This document outlines themes and strategies from a professional development session on meaningful instruction, assessment, and communication with parents. Key topics discussed include the power of feedback, making learning visible through student voice and agency, teaching with "big ideas", and ongoing communication with families. Specific assessment strategies are presented, such as using formative feedback to improve student performance, developing student self-assessment skills, and creating digital portfolios to showcase the learning process. The document encourages teachers to reflect on how to apply these ideas to increase student ownership of learning.

1. Meaningful Instruction, Assessment
and Communication with Parents, #2
Vancouver
January 16 & 17, 2019
Faye Brownlie

2. Learning Intentions/Essential
Questions
• What does the research say about authentic,
strengths-based assessment and its impact on
teaching strategies and learning?
• How can teachers make an instructional plan
that includes authentic ways to assess student
learning?
• How can teachers plan for and monitor the
learning students do in terms of skills,
processes and understandings?

3. • What will you try?
• With whom will you work?
• What student(s) will you keep in mind as you
try something new to gauge the impact of
your actions?

4. Themes Tonight
• The power of feedback
• Making learning visible
• Student voice and student agency
• Teaching with big ideas
• Ongoing communication with families

5. Feedback
• The purpose of feedback is to improve future
performance.
• …most of the time the focus of feedback
should be on changing the student rather than
changing the work…
– Dylan Wiliam, April 2016

6. Students taught by teachers who used
assessment for learning achieved in six or
seven months what would otherwise have
taken a year.
-Black & Wiliam (1998).

7. Descriptive Feedback
• What’s working?
• What’s not?
• What’s next?

8. Feedback
• Where am I going?
– Feed up (give the targets in advance)
• How am I going?
– Feed back (reference the targets)
• Where to next?
– Feed forward (develop self-regulation, clarity and
understanding about what they know and don’t
know)
– Hattie & Timperley, 2007

9. Tom Sherrington, London

10. Do your students receive individual
feedback from you in every class?

11. What should I notice?

12. • Does your assessment inform your decisions in
teaching?

13. Major shifts in curriculum and
assessment
• Competency-driven curriculum
– focus on doing
– curricular competencies
• skills, strategies, processes
• Focus on classroom assessment
– Focus on learning standards (formerly learning
outcomes)
– Documented with formative assessment
• Do (curricular competencies)
• Know (content)

14. Key Questions: from teacher to
student
• Where is the student now?
– Criterion-referenced
• What does the student need to improve?
ê
• What can I currently do?
– Criterion-referenced
• What is my next goal?

15. Student Agency
• Listening to student voice
• Supporting students in gaining control of their
learning

16. What is my job? -K
Lauren Maclean and
April Pikkarainen, Richmond
(Coquitlam)
Critical thinking
Communication
Personal awareness and responsibility
How do I know I’m doing a green light job?
seed – sprout - flower

20. Pikkarainen – K class
• Students providing peer feedback

21. • Developing metacognitive
strategies through peer
documentation and dialogue
Students share their drawing/story, and ask
peers to give feedback or ask question.
Teacher writes student feedback on a post-
it.
Post-it feedback
& questions

22. Narrative Writing – Gr 2/3
with Marnie Manners, Burnaby
• Students have been reading and retelling Lars, the polar
bear stories by Hans de Beer
• The story plot is that Lars, the polar bear, is bored/lonely in
his home at the North Pole. Something unexpected
happens (an iceberg floats away, he gets caught in a fishing
net/trap and travels by boat/plane/train) and is taken to
another place (jungle/city). He meets another animal in the
new setting. The new friend takes him to meet another
animal who helps him to get home by some sort of
transportation. Lars safely arrives home, is reunited with his
family and tells them about his adventure.

23. • Goal: move beyond retelling to create a story following his
recipe
• Class had identified the recipe
• Review recipe
• Introduce the ‘story necklace’ – 3-4 recipe cards, 1 for each
chunk
• Model, with their help, the writing
• Students leave the carpet, having identified:
– The new animal
– The new setting
– The method of transportation

24. • After writing:
• Voice: Provide evidence of how your writing sounds
like you
• PPCI: How did you keep on writing? What did you say
or do to show such stamina?
• Circle 2 words that are unique or specialized in your
writing

37. Deeper Thinking with Visual Literacy
- Joanna Fournier and Christy Rollo,
5/6
• Very diverse classes
• Collaborate on almost everything
• Include in-class LA support as much as possible,
working on in-class ELL
• Opening the curriculum to embed the core
competencies throughout the day
• Focus on feedback frames and student self-assessment

38. Why visual literacy?
• We interpret our world largely through the sense of
sight.
• Provides an opportunity to interpret, negotiate, make
meaning and share in a visual format.
• Pairing oral language and visuals helps students
develop their communication and comprehension.
• Provides all learners with an entry point (accesses their
background knowledge and gives them an opportunity
to listen to others’ ideas and share).
• Develops deeper thinking (making inferences,
metaphorical language, using symbolism).

39. Loose Parts and Materials
• A way for students to show their thinking, and understanding; very
powerful.
• Springboard for oral stories: picture books, a big idea, or a theme.
• Introduce an open ended question to provoke thinking (a
provocation).
• Build a setting, a pattern, an image (2D or 3D), using natural or
found materials.
• Partner or group talk time and reflection makes thinking visible.
• Formative and summative assessment of student understanding of
concepts and big ideas.
• Partner with digital tools such as the camera app and Shadow
Puppet (screen casting) to record thinking.

41. Japanese-Canadian Internment
❖ What stories are inspired by war, fear, oceans,
mountains, family, seeking a better life?
❖ Is it ever necessary to take away personal rights for the
safety of all?
❖ How would you live and feel separated from your
family? Your connection to home?

42. Japanese-Canadian Internment

43. Feedback Frames
From Brooke Douglas

44. Communicating with Parents

45. Homework Journals
• Ideas and samples from Cedar Stream,
grades 3-6, Whonnock Elementary,
Maple Ridge
• Multi-age, place-based, co-taught classes
• Spend 90 minutes/day ‘beyond the fence’ in the
local forest
• Teachers:
– Heather Chapman
– Renae Pennell

47. Bear entry – based on
The Six Cedar Trees
• I can statements:
– I can celebrate when I’ve done something I am
proud of
– I can listen to my feelings no matter how I am
feeling
– I can use calm down strategies to help me when
I’m upset

48. • Provocation: What can we learn from Bear?
• Week 1
• Youtube video: Black Bears – Yosemite Nature
Notes
– We relate to bears as we are so similar to them.
– How many ideas will you record from the video?
(light, medium, dark roast)

49. • Week 2
• Connect Bear to
– Listening to our intuition
– Acknowledging our feelings
– Taking breaks when we need them
– Being proud of whom we are
When in the forest we listen to our inner Bear when
engaged in risky play and ensure we only do what feels
right to us.

61. Digital Portfolios
• Louesa Byrne, K/1

62. How to get started?
• explore on your own before going “live”
• you don’t need to go all , you can:
– start with one subject area
– think of adding one sample per month/term
– start with one student
• consider what your purpose will be
• use the documenting AS your assessment and
planning, not as an extra
Start SLOW Start SMALL

63. Tips
• keep your smartphone, digital camera or iPad handy during
learning activities
• video recordings are great for quickly capturing student
observations, questions and comments
• if you use an iPad/iPhone/Android to take photos you can
upload photos directly to the FreshGrade app
• you can upload work from 30 Hands, Pic Collage to
FreshGrade

64. Teachers can include guiding
questions for parents to use
when spending time with their
child
Can you find frost in
your back yard?
What happens when
you bring frost inside?
What happens when
the sun hits the frost?

65. Parents develop an awareness of
the way children are practicing skills
and can possibly repeat at home.
During some literacy and
letter play, Levi experiments
with making the letters in his
name with loose parts, play
dough and craft sticks.

66. Highlights the process of
learning rather than simply
focusing on products.
This term Div. 9 is exploring
the question, “How are the
living things in our community
connected to one another?”
We will be looking closely at
the living things in our
classroom, school yard and
beyond.
Here, Neil uses his sense of
touch and sight to look closely
at a variety of seeds.
He says, “I can see little tiny
pieces, I think it is corn. I know
plants need dirt and rain and
sun and then they grow up in
the air. I wonder, which
animals like seeds?

67. What do you value?

68. • Use the content to report on the curricular
competencies because the competencies
show depth.
– How do you know that your learners are getting
better?
• Where are they now (their strengths)?
• Where do you want them to grow (their stretch)?
• How will we work toward this (the plan)?
• Report on what counts! What is most
important in what you have been teaching?

69. • What will you try?
• With whom will you work?
• What student(s) will you keep in mind as you
try something new to gauge the impact of
your actions?
• How will you use this learning experience to
document student learning?
• How will you increase students in being
owners of their learning?