Week 1 Reflection

Looking back at this first week I'd say it went quite successfully. There is always a fear with change that somehow your classroom will devolve into chaos (or maybe I am the only one with nightmares about about that). 

This week the main new strategy was incorporating the question formulation technique (QFT) into the class. Last year I had my students individually work on this to develop a question about space for a research project, but it is different doing it with a whole class. In general I would say that the most successful aspect was the involvement of my students. There were a lot of great questions which in turn really helped them pick good research topics. I did give them an aim of 3 questions per group to encourage a lot of questions, but many groups had that or more without prompting. 

The one thing I would change is how I set up the document for them to write their questions on. It was a Google Sheets document shared with the class in Google Classroom and included a place for identifying the type of question as well a place to rewrite it. This meant that some groups had an individual person who classified and rewrote all questions before we even had a chance to discuss it as a class. Not the end of the world, but it meant that all members of their group were not as involved in this idea of evaluating questions. Next time I will just edit their sheets as the lesson progresses to include these that rather than including it at the start.

A focus for me this year is efficiency in grading and I've incorporated peer evaluation to help with this. No, this isn't having them check off if each question on a test or worksheet is correct and assigning a grade, it is having them give feedback to their peers to they can revise and improve their assignments before turning in the final thing. 

Below shows the peer evaluation for the Defining Key Concepts Worksheet. It is a simple check off of what is done and what has enough detail. For them the goal is to give them a focus on what to improve during the class discussion.

I still do evaluate each assignment using a rubric as seen below, but these peer evaluations help them improve and help me grade quicker.

Overall there wasn't much change from my initial plan and, although there are some small changed I would make, I am generally pleased with how the assessment is progressing...though the more difficult parts of the assessment are still to come.