One major focus area in Orleans Central Supervisory Union (OCSU) is student engagement. During the last two years over 40 teachers and administrators have read and discussed the book Total Participation Techniques by Himmele and Himmele. Administrators and teacher leaders have modeled total participation techniques (TPTs) in meetings with colleagues, teachers have created TPT folders to use with students, and learners across OCSU are participating more actively in their own learning.
 
What does engagement look like in the OCSU environment?

• Kindergartners turning and talking about things they notice and wonder during a read-aloud.
• Second-graders holding up mini-boards with their responses during a Eureka math lesson.
• Fifth graders recording their thinking on a whiteboard or large piece of chart paper and then moving around the classroom to analyze their peers’ recordings and to look for similarities and differences (chalkboard splash).
• Middle school students working in pairs with their 9:00 partners (appointment agenda).
• High school students participating in a review of content using the three 3’s in a row strategy.
• Administrators moving around in an inside/outside circle activity to share about how they are supporting teachers in implementing formative assessment strategies.

 
In last year’s TPT class, Michelle Bonneau (Brownington School) created a Buncee presentation that describes the TPTs noted above as well as others from the Himmele and Himmele text. You can view Michelle’s Buncee here: https://app.edu.buncee.com/buncee/02dd97c6fb074c6f967a3b2087b2604a
 
How are you engaging students in your classroom? Post a comment below to share your ideas!

As teachers and administrators in OCSU continue to deepen their knowledge of formative assessment, many of us are focusing on having students engage in self-assessment. Why is self-assessment important? The website eduplace.com has this to say:
 
"When students are collaborators in assessment, they develop the habit of self-reflection. They learn the         qualities of good work, how to judge their work against these qualities, how to step back from their work to assess their own efforts and feelings of accomplishment, and how to set personal goals (Reif, 1990; Wolf, 1989). These are qualities of self-directed learners, not passive learners. As teachers model, guide, and provide practice in self-assessment, students learn that assessment is not something apart from learning or something done to them, but a collaboration between teachers and students, and an integral part of how they learn and improve."
(https://www.eduplace.com/rdg/res/litass/self.html)

And the site, studentsatthecenterhub.org, has lots of information on self-assessment. I’ve taken some key bits directly from that website:

"Self-assessment is simply a matter of having students identify strengths and weaknesses in their own work and revise accordingly. Effective self-assessment involves students comparing their work to clear standards and generating feedback for themselves about where they need to make improvements. It is a tool that can promote learning if it is used while the learning is taking place. In order for self-assessment to be effective, students must be able to use their self-generated feedback to revise and improve their work before it is due for grading. After students self-assess and revise their work, they can turn it in for teacher feedback.

Effective self-assessment involves at least three steps:

1. CLEAR PERFORMANCE TARGETS
In order for self-assessment to be effective, students must have clear targets to work toward. In other words, students must know what counts! Clear criteria for assignments that will be graded should be made available to students before work on the task begins. The assessment criteria can be created by the teacher or co-created with students. The criteria can be arranged in a simple checklist or in a rubric.

2. CHECKING PROGRESS TOWARD THE TARGETS
This is where the actual self-assessment takes place. Once students know the performance targets (step 1), they create a draft of the assignment, compare the draft to the targets, and identify areas of strength and areas for improvement.

3. REVISION
Using the self-generated feedback from step 2, students revise their draft, trying to close the gaps between their work and the targets. This step is crucial. If students don’t have the chance to revise and improve their work, they are unlikely to take the self-assessment process seriously."

​Check out studentsatthecenterhub.org for more information about self-assessment, and leave a comment below to let us know how you are engaging your students in self-assessment.

This blog post was written by Monique Schneider, kindergarten teacher at Glover Community School. Thanks Monique!
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Do you want to take your ordinary lesson to the next level, incorporating movement with your teaching concepts that will enhance student engagement and understanding? In watching the video Dramatic Interpretations of Poetry on the Teaching Channel (https://www.teachingchannel.org/videos/dramatic-interpretations-of-poetry), Mr. Wasse takes concepts such as vocabulary acquisition, comprehension of text, character perspectives and peer relationships, and utilizes movement and drama to captivate and motivate student involvement. In listening to the interviews of Mr. Wasse and his students, I am inspired by the creativity and depth this lesson illustrates.
 
Mr. Wasse uses a familiar movement game (Fox and Hare) for his students at the beginning of the lesson to review and deepen the understanding of the word exclusion. After the game ends, there is a class discussion of the term exclusion, how it was used in the game, and his prompting helps to make this term relevant and connected to what students have experienced in their lives (higher order thinking). He then takes text from poetry to help make connections to this term, and introduces a new vocabulary term, status, to the children. Again, Mr. Wasse scaffolds this new vocabulary term by having students pose their bodies in ways that show someone has a higher/lower status, which is a concrete representation of something that may seem abstract or hard to understand from a sixth grade perspective. Students use an excerpt from poetry to make connections with these terms, and then are given opportunities to create “tableaus” in small groups. These tableaus are frozen scenes of the characters from the excerpt, and how they might be depicted and why. The discussions by students are very powerful to watch, and students are seen working together to justify why they pose in the way that they do. They have the chance to “perform” their tableaus for their classmates, and are given feedback from their peers based on questions/prompts on a teacher-created peer assessment form. They even have a chance to “role play” their character’s perspective by taking questions from the audience about how they feel or their response to other characters in their tableau. Mr. Wasse brings in another technique of asking children to think forward from a character’s perspective. How might a character look ten years from now? What characters would be involved in this new tableau/scene?
 
After viewing this video, I felt empowered as a teacher to find ways to use movement throughout the day with the students I teach. This video depicted middle school students participating in an “ideal” way, fully engaged and acquiring skills that will be carried on through adolescence and beyond. This video reminds all educators about the power we have when creating/crafting our lessons. What we do and how we do it is the art and science in our profession, having huge implications on student engagement and learning. What Total Participation Techniques are you using to craft your daily lessons? How engaged are your students? I highly recommend taking the time to watch Mr. Wasse and become inspired by his participation techniques.
 
Note: The Teaching Channel video is about 16 min. long. Total Participation Techniques refer to the text of the same title written by Himmele and Himmele.