Category: Uncategorised

Target Audience: High School Students

What is the Tip For? 

Teachers should harness a growth mindset in their students through the development of metacognitive skills that facilitate reflection and improvement in their work. One effective strategy is Assignment Wrappers. Assignment Wrappers challenge the idea that the learning from an assignment ends once it is marked, and instead prompts students to reflect and learn from the feedback they received and strategies they used. In so doing, teachers can change the student’s focus from the past (which they can do nothing to change), to the future (in which they can grow).

When Might it Be Useful?

Assignment Wrappers can follow-up any assignment, and can be made more in-depth for larger assignments, and briefer for shorter ones. For very short assignments, teachers may have students reflect on a single question.

How to Use Assignment Wrappers

So, how can you implement Assignment Wrappers? Once you hand back an assignment to students, ask them to read through the feedback, and answer some prompting questions. The goals of these questions should be to help students see the strategies they employed that worked, and where they can improve in the future. Teachers can also encourage students to take the next step and set goals for themselves to improve their performance and understanding for the next assignment. These goals can then be revisited in the next opportunity for Assignment Wrappers.

An Illustrative Example

Ms. Green’s History class has just completed a project in which they worked in small groups to develop a virtual museum exhibit with 5-10 significant items from WWII, each with a description of the artefact and why it is important to understand the history of the war. Miss Green hands back the marks and feedback to each of the groups and gives them a few minutes to read through them individually. Then, Ms. Green writes the following questions on the board, and asked the students to respond to each one in their journals:

1. What strategies did I employ to do well on this assignment? How effective were those strategies?
2. What aspects of the rubric did I overlook / could I have done better on?
3. In what ways did I contribute positively to the group? In what ways could I have been a better group member?
4. What are three strategies I can use next time to help ensure I improve?

Ms. Green wanders around the room supporting students through their reflection and facilitates a class discussion to help students get ideas from one another. She tells students she will ask them specifically about these goals in the next assignment and makes a personal note to remind them of this later. Finally, Ms. Green gives the students the rest of the class period to implement any of the feedback that they received into the project and detail the ways they did so, explaining they can improve their mark by demonstrating they have reviewed the feedback meaningfully.

The Research to Support:

Gezer-Templeton et al. (2017) explored the effects of exam wrapper assignments for an introductory food science and human nutrition course in a university setting. The exam wrappers were offered as an extra credit assignment after three exams throughout the semester. The majority of students completed all three exam wrappers, which involved answering the following 3 questions:

1. How did you prepare for the exam?
2. What types of questions on the exam were most challenging for you? Why do you think they were challenging?
3. What changes to your study habits do you plan to make when preparing for the next exam?

The lack of control group prevented the researchers from making firm conclusions from the study, but the results are promising. The researchers found that “…students not only made the right plans, such as not waiting until the last minute to study but were also able to follow through with the plans they set for themselves” (pp. 33) and students indicated that they found the exam wrappers to be a helpful tool.

Gezer-Templeton, P. G., Mayhew, E. J., Korte, D. S., & Schmidt, S. J. (2017). Use of exam wrappers to enhance students’ 

metacognitive skills in a large introductory food science and human nutrition course. Journal of Food Science Education, 16(1), 28-36. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/1541-4329.12103

Below is a found poem I wrote from this article on police brutality at Fairy Creek:

Face down in dirt,

Cracked, Blinded, dragged away,

Peaceful protester at Fairy Creek

A pattern.

The police responsible

Everything the RCMP told media was false

We were obeying

Didn’t hear any warning

The officer was safe

But decided to use pepper spray on the crowd anyway

Trade in your eyeballs for fireballs

Spread like wildfire

Indiscriminate

Video evidence

Disappointing but not surprising.

How can the concept of place help create a more meaningful learning environment and learning experience?

I am interested in exploring the above question to help inform my own teaching; from the little I know about Place-Based Education (PBE), I can see many strands of promise and potential. It is important to me that my students feel what they are learning is relevant in their own lives. Too often, I believe school can appear to be about issues and concepts that are distant and irrelevant, which can result in a lack of engagement, retention, and knowledge transfer. The new curriculum provides teachers with a tremendous amount of flexibility in terms of content and competencies, opening up the possibility for a shift towards more place-based methods of teaching.

PBE may facilitate the development of a critical consciousness in students about their surroundings and help them practice the skills required to be active and engaged community members. By grounding challenging social and environmental issues within students’ communities, PBE may help students feel greater agency and hope in making a positive impact. Furthermore, PBE may challenge educators to expand learning beyond the four walls of their classroom and integrate more authentic learning environments and opportunities for their students. I can imagine there are many challenges and opportunities in this realm that I would like to learn more about.

At the same time, I would like to understand some of the limitations or tensions of the approach. For instance, I believe it is important that students feel a sense of global citizenship and I recognize that many issues and systems are enforced on a larger scale than their local communities. I hope by exploring the above question I can uncover some of the possibilities and challenges within PBE to better serve my future students.

Resor, C. W. (2010). Place-Based Education: What is its place in the social studies classroom?. The Social Studies, 101(5), 185-188.

Resor argues that Place-Based Education (PBE) can be a meaningful tool to integrate into social studies classrooms. PBE is the process of using the local community and environment as jumping off points to teach subjects, and that it emphasizes real-world learning experiences that are often interdisciplinary. Resor distinguishes between the concept of space, which has no name or meaning and place, which is a social construct, imbued with meaning through the minds of individuals and groups. Place is linked closely to power and is an important point of investigation in social studies classrooms. Resor ends with an example of a place-based project in which students interrogate the subjective elements of place through competing ideas of what should be included in their town’s walking tour.

McInerney, P., Smyth, J., & Down, B. (2011). ‘Coming to a place near you?’ The politics and possibilities of a critical pedagogy of place-based education. Asia-Pacific Journal of Teacher Education, 39(1), 3-16.

McInerney, Smyth, & Down outline the challenges and possibilities of Place-Based Education (PBE) and argues for a more critical framework. While advocates of PBE argue that it empowers students with a sense of agency and opportunities for hands-on learning, critics hold that it is often undertheorized, uncritical, and disconnected from global perspectives. PBE’s lack of critical outlook may sustain the dominant, status quo perspectives of education. Additionally, connections must be made between local issues and the more regional and global systems to which they are connected.

PBE builds on Ecojustice notions of revitalizing the commons, the natural systems and cultural patterns that hold value but are currently being destroyed. It also seeks to break down the false divide between school and community. The research shows that PBE can provide authentic learning opportunities and foster community involvement and environmental consciousness. At the same time, we shouldn’t overidealize the notion of place; many homes and communities may not feel safe for learners and so a focus on what needs to be transformed is important. By incorporating a more critical perspective into PBE, we can invite students to question the established order and work for the common good.

Greenwood, D. A. (2013). 9 A Critical Theory of Place-Conscious Education. In International handbook of research on environmental education (pp. 93-100). Routledge.

Greenwood argues that a place-conscious approach to education can serve as an effective framework for students to understand and address today’s issues. Rather than reinforcing a narrow view of global realities, a focus on place allows learners to understand more deeply specific contexts that then allow for more global understandings of relationships. Place can make learning accessible and relevant for learners, help to overcome the false binary of “culture” and “environment,” and reveal that different people have diverse and competing meanings for the same physical spaces.

Greenwood advocates for a critical theory of place-conscious education, a philosophy that provides ethical direction for PBE, and challenges educators to rethink standard assumptions of schooling. He argues for decolonization and reinhabitation; critically problematizing current systems and building ecologically and culturally conscious relationships in their place. Educators can be guided by the following inquiry questions to help achieve these aims:

1. What happened here? (historical)
2. What is happening here now and in what direction is this place headed? (socioecological)
3. What should happen here? (ethical)

Willis, A. S. (2017). Queering Place: Using the Classroom to Describe the World. In Interdisciplinary Approaches to Pedagogy and Place-Based Education (pp. 135-145). Palgrave Macmillan, Cham.

Willis argues that educators can use the concept of place within the four walls of their classroom, rather than feeling the need to always go outdoors. Objects and social relations in the classroom can serve as departure points to discuss broader themes of power and justice globally. Through this approach, teachers can politicize their classroom and refuse the binary separation between school and community, ultimately bringing to light the explicit ways that students are embedded and tied to global forces. Questions such as “who built the stairs you climbed today?” or “how did this desk get here?” can make the erased labour of classroom objects visible. This can encourage students to consider and grapple with the ways their classroom and school relate to the maintenance or transformation of the status quo.

Getting Smart (2017). Quick Start Guide to Implementing Place-Based Education. (pp. 1-21). Retrieved from: http://gettingsmart.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/Quick-Start-Guide-to-Implementing-Place-Based-Education.pdf

This guide provides an overview of Place-Based Education with some tips and examples for educators to implement this approach in their classrooms. Problem-based learning provides an effective framework to empower students to identify and solve real issues in their communities. The authors outline many ways to facilitate integration into the community such as inviting community leaders to speak and give feedback to students, as well as visiting them in their places of work. It is important that field trips be accompanied with intentional pedagogical strategies such as proper framing and reflection. The authors also weave in the importance of a critical stance to PBE, citing Greenwood’s previous work. Critically, the guide emphasizes the importance of teachers building their networks in the community and collaborating with others in this space.

Reconciliation in the Classroom: Tensions and Opportunities

In “Teaching for Truth: engaging with difficult knowledge to advance reconciliation” Tupper & Mitchell (2021) investigate teacher successes and challenges in advancing reconciliation in their classrooms. They outline common resistance by students in classrooms and consider effective tools and strategies for teachers. I felt the authors did a good job of exploring the challenges and recognizing tensions that do not have simple, easy answers. After discussing the major themes in our seminar, I found myself with some points of tension that have stuck with me.

One point of tension is the desire to center local Indigenous voices in the classroom, while also recognizing that their time and energy should be respected. Tupper & Mitchell (2021) note that while inviting community members to the classroom can be beneficial, it can be traumatizing for them to continually speak to past and current injustices. On top of this, I think it’s important that educators don’t let themselves off the hook; with so many resources, they have a major role in understanding and teaching about local nations. Of course, it’s a tricky line; I don’t want to overstep and speak to customs and issues that are not mine to speak to.

I hope that the school I work at in the future has resources and staff committed to help the Indigenization of the classroom. Even understanding customs of inviting a guest in, how to thank them, etc. is something that I imagine varies from district to district and guidance and connections would be valuable; I would have liked the authors to have delved more into these types of supports. To me reconciliation takes intentional and specialized knowledge and practices but is also intertwined with many other pillars of good teaching such as creating a safe and inclusive space, engaging students to think critically, and integrating place into the content.

EDCI 773 Reflection #1

Create a 250-300 word reflection on Thomas Friedman’s October 2020 New York Times article “After the Pandemic, a Revolution in Education and Work Awaits”.  

Be sure to use the “What, So What, Now What?” framework for your reflection.  

Reflection 1:

I found Elin Kelsey’s presentation in class very uplifting. I had read an article by Kelsey in a previous course at UofT and it really stuck with me; when I heard she would be a guest in this class I took it as a sign and checked out her book from the library. Kelsey demonstrates that there are many great success stories that are filtered out of the mainstream narrative due to psychological and financial mechanisms that perpetuate negativity. I have learned about this ‘negativity bias’ in past psychology classes and books such as “Humankind: A Hopeful History,” and believe it’s critical to discuss the idea with students. Kelsey helps show that the result of the negativity bias, as it relates to the climate crisis, is a self-fulfilling prophecy in which so many of us assume the issue is so bad our actions are inconsequential. 

As an individual, I frequently end up in conversations around climate change that leave me feeling deflated and numb; feelings of helplessness have contributed to nihilism. Such feelings were only cemented in my undergraduate classes, that so often focused on issues and very rarely highlighted ways to move forward. Indeed, I was one of the students who scored less than a chimp in that quiz during our first class! As an educator, I see that I have an important role to play in supporting my students through these difficult feelings and reshaping the doomsday narrative to one where we find meaning and importance in our individual actions and decisions. I believe it is our responsibility as educators to help build a better world, and that starts with care, empowerment, and hope.