I guess I can say that I know my kids well because I feel like my expectations for what they would do on this assignment are fairly on target with what actually happened when we did the primary sources assignment this week. My stronger students did fairly well with annotating, my average students did alright but did not do enough, and my struggling students did nothing until we talked as class or did very limited work. |
Reactions & Findings
1. Most students are good at copying. As if this wasn't already clear to me, my modeling of the first excerpt from the Bhagavad-Gita and the work that students' turned in tells me that they are generally good at copying down information from the board. Across my two classes, of those who turned in their assignments on time (29 of my 46 students), roughly 50% (15) copied exactly what I had written on the board. However, the rest of the students were split pretty evenly between having no annotations (4), incomplete annotations/less than what I put (5), and making adaptations of their own in addition to what I wrote (5).
2. Partner and individual work varies by the student. This is where the differences really came through in students' work. I allowed them to pick their own partners and then work on the third page for homework individually. My strong students did a good job and usually chose to work with one another for the partner activity. My struggling students generally wrote less, wrote nothing at all, or wrote nothing until I talked about it in class the next day when they copied what I wrote on the board.
3. Most students can summarize but some struggle with connecting to core ideas. Many of my students could answer the first question asked about the texts - to summarize what happens, but the struggling students had a hard time making the connections to what this meant for the religious ideas or beliefs in my second question.
Improvements
1. Guided partner work - I'm thinking of assigning partners next time to help struggling students understand what to do. I'll have to figure out exactly how to make it more than just having stronger students do the work and then handing it to the other person to copy, but perhaps some guiding discussion questions can help them to actually talk about the ideas in the text. Suggestions helping mixed-ability pairs work well would be useful.
2. Ask about using evidence - I realized that my two questions about each text didn't actually ask my students to use their annotations as evidence! Rookie mistake! I assumed they would use those ideas to help them identify how the text connects to ideas in the religion, but I didn't actually make them use the evidence in the assignment. I'll be sure to do that (and scaffold it) next time, and hopefully make that more explicit in their test on India this week (where I'll also be giving them points on the assessment for annotations).