Stage 3--Collaboration

I met with Chris to discuss stage 3 and I showed him all of my stage 3 work. He was impressed with the variety of assessments that I was planning on using. Much of our conversation centered around trying to access all varieties of learning styles in one assessment.

I explained what Dr. Grace had said about the different learning styles and I also mentioned how I found myself thinking more creatively about assessments when I had to utilize and incorporate all the different learning styles in a single assessment piece.

Chris is more of a lecture/Socratic seminar kind of guy, but he also devises many activities and assessments that contain different projects that the students can choose. We spent some time discussing this and I emphasized that this student choice was a great thing as students could play to their strengths and choose projects that were of interest to them.

We also discussed the fact that, when given choice, many students tend to still choose the traditional paper and pencil (or in this day and age, word processing) kind of assessments. I gave him an example of my recent Lord of the Flies assessment. Students could choose to have their assessment be an essay, poster, PowerPoint, iMovie or other product. However, 99% chose to do a traditional essay. We talked about why that might be, and how we might encourage our students to think outside the box.

I left the templates for Chris, after I explained how to use them. We worked together on filling out the first one, and he, when he had some more free time, was going to work on the rest. This is a very busy time of year for Chris, since he is also, in addition to his many other duties, Senior class advisor. I did not want to overburden him.