10/4/2023 0 Comments Ib command terms![]() ![]() There’s a bit of an inclusion piece here, as well. The kid from Serbia also has his reasons for his answer: he was born there, or he’s from a Serbian family, or maybe that’s where his passport is from. They don’t indicate the complexity of the answer we expect. There’s a better question to ask instead of “where are you from?”, but what I experienced is the trouble with question words. This is going to take forever, I thought!” ![]() I never really lived in Singapore and grew up in different places in Africa. The second student had a puzzled look: “Well, I was born in Singapore, but my dad is German and my mom is Serbian. Eager to know more about my students, I wanted to spend the first 5 minutes of class asking each of them where they were from. “In 2008, I walked into a DP classroom for the first time. Asking good questions is an essential part of doing that. Teachers seek to uncover what students know and don’t know, so we can bridge the gap. The reflection that inspired my ToddleTalk was essentially on how we ask questions. Use the feedback from trying this out, and get ready to… Re-imagine teaching using the language of command terms Even without really knowing much about command terms. ![]() The good news: having students make predictions on assessments is a zero-risk practice that you can start tomorrow. It’s a bit like going up a set of stairs with uneven steps, arguably with the top steps being more difficult to climb. Nor can it be quantified the same way as a percentage or a letter grade. ![]() In other words, moving from one level to the next requires increasingly complex thinking that is not separated by even increments. Even though the numbers on the left indicate otherwise. Secondly, the difference between “ state” and “outline” is not symmetrical to an improvement between “outline” and “describe”. To make good predictions in the MYP, students need to know the command terms so they recognize the levels of the rubric in the context of the assessment. If the student is having a good day and predicts a 60%, she knows that all it takes is answering another 10% of the test correctly. “I think I can get 50% of these questions right”, one student might say. In a non-MYP course, students can intuitively predict their performance because of their familiarity with percentages. They’re about the level of complexity of your understanding. MYP assessments aren’t about how much you know. The first reason is that the command terms are aligned with the level of performance in the rubrics. An understanding of the command terms is crucial if this is to be the case in an MYP classroom. Hattie argues that students are quite accurate at doing this. The practice is quite simple: have students predict their performance on an assessment. Hattie’s effect size list has “self-reported grades”, what he wishes he had called “student expectations”, at the top of the classroom domain. Use command terms with student expectations What’s left to do is create meaning of the command terms within them. I, for one, am thankful that someone (more likely a team) much smarter than me has already produced the MYP rubrics. A poorly designed rubric can get in the way and sometimes misrepresent ability. The next lesson, though, was far more brutal: the language of an assessment rubric matters. “ Students can know what to do and how well they’re doing at the same time! Perfect!”, I thought. This warm memory of motherly support sprung to mind the first time I ever looked at a rubric, during my first year of teaching. She shrugged and said, “I guess we’ll paste some leaves on the paper?” and we spent a couple of hours doing crafts but not learning much else about the topic. “The teacher just said we have to make a poster”. Then she asked me for the poster requirements, which I did not know how to explain. She asked me what photosynthesis was about, which I could explain. One mid-week afternoon, I asked my mom for some help with a project on photosynthesis - I had to make a poster. I went to 8th grade at a private school in my hometown of Curitiba, Brazil. ![]()
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