- Practice close reading
- Plan a “student understanding” form
- Practice providing feedback on two different week 4 posts using the intellectual standards.
This week we explore an extremely powerful instructional strategy to be used in online learning, and perhaps more importantly to be used as students read in preparation for online discussions.
If you can read a paragraph well, you can read a chapter well, because a chapter is nothing more than a collection of paragraphs. If you can read a chapter well, you can read a book well, because a book is nothing more than a collection of chapters.
Skilled readers do not read blindly, but purposely. They have an agenda, goal, or objective. Their purpose, together with the nature of what they are reading, determines how they read. They read in different ways for different purposes in different situations. Of course, reading has a nearly universal purpose: to figure out what an author has to say on a given subject.
Badge Activities-Due Sunday 11:59PM
Create your post on close reading in our week 5 Laulima workshop Forum.
- Watch the two socratic questioning video above and read pages 1-19 in The Thinker’s Guide to How to Read a Paragraph.
- Create a post by completing the first four levels of close reading on idea # 22 from the Thinkers Guide to How to Improve Student Learning (see below)
Create your “student understanding” form post in our week 5 Laulima workshop Forum.
- Create a post on how you will create a “student understanding” form to provide clear guidelines for your online discussion infused with critical thinking.
- Refer to the sample understandings from the The Thinkers Guide to How to Improve Student Learning. (See below)
Guidelines for Providing Feedback to Others
- Improving Your Assessment of Others
- What is allowed- Reasoning
- How could this post be improved?
- What exactly needs to be done to improve it?
- What is not allowed-
- No general statements of like or dislike.
- No sweeping comments. “Nice post, insightful and interesting”, type statements are not helpful. These type of statements only tell how you, and your ego, emotionally reacted to the post.
- Course instructor will model the assessment process to provide examples for learners to follow.
- What is allowed- Reasoning
- Assessment of Feedback to Others
- Is your own feedback reasoning deficient?
- Course facilitator will model and comment on how you give feedback, using the intellectual standards, to help you improve your reasoning skills.
- Improving Your Writing
- Revise and improve your posts based on feedback given, or
- Challenge part of the assessment and explain with reasoning, why it is not necessary.
Note: Receiving evaluative feedback using the standards should not be taken personally when the feedback captures a potential weakness. We can always improve our reasoning and should be willing to accept feedback – this shows intellectual humility.
Format to use to give feedback.
- When a standard was not well met: I am questioning the _INSERT THE INTELLECTUAL STANDARD_ of your statement ____________ because _______.
- When a standard was well met: Your statement had _INSERT THE INTELLECTUAL STANDARD_ when you said….
Provide Feedback on two different week 4 posts using the intellectual standards.
- This week you will begin providing feedback to 2 different learners posts –
- Go to last week’ s Week 4 Forum discussion in Laulima to comment on posts from last week.
- Provide feedback to two different learners posts.
- Provide feedback for each of the assignments.
- When a standard was not well met: I am questioning the _INSERT THE INTELLECTUAL STANDARD_ of your statement ____________ because _______.
- When a standard was well met: Your statement had _INSERT THE INTELLECTUAL STANDARD_ when you said….
- Give this your best shot. If you are the one receiving the feedback, please don’t take it personally. This is about getting practice in providing feedback.
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LETTER OF COMPLETION
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Clear Guidelines and Expectations
The quality of participation in online discussion forums is not dependent on the type of students you have in the course. Good discussions are directly related to what is articulated by the instructor and the discussion model they create. Therefore it is critical to design and structure discussions with guidelines or “rules of the road” .
Guidelines for Posting
The most important thing to remember is that the initial “discussion” question is only the beginning of the process. A discussion doesn’t develop until learners post their initial responses and you and the learners begin to exchange responses and reactions. The design of the discussion assignments must reflect and stress scholarly discussion among all participants (including yourself).
It is very important to structure your online discussion forum activities carefully. Learners need to have very clear guidelines for posting material, how often to comment, length of comment, and what information to include in the comments. You will get out of discussions what you articulate and model. You should set expectations on participation, grade both participation and the quality of participation, and provide rubrics that give students the standards by which they will be judged.
Participation
Provide guidelines for posting material and participation.
- How often to comment.
- Length of comment.
- What information to include in the comments.
Guideline Examples
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Guidelines for Students Participating in Online Discussions
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Guidelines for effective online discussions
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How to Get Students to Participate in Online Discussions
Example Rubrics
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Online Discussion Boards & Rubrics, University of Illinois Springfield
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Rubric for Asynchronous Discussion Participation, by Barbara Frey
Factors for Successful Online Discussions
Online discussions have different formats and can be effective in various ways..When instructors begin to plan their online discussions, research suggests a number of matters that must be taken into consideration in order for the discussion to be effective and successful.
Clear Directions
One thing that an instructor must make sure to do is provide the students with directions for online discussions that are simple, to the point, and do not cause any confusion among the learners (Rose & Smith, 2007). It should be made clear whether the discussion will be synchronous or asynchronous. If it is a synchronous discussion, the students will need to know where and when to meet, and if it is asynchronous, the students need to know if they must meet a deadline for responding to the questions posted.
Instructor Feedback
Not only are clear directions necessary, but also needed is feedback from instructors (Rose, et al., 2007). It is not enough for an instructor to give an assignment. The students need to know whether or not they are addressing the issue in enough depth, if their understanding of the issue is correct, or if students need clarification about something, an instructor needs to be able to shed light on the subject.
Promoting Motivation
Students should be motivated to contribute to the discussions (Rose, et al., 2007). There are different ways that this can be accomplished. To start with, at the very beginning of a course, an instructor can find out what interests the students, and if possible, tie in their interests to the discussion and issue being presented. The instructor also needs to address how students will be assessed on their participation in discussions. If an instructor does not include this as part of the final grade, it may be very difficult to motivate students to partake in the discussion.
Some students may not participate at all and other students may participate but give shallow and short responses instead of providing in depth reflective responses that bring together their experiences with the material. It is not enough to inform students that they will be graded on their participation in the discussions, but the students must know how they will be graded. There should be specific guidelines and rubrics that explain all of the assessment techniques that the instructor will use (Black, 2005).
Table 1 shows an example of what a rubric may look like, and there may be other criteria that an instructor wants to include when assessing a student. The criteria listed in Table 1 may be broken down into further categories, but ultimately, it is up to the instructor to decide how to assess the discussion.
Table 1. Sample Rubric
Criteria: | Excellent (5) | Acceptable (3) | Poor (1) | Total |
Meeting the deadline | The student made the required posts by the deadline set. | The student made some of the required posts by the deadline set. | The student did not post by the required deadline set. | |
Quality of work | The student has clearly thought about the material and has raised interesting solutions and/or problems. | The student has written about the material, but has not offered information that was not already given in the text. | The student has not reflected on the material, or the post made is irrelevant to the topic. | |
Mechanics | The post made does not contain grammatical or spelling errors. | The post made contains very few grammatical and/or spelling errors. | The post made contains several grammatical and/or spelling errors and is difficult to understand. |