests in pretty much the same way.  I would collect them, take them home and then return them a class or two later.  We would review them.  I might point out an area where my students seemed to be struggling, but by then the unit plan had moved on past that particular point of instruction.  I certainly didn’t grade quizzes mid-lesson and then adjust my teaching to address the misconceptions or complete lack of understanding in my students.

Then came my first interactive whiteboard training and my introduction to the student response system (SRS).  The trainer said that the SRS was a game-changer because now you could assess your students mid-lesson without having to stop and hand-grade papers.  The SRS would gather quick data and show you what students had learned and what they had missed.  It would even guide your remediation by helping you to locate the students who were struggling— even if it appeared that every head was nodding when you asked, “Everybody got it?”.  I realized immediately that I should be doing this, in some fashion, with every lesson I taught.  And, with time, I did begin to use the SRS to check in with my students during instruction.

Back in those days you were a little restricted in your assessment types.  The SRS that came with our whiteboards were strictly true/false and multiple choice.  Today we have an embarrassment of riches when it comes to technology based formative assessment.  Here are three easy ways to get started using technology to formatively assess students in your classroom.

1. G Suite and the Google Classroom: 
Create a quiz in Google Forms and watch as the data are compiled in front of you (here’s how!).  Share it via your Google Classroom and you have a blended model that can highlight the areas of you lesson that you need to review.

2. Kahoot
Kahoot is a free online tool that allows students to respond to quizzes, discussions, or surveys using any device (laptop, tablet, phone, etc.) in a game-based format. Students race the clock—and each other—to earn points and show off what they know. Overall answers are projected on the board, allowing the teacher to easily do some whole group reteaching and remediation. It’s easy to set up and your students will love it. 



3. Edulastic:
This one is also free.  Edulastic really makes you look like you know what you’re doing by providing you with a question library that is aligned to state standards.  You can create a targeted and meaningful formative assessment in minutes.  Edulastic also allows you to create Technology Enhanced Items.  Sync your account with Google Classroom and you have really stepped up you “Do Now” and “Exit Ticket” game.




Consistently using formative assessment just makes good sense and with the variety of technology resources available, it has never been easier to check in with your students about today’s lesson before you move on to tomorrow’s.

Paul Lawrence is the Director of the Information Literacy Department for Hampton City Schools, Virginia. You can reach him at plawrence@hampton.k12.va.us

A Few of My Favorite Things: My Top 10 Book List for Educators

By Kate Wolfe Maxlow

Still looking for a last minute gift for that educator on your list? There are a few books that I personally can’t live without and I find myself reaching for constantly--and belong on any educator’s shelf.They’re a mix of curriculum and culture, or what makes any classroom successful.

You’ll notice that the first two books on here are related more to climate and culture than to curriculum, assessment, and instruction. That’s because I truly believe in the old adage that “students don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care” (John C. Maxwell). The first book is really all about setting up positive relationships with students and the second book is a bridge between that positive mindset and instruction.

1. How to Talk So Kids Will Listen and Listen So Kids Will Talk
By Adele Faber & Elaine Mazlish

I cannot emphasize enough how much this book has changed not only the way that I talk to young people, but to just about everyone. I recommend it to basically every person I come across who interacts with young people in any capacity, including both educators, parents, daycare workers, etc.. When my son, who is now 8, went through some pretty heavy live events, this book got us through.  Chapters include: Helping Young Children Deal with Their Feelings, Engaging Cooperation, Alternatives to Punishment, Encouraging Autonomy, Praise, and Freeing Children from Playing Roles, and each chapter has concrete strategies, is easy-to-read, and has helpful comic illustrations that give further scenario examples.

The book covers most ages but the examples are mostly elementary and middle school (though like I said, I definitely use many of the strategies even with adults!) But if you teach other levels, check out How to Talk So Little Kids Will Listen: A Survival Guide to Life with Children, Ages 2-7 or How to Talk So Teens Will Listen and Listen So Teens Will Talk.


2. Smart But Scattered: The Revolutionary “Executive Skills” Approach to Helping Kids Reach Their Potential
By Peg Dawson and Richard Guare

After the How to Talk books, this has been the second-most life-changing book for both myself and my son. Before this book, our mornings were a hectic whirlwind of no one knowing where anything was as we frantically tried to get out the door.  “Smart but scattered” is the perfect description for him and it was his teacher who recommended I read this book. Instead of me just being frustrated with his inability to sit still and the constant disorganization of everything he touches, this book helped us see it not as a matter of “Why can’t you just…” but rather, “Here’s where we need to grow your skills and here’s how we can do it.”

I’ve since done several PDs that combine this book and Executive Skills in Children and Adolescents: A Practical Guide to Assessment and Intervention (by the same authors but geared for teachers). It’s probably my favorite PD to do and participants always talk about how much it changes their outlook and takes them from frustrated with certain children to ready to implement concrete action plans.



3. Understanding by Design
By Grant Wiggins & Jay McTighe

This should be anyone’s starting guide to determining how to plan for learning. Also known as a “backwards design” approach, Wiggins & McTighe walk teachers through how to align curriculum, assessment, and instruction in a way that engages students and uses authentic learning to help students learn and actually understand at a deeper level. It’s a seminal work that should inform the work of any educator who plans learning for students.

(As a side-note, I'm also a big fan of their follow-up book: Essential Questions: Opening Doors to Student Understanding.)


4. The Art and Science of Teaching
By Robert Marzano

In 2007, this book took the educational world by storm because it basically said that it wasn’t enough to think that strategies were effective; we needed to look across thousands of educational studies and see what strategies are actually most likely to produce positive outcomes for students achievement. Marzano breaks down nine high-yield strategies, what they look like, and what they don’t, in order to help teachers choose what will actually make a difference in their classrooms.


5. Visible Learning: A Synthesis of Over 800 Meta-Analyses Relating to Achievement and Visible Learning for Teachers: Maximizing Impact on Learning
By John Hattie

Following closely on the heels of Robert Marzano was New Zealand educational researcher John Hattie. Like Marzano, Hattie conducted several meta-analyses, which means that he looked at anywhere from dozens to thousands of studies on various topics in order to determine what instructional strategies actually seem to make a difference on measures of student achievement. Unlike Marzano, who came up with nine general strategies, Hattie looked at dozens of various educational factors, from retaining students in their current grade to cooperative learning to implementing learning intentions and success criteria. His first book, Visible Learning: A Synthesis of Over 800 Meta-Analyses Relating to Achievement, is a dense read...but I find it an imperative one any time someone starts a sentence with “Research says…” because I always want to know exactly what the research says rather than just someone’s synopsis of Hattie’s synopsis.

His 2011 book, Visible Learning for Teachers: Maximizing Impact on Learning, is a much easier read, and follows more the format of Marzano’s Art and Science of Teaching, in that he picks some of the most gainful instructional strategies and discusses them as more of a how-to than a literature review.


6. Total Participation Techniques: Making Every Student an Active Learner
By Persida Himmele and William Himmele

I love this book because it’s a quick read with easy strategies that will liven up any classroom and immediately engage students. It contains 51 alternatives to “stand and deliver,” with simple instructions and suggestions for higher-order thinking. I’ve not only used several of these in my teaching, but also in the professional developments that I do.  These techniques get students up, moving, and talking so that they’re not only absorbing information, but processing it on a deeper level.


7.  Presentation Zen: Simple Ideas on Presentation Design and Delivery
By Garr Reynolds

This isn’t strictly an educational book, but it should be a must-read for anyone who ever designs presentations. What’s worse during a presentation than a slide with tiny font that the presenter reads to the audience? In this book, Garr Reynolds not only walks you through how to create a storyboard for an engaging presentation, but also simple design tips that can make your presentation aesthetically appealing while helping to underscore your major points.


8. Get Better Faster: A 90 Day Plan for Coaching New Teachers
By Paul Bambrick-Santoyo

Admittedly, this book is written for leaders, but there’s no reason that any teachers can’t also read this and learn both the fundamentals and nuances of almost every aspect of instruction. Bambrick-Santoyo breaks instruction down into simple, easy-to-follow and implements chunks and the book comes with videos that show each technique and what it should look like in the classroom. 


9. How to Create and Use Rubrics for Formative Assessment and Grading
By Susan Brookhart

Quite simply, anyone who does any sort of project that needs to be graded with a rubric needs to read this book. Sure, rubrics seem simple enough, but it turns out there’s both an art and a science behind what actually needs to be on a rubric and how to word it to get the maximum possible value, and ensure that the rubric is actually fair for all students.


10. Teacher-Made Assessments: How to Connect Curriculum, Instruction, and Student Learning
By Christopher Gareis and Leslie Grant

Anytime I either write an assessment or teach a course on assessment, I pull out this book. It breaks the different types of assessments down into item types and has easy “rules” for creating items with higher reliability and validity. The authors provide examples of poor assessment items and how to strengthen them. Each section is an easy read and takes the guess work out of creating assessments.

Kate Maxlow is the Professional Learning Coordinator at Hampton City Schools in Hampton, Virginia. She can be reached at kmaxlow@hampton.k12.va.us

How Do I Make My Learning Intentions & Success Criteria Stronger?

By Kate Wolfe Maxlow

What are Learning Intentions and Success Criteria?

When I first heard the words “Learning Intentions,” I admittedly thought they sounded overly complicated. It’s a term used by John Hattie in his book Visible Learning: A Synthesis of Over 800 Meta-Analyses Relating to Achievement, and the definition from Hattie is a lot simpler than you might expect: “Learning Intentions describe what it is we want students to learn in terms of the skills, knowledge, attitudes, and values within any particular unit or lesson.”

In other words:

Learning Intentions answer the question: “What are students learning?”

“Success Criteria” is slightly less of a head-scratcher. Hattie says, “The purpose of the Success Criteria...is to make students understand what the teacher is using as the criteria for judging their work, and, of course, to ensure that the teacher is clear about the criteria that will determine if the Learning Intentions have been successfully achieved.”

In our district, we tell teachers that a Success Criteria should include two important components: 1) What is the TASK that students will complete, and 2) What is the level of proficiency required?

In other words:

Success Criteria answer the question, “What task will students complete to show they’ve ‘got it’?”

One of the most frequent questions I get is how to word Learning Intentions and Success Criteria. I’m always cautious when it comes to answering this question, because if you look at Hattie’s research, neither “Learning Intentions” nor “Success Criteria” are a specific program that only works if done in a prescriptive way. Instead, he uses each term as a summary of various techniques that either 1) tell students what they’re learning (Learning Intentions), or 2) explain to students what success will look like (Success Criteria).

In other words:

As long as you’re answering the above questions, there’s no one prescriptive way to write your Learning Intentions and Success Criteria.

Now, some of the principals in our district DO require their teachers to all use similar stems in their Learning Intentions and Success Criteria. They usually make this decision for a couple of reasons:

• To help teachers better understand the difference between the two statements
• To provide consistency between grade levels and subject areas for their students

That being said, I’ve had some teachers tell me that they struggle to make their Learning Intentions and Success Criteria distinct from one another and ask for help. Let’s take a look at some examples and work through them.

How do I make my Learning Intentions and Success Criteria stronger?

EXAMPLE 1: Social Studies
LEARNING INTENTION: Students will be able to explain the causes of the American Revolution.
SUCCESS CRITERIA: Students will be able to explain the causes of the American Revolution.

Here you can see that the Learning Intentions and Success Criteria are exactly the same. Busy teachers writing the same thing twice on their board feels like (and is!) a waste of time.

Moreover, these are BOTH Learning Intentions. The Success Criteria misses both of the points above: there’s no task nor level of proficiency.

Why not? Well, to “explain” can mean so many different things. Are students verbally explaining it to a friend? Do they need to write a 10-page paper? Are they answering a multiple choice exit ticket? There are literally hundreds of ways that we could assess students on whether they can “explain” something.

Next, there’s no level of proficiency. How many causes do students have to know? To what level do they need to explain them? Does “explain” here mean that they simply have to rattle off three memorized reasons, or are we expecting them to use primary sources to pick a main cause and justify it?

Here are some better Success Criteria for this Learning Intention:

SUCCESS CRITERIA: When asked, students will be able to verbally recite the given 3 major causes of the American Revolution.
SUCCESS CRITERIA: Students will be able to write a 5 paragraph essay in which they outline three major causes of the American Revolution, provide evidence for why they think each is a major cause, and score a Proficient in the Historical Essay Rubric.


EXAMPLE 2: Foreign Language
LEARNING INTENTION: Students will be able to describe what they would like to eat for a meal.
SUCCESS CRITERIA: Students will be able to have a dialogue with a classmate about their favorite meal.

You can see that we’re getting closer here. The Learning Intention and Success Criteria are still really close, however, and not quite meeting the definition for either.

The Learning Intention, first of all, probably needs to be a bit more general. The point of this lesson is not simply describing a single meal (which, if that’s all the student can do, won’t be that helpful), but rather to learn how to discuss or describe food and meal-related topics.

Meanwhile, the Success Criteria is starting to hint at a task (and dialogue with a classmate), but doesn’t do much to tell students what proficient will look like. Can each person spout one sentence and call it a day? Is the dialogue written beforehand and memorized, or does it have to be extemporaneous? How many vocabulary words do they need to know? Do they get to keep it all in present tense, or do they have to use some past or future tenses?

Here are some better examples:

LEARNING INTENTION: Students will be able to understand and use food-related vocabulary.
SUCCESS CRITERIA: Students will engage in a one minute extemporaneous dialogue with a classmate in which they each use at least five (5) given vocabulary words and have no more than three (3) grammatical mistakes.



EXAMPLE 3: English Language Arts
LEARNING INTENTION: I can summarize the short story The Tell-Tale Heart.
SUCCESS CRITERIA: I can summarize the short story The Tell-Tale Heart by including 1-3 significant details from each of the following: the beginning, the middle, and the end.

This Learning Intention and Success Criteria are so, so very close to doing the job. Still, though, you see the learning intention being repeated in the Success Criteria, which can be frustrating to teachers to have to write twice and students to have to read twice.

Meanwhile, the Success Criteria has the level of proficiency required (need 1-3 significant details for the beginning, middle, and end), but it’s still missing the actual task. Are students doing this verbally? In a paragraph? In a graphic organizer.

Therefore, what about these instead:

LEARNING INTENTION: I can summarize a short story.
SUCCESS CRITERIA:  I can complete a graphic organizer on The Tell-Tale Heart that includes 1-3 significant details in each of the following boxes: the beginning, the middle, and the end.

Have a question about Learning Intentions and Success Criteria? Post a comment below or send an email!

Kate Maxlow is the Professional Learning Coordinator at Hampton City Schools in Hampton, Virginia. She can be reached at kmaxlow@hampton.k12.va.us

Who Are You...Digitally?

by Lyndsay McCabe

While our students are asked all kinds of Essential Questions throughout the day, one big question that all ninth graders in Hampton City Schools encounter in Success 101 is: “Who Are You?” Throughout the course, students explore interests and career opportunities and then return to this Essential Question to reevaluate their previous responses. Students examine what is important to them and what piques their interest, and in doing such, each student begins to form a perception of his or her own identity.

Though our students may think they know who they are, they may not realize how great a role technological advancements have played in their daily lives.  Technology has shaped this generation of students moreso now than ever before, and we need to start asking our students, “Who are you…. Digitally?

Sculpting (or Discovering) Your Digital Presence

Most of us have an online presence, whether we know about them or not, and so do most of our students in middle school and high school (and maybe even some elementary students).

A simple Google search can turn up social media accounts, news articles of accomplishments or stats from school sports, or less favorable information.  Though our students likely have less information that is “Google-able” than we do, they have a very strong online presence on social media sites and apps like Snapchat, Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook. Even if they do not use social media sites in the more traditional sense, students who have gaming accounts such as accounts through XBox or computer games can still communicate with one another and mold their online persona.

Snapchat is favored by many students because it is easy to use and the photos you take “disappear” after they are viewed, and though most young people use this to take innocent pictures with silly filters on them, there is still the chance that they will be used to send inappropriate pictures with the assumption that they will simply disappear.

Fortunately, students at Hampton City Schools have a built-in library program that addresses Digital Citizenship and works to impart on students that your online presence isn’t temporary… whatever you share or post in your experience can and will become part of your permanent presence online.

What Do We Need to Teach Our Students About Their Digital Footprint?

Though Digital Citizenship is typically taught in the first library unit in middle school through high school, it can easily be incorporated into any classroom so that all teachers can be a positive influence in how students use technology. What is it that we should be teaching them, and how can we get our students to make responsible decisions online?

Your digital footprint is forever

We all say and do things that we regret, but when we say them or do them online, it leaves a trace that can be very difficult to erase.  Hurtful words and inappropriate pictures that you may think you are just posting on your personal account can easily be copied or screenshotted and shared all over the web or your own community. One way to think of it as squeezing a tube of toothpaste… once you have squeezed the toothpaste out, you cannot get it back in the tube.  Likewise, once something is out on the web, it can be very difficult to rein in.

Mistakes online can lead to missed opportunities in life

If someone were to look you up online, all they would know about you is what you post. What kind of person do you want that to look like? Most young people aren’t thinking about the future yet, but they need to know that teens often lose opportunities because they made bad choices online.  When these stories come up in the news, take a few minutes to talk about them with your students.  Why would a young person lose a college scholarship for posting pictures of them drinking while underage? Why would a teenage girl lose her job for posting something mean about her employer on her personal Twitter page? Students love to debate these questions, but they need to understand the reality whether they agree with it or not. People in power can and will look at your personal posts and accounts and create judgments of you based on what they see.

Don’t give away personal information, but still be real

Students have been told since a young age that they should not give away any personal information online, but on the other hand, students should also not create a false identity that can lead to cyberbullying.  Treat people the way you would treat them in real life, and don’t hide behind the screen so that you can say hurtful things or share harmful rumors or images.  As mentioned before, what you post is permanent, and if you decide to use the web to attack peers or others, it would not be that difficult to trace back the account to discover your true identity. If you have students in your class who may be creating alternate identities to log in to classroom resources, this may be an appropriate time to discuss this. Having a Google Classroom, class blog, or other shared online class platform can be a good place to start teaching students how to have positive social interactions with one another, such as by constructively commenting on one another’s blog posts or projects. Use of other Google apps can further provide opportunities for students to collaborate online and practice good digital citizenship.

By opening up conversations with students and modelling good citizenship with controlled educational platforms, we can show them that they are neither invisible nor invinceable online.  For more lessons or ideas for starting the conversation, check out the following resources:

Resources for Teachers

Everfi - Free Digital Citizenship Lessons

Everfi has a free computer program with pre-made lessons called Ignition: Digital Citizenship and Responsibility.  What may have the biggest impact on your students is that they have a specific lesson on sharing inappropriate photos, and how sharing one photo to someone you think you can trust can end up with that photo being shared to everyone at school. It is easy to lose control of what you post online, so students must learn how to be guarded with their personal information and photos.

NetSmartz.org

NetSmartz also has a variety of lessons and activities that are centered around videos, comics, and conversation starters to help teachers find a way to talk about digital topics in the classroom. Lessons are available for elementary through high school, and include basic internet safety, webcam use, cyberbullying, predators, inappropriate content, file sharing, and sexting.

Be Internet Awesome

To make the most of the Internet, kids need to be prepared to make smart decisions. Be Internet Awesome teaches kids the fundamentals of digital citizenship and safety so they can explore the online world with confidence.

Lyndsay McCabe is a special education teacher at Jones Magnet Middle School in Hampton, Virginia, and previously taught elementary and middle school special education in New York.  In her free time, she can typically be found reading, listening to music, and trying to identify Virginian wildlife.  You can contact her at lmccabe@hampton.k12.va.us.

Think your question is Essential? Read this first.

By Kate Wolfe Maxlow

I train curriculum writers and therefore read a lot of curriculum documents from every subject and grade level. I’ve done training on Essential Questions dozens of times at this point, and you would think that I would be sick of it, but I’m not.  That’s the thing about Essential Questions: you can always learn more about them. There’s always a new question to be discovered, mulled over, refined, and debated. In fact, my own understanding of Essential Questions has grown and evolved an incredible amount since I first started writing and training on them.

It turns out that understanding the concept of Essential Questions is easy, but just like good ol’ Benjamin Bloom tells us in his revised taxonomy, understanding general concepts is a lot easier than actually creating with them.

Sure enough, there are some common questions that often masquerade as Essential Questions. They’re questions that first-time writers often slap together and declare their work finished. I know this, because they’re how I wrote Essential Questions when I first started out.

These not-quite-essential questions are also the reason why I caution people not to simply Google Essential Questions. There are a lot of these out there, and while they each have a place, it’s alongside, rather than instead of, the actual Essential Question.

Not-Quite-Essential Question #1: The Multiple Correct Answers Test Question

Example: What are simple machines and some examples of them in everyday life?

True, the word “essential” has lots of meanings, and one of them could be that you have to know the information to pass a test.  But that’s not the purpose of Essential Questions in Wiggins & McTighe’s Understanding by Design. Test questions usually have right and wrong answers; essential questions should be open-ended and able to be explored over and over again.

The above question isn’t a bad question; in fact, having a basic understanding of this information will serve students well in life.  It’s therefore a question that teachers should be using with their students. But that doesn’t make it an Essential Question.

An Essential Question would get to the heart of why we care about simple machines at all. Why is it something worth studying? Essential Questions should motivate students to want to learn more, and the above question isn’t a particularly strong example of that.

Better question: How can we make our work easier?

Now this is a question that, if you ask even a third-grader, they’ll probably want to know the answer to. It immediately gets to the heart of why simple machines are important (heck, any machines). And, it’s debatable; “easier” for some is not “easier” for all.

Not-Quite-Essential Question #2: Guiding Questions

Example: Why are rules important?

If you’ve ever written an Essential Question, then I bet you, like me, at one point went for the easy formula of “Why is [insert topic] important?” or “Why should we study [insert topic]?”

Here’s the thing, though: neither of these questions are truly about debating the topic. Instead, the entire point of this question is that the teacher has presented the students with a foregone conclusion (e.g., “Rules are important”) and is simply asking students to justify that conclusion with various answers.

Once I point out to teachers that they’re not asking students to debate with this question, the second-generation question that I often see, is “Do we need rules?” And yes, this is debatable...kind of.  But again, what’s the intent of this question? The majority of students are going to think about it for a minute, realize all the ways that rules help us function in communities and determine that yep, we need them. Sure, some will disagree, but not many. Then most students will go right back to where we were with the first example of this question--justifying a mostly foregone conclusion.

Better question: What rules do we need?

Now, this is a truly debatable question. It leaves room for the students who want to say, “None at all!” but gives everyone room to debate. It requires deep thought and justification, and the intent really is to have students discuss and debate and justify, rather than to simply agree that rules are important.

Not-Quite-Essential Questions #3: The Process Question

Example: How do we summarize a passage?

Like many of the not-quite-essential questions, this is an important question that students should know how to answer.

It’s also not very open-ended or debatable. There are some pretty accepted methodologies for summarizing a passage, and most teachers are going to ask this question and then give students a concrete list of steps. Therefore, this question is more about learning a skill than it is about debating and thinking critically.

Better example: What is worth remembering?

This question again gets to the heart of why we summarize in the first place. We have a finite capacity for memory. We don’t need to recall every single detail and our brains actively work to dump whatever we deem irrelevant information.  When writing a summary, this is the question that students should be asking themselves. “What is worth remembering?” is also a question that you can use not only in English, but in many other subjects.

Not Quite Essential Question #4: The Hook Question

Example: Why is a square always a rectangle but a rectangle not always a square?

There’s a special place in my heart for great Hook questions. They’re fun and immediately engaging. But they’re also not necessarily essential to life, you know? I didn’t know the answer to the above question until I taught about squares and rectangles in fourth grade. Or maybe I did, sometime back in grade school, and then I promptly forgot.

Better question: How can the facts that we know help us figure out what we don’t know?

Okay, bear with me while I explain how the heck these two questions are related.

In my experience, mathematics is probably one of the hardest areas to write Essential Questions for, but I think that’s often because we’re so busy concentrating on getting the “right” answer that we lose focus of why we’re learning about the concepts in the first place. Also, I think that a lot of us grew up with mathematics instruction that was mostly about complicated algorithms rather than real-life applications. And when you get to upper level mathematics, sometimes there aren’t as many real-life applications and you trip into the realm of the theoretical, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t plenty of good reasons for learning it.

Therefore, I spend a lot of my time whenever I review a math curriculum Googling things like, “Why do we learn about polygons?” and reading articles like this. No one ever told me why there are 360 degrees in a circle, either, but luckily we live in an age where someone out there knows, and that person probably put it somewhere on the internet.

If you dig into the article linked into the previous paragraph, you start to realize that one of the reasons that we study polygons, their definitions, and how they’re related is because it is, in many ways, a time-saving measure.  For instance, if you have learned or proven something about a parallelogram (a four-sided figure in which the opposite sides are parallel), you have automatically learned and proven is about every type of parallelogram out there, including rectangles, rhombi, and squares. Think of all the time that saves!

So, next time you see an Essential Question or write one yourself, think critically: is it really Essential? Or is it one of those not-quite-essential questions?

Kate Wolfe Maxlow is the Professional Learning Coordinator for Hampton City Schools in Hampton, Virginia. She can be reached kmaxlow@hampton.k12.va.us.

Three Ways Students Can Use Classroom Technology to Explore Essential Questions

by Paul Lawrence

“What is power? Who should have it?”

When we consider this essential question from a middle school social studies classroom, we each bring our own perceptions and experience to answer.   Even in a busy classroom, this process begins for all students as a personal and internal moment that will give a learner the chance to make connections to the question, the unit topic, and the ways that they intersect with the learner’s world.

While this personal moment is integral to the method of using essential questions and should be a starting point for any essential question activity, it should not be the end of your use of the essential question with your students, but really just the beginning.  

The classroom conversation that takes place when students share their answers to essential questions is the moment when essential questions transcend the personal and become the bridge to the learning experiences to come.

This conversation creates an opportunity for students to shape answers for an audience, as well as the chance to measure the answers of their peers.  In addition, students may be called upon to elaborate on or defend their answers while they in turn critique the responses of their classmates.  These higher order actions are the reason why the essential question is such an important part of the UBD method and a practice that works on a common sense level for thoughtful teachers.

Classroom technology is a next step in the evolution of this practice.  Applications such as Google Classroom, Nearpod and Edulastic have given teachers the ability to move this essential question discussion onto student devices and even out into the world.  

Here are three easy ways to start using technology with your essential question conversations.

Post the Essential Question in Google Classroom

As a Classroom teacher, you can post short-answer or multiple-choice questions. After you post a question, you can track the number of students who’ve responded in the class stream. You can also control who sees the answers and whether or not students can comment on each other’s responses.

Post an Essential Question in a Collaborate Activity in Nearpod

Collaborate is a Nearpod feature that allows you to set up an interactive board for brainstorming, sharing text and images in real time. You add the boards, students simply add their ideas. You can moderate these boards from your Teacher Dashboard, reordering them and sharing them.

After students complete and turn in their work, you can grade and return it to the students.

Have Students Post Their Answers in a Flipgrid Video

Flipgrid is a video discussion platform that can be used to spark a discussion and build a dialogue as students share short video responses. Super simple. Super powerful.

When we ask a student to construct a response for an online post, we can both inspire those students who live to reach an audience, while protecting those that would rather stay anonymous. We can teach students how to react and respond to each other’s opinions by using their writing and reasoning skills while also learning how to handle themselves in the online world.

So the next time you introduce an essential question, try to remember that you have the opportunity to give students an experience that will challenge them to begin with a conversation with themselves, extend to a conversation with their peers and possibly finish with a conversation with the world.

Paul Lawrence is the Director of the Information Literacy Department for Hampton City Schools, Virginia. You can reach him at plawrence@hampton.k12.va.us