Not Teaching to the Test, but Teaching about Tests...

The PIA. I standards based assessment that should measure how a class is progressing. My teacher and I have been analyzing the data for our results which we not great. Interestingly, we believe that most of the students have a better understanding than the low scores they received. After discussing with them about how/why this happened, they said they found the test confusing. The questions were not clear and the passages were too long. In terms of writing, almost no students did the constructed response correctly because they used different language than we were teaching.
My teacher decided that our class needs to learn techniques to respond to questions based on a passage-- so we are teaching them the UNRAAVEL technique. We are not only teaching them the specific information on the test, we are teaching them how to take a test. I don't know how I feel about actually going through short passages when we should be learning material, but it might help my students tackle difficult or tricky questions.
The parts of UNRAAVEL are: Underline the title, Now predict the passage, Run through and number paragraphs, Are you reading the questions?, Are the important words circled?, Venture (read) through the passage, Eliminate andy obviously wrong answers, Let the questions be answered.

UnJournal

In my Practicum classroom, my teacher kept talking about the student's "UnJournals." My first thought was that it was thought that journaling had a negative connotation-- confused by why they would call it that, I asked my teacher. UnJournaling is the idea of writing creatively in a non personal way. An example is "Describe in one paragraph someone who looks bored. Do not use any form of the word yawned, sighed, or stared." After watching the students come up with creative stories, it was easier for the class as a whole to find a common ground. Each student had a very different story, but there was noting that would make one students abilities personal from another. I don't know how I think about this now, but U like using it in some form in a classroom. Lots of the prompts are silly like "Write a story about a girl named Dot. Do not use andy letters with dots (i or j)." I think that it forces students to think about their writing in a more critical AND creative way. So frequently, students get lost in their own stories. Careful planning in a creative exercise like this could be really helpful for both the teacher to examine but also the student to be independently creative.

First Post: If I Saw a Dog in School

Looking at Language arts in my classroom, I want my students to start writing! I have one student in particular that is really talented creatively. She wrote a poem as a response to a writing prompt that was really creative. The prompt asked how students would respond if they saw a dog walking through the halls of their school— They had to use 4 types of sentences. It is interesting to observe the students who are on the “highest” “reading level” because they are the students who are not going above and beyond the 5th grade expectation, they are the students who are doing exactly what they are told, correctly. I want to know how to challenge students and really expect them to challenge themselves instead of just doing work that they know will get completed marks.

My cooperating teacher really wants all of the students to connect with what they are writing— I want to help them self-start their writing and know that they can actually write their ideas down in a way that they will feel good about their work. I worked with several students to complete this prompt by asking thinking questions like “do you think it would be funny? would you be afraid? who would you tell? what would you do first?” One student changed his interpretation of the story to he saw a god drive to school. He thought it was hilarious. That sense of creative ownership is something I want to include in my classroom too!