Many things frustrate teachers and parents when it comes to standardized testing. In the state of Illinois, the adoption of the Common Core Standards isn't something that truly upsets me (The Language Arts standards are clear and concise.) However, our state assessments are not as clearly defined.
Last year, teachers were prepared only with the "warning" that the ISAT would have a percentage of questions that were clearly Common Core. This year, we should be ready for a full-fledged testing based on these standards. Yet, if you visit the Illinois Board of Education site, you would find that the resources are lacking. The standards are there. In fact they are repeated in about five different "forms", but there are no clear references to scoring or practice questions. By gosh, Illinois! It is almost NOVEMBER!
Rant over...time to work it out.
Knowing that my students have been working hard, responding to tiered questions that I've modeled for them in class for weeks, I knew that it was time to step it up!
It was time to take the prompt apart and build it again from the pieces. Like learning to put together a model airplane, the students already had a good idea what a question and reading response should look like, but what I wanted them to do, was have the independent skill of taking all the pieces and reconstructing the knowledge for themselves.
First, we read and discussed three "wishes" stories. In our notes, students completed a chart comparing the wishes and general plot of all three.
I used "Monkey's Paw" by W.W. Jacobs, "The Third Wish" by Joan Aiken and "Those Three Wishes" by Judith Gorog.
Today, I introduced Bloom's Taxonomy.
After a brief introduction and discussion of how each of these terms can be used in other subjects, we reviewed the basic construction of our previous reading response prompts and answers.
Here's what we decided that they all had in common:
1. The Reading Responses opened with a QUESTION or COMMAND using a lower level verb. (Asking the reader to think about what they read or recall something.)
2. The Reading Responses then asked a QUESTION or COMMANDED the reader to respond to what they read at a higher level. Often the reader needed to look at two of the text to answer.
3. Required that the reader use evidence from the stories being referenced.
After I checked that everyone was clear about where these questioning strategies were coming from on the Bloom's chart, I set them to work. In small groups (no more than 4), they developed Reading Responses for the "wishes" stories that the other class would be answering.
As a teacher, I find it fulfilling to know that the students are excited for next week so that they can answer the questions that the other class has left for them!
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