[MUSIC] Welcome back. In the last session, Linda introduced you to four key questions, and why they matter so much to us. She talked about the first big question of social/emotional learning, and the importance of learners knowing that within the school, there are at least two adults that believe they'll be a success in life. In this session, we're going to be thinking hard about three cognitive questions that will help you determine the extent to which your learners are owning their own learning, and providing excellent feedback for you about what you can do to help them next. Our intention is for you to think about these questions and to think about some schools that are applying them - we're going to provide a couple of examples, one from B.C. and one from Australia. And then we're going to invite you to think about how you might apply these yourself. So, let's take a look at the first question. And it, the wording may sound a little bit unusual. But the question is, where are you going with your learning? We want learners to understand not only the purpose but the direction of their learning, that it has some connection to their life outside of school. So, we're going to be using this question in big areas of learning. Michael Absolum in his book Clarity in the Classroom, talks about a teacher from Manitoba who used with her students the analogy of a flashlight. She said that if they didn't know, when introducing learning intentions, she had the students imagine that they were in a cave and if they were there without light, what would happen to them? So, they talked about they would get bounced off the sides of the wall, they'd get lost, they might get turned around. And then she said, well, learning intention is like the flashlight to help you through the cave. And we think that this is quite a good analogy. So, just to think about, we're providing the light so that the learners know where they're going and why their learning is important. This question let's us know whether learners really get what it is we want them to learn and if they don't get it, then what is it that we need to do to help them. So, here's a couple of examples. In a grade nine history class, asking a student, where are you going with your learning? And the student said, we're doing the French Revolution. That's not a particularly thorough answer. So, we want to probe a little bit more with that and say, well, what is it about the French Revolution that's important? And then we might hear, well, we're understanding the causes of the revolution and why people revolt. Now, we're getting into the territory that's really important. So, another example might be from language arts in elementary school. So, you ask a student where are you going with your learning? And you'd hear, I'm writing a letter to my principal. That's describing the task. What we want to know is the purpose, so we probe a little bit further and say, so why are you writing the letter to the principal? Well, we want him to give us soccer balls to play with at recess. And then we want to probe a little bit more. Well, why is that important? And why is that important that you learn to write this letter? And then the learner would think a little bit more and say, we're learning how to persuade another person to listen to our point of view. Now, we're in the territory of a big learning intention that can be applied across life, not just within the exercise of writing a letter. So, we want to pose this question, see what learners respond to and see if we can get underneath it so that they can really explain, in their own words, why what they're doing is important and how it connects to life. And we're going to provide you with some more examples later on. So, just to be thinking about that - can learners say, in their own words, where they're going with their learning and why it's important? Once we've got some confidence with that, our second question is, how are you going with your learning? How's it going? Do they have the criteria in themselves to know whether their work is on track or where they need to improve. What we don't want to hear is I got seven out of ten, the test is next week, my teacher hasn't told me, I don't know. We want learners to be able to say, I'm pretty good at this, and this is what I'm working on next. So, if we go back to the example of the French Revolution, we'd like to hear the learners say, we're learning about the causes of the French Revolution to understand why people rebel. Then, how's it going? We might want to hear, I'm pretty good. I really understand the causes of the French Revolution now and, I can wrote those in a clear articulate way. What I'm struggling with is how that compares with what's happening, say, in Syria. Or what happened in Myanmar. So, my challenge is, to make the connection to more current rebellions. Now, we're in a real learning area. So, how's it going with your learning? We need to provide criteria for the learners. We're very fortunate in, in a number of countries, and particularly in British Columbia, to have a series of learning progressions. We talked about those earlier in the assessment for learning section, but of performance standards. And they're readily available on the website so, here are just three examples where you can find reading, writing, math problem solving, social responsibility. Here's some excellent learning progressions in science that are easily available. These are from Australia. And then this is another sample that's been designed by some teachers to show what a performance rubric would look like in a fairly simple area. So, we'd like you to be thinking about the extent to which your learners can say for themselves how they're going with their learning because they have the criteria readily available to them. Now, it doesn't always need to be in words or in print either. Sometimes the criteria, it can be provided visually. What we've got here is an example of a clothes line in an elementary school, where there are writing samples at different stages and the learners can go up, and they can attach their own writing to the sample and see where they are on the clothesline. Another one is an example of a paddle-making class from an aboriginal community in northern British Columbia where the teacher said, here's a crummy paddle, here's a so-so one, and here's a beautiful artistic paddle, and the learners could see visually what it is they're supposed to do. Sometimes we use words too much - sometimes we want to use images. So, question number one, where are you going with your learning? Question number two, how are you going with your learning? Or how how are, is your learning going? And the third one is, where to next? Now, earlier in this course, we talked about the importance of feedback, and this is where we are listening to hear whether the learners have internalized the feedback and they can say for themselves what their next step is. So, we want to be thinking about do they know what the purpose of their learning is? Do they know how they're doing? And do they know what the next step is? It's how we listen to those questions and how we act on what we hear from the learners, that's at the heart of teaching. So, in the next session, we're going to be showing you what this looks like, in practice, from a couple of schools. See you then. [MUSIC]
