Summary
You always create a song list before beginning to dance, just as you create a learning list for your students before beginning instruction. We hope that this chapter guided you through the process of providing a seamless learning sequence by showing you how to break a broad standard into smaller learning targets that students can master within a few days, and how to design formative assessments that accurately evidence learning target mastery.
CHAPTER 3
Get to Know Your Dance Partners
Dance instructors determine how proficient their dancers are prior to placing them in a dance class. They want to find out if their students know the dance vocabulary, the steps, whether they’ve danced a particular style, and if they’ve partnered before. While teachers can’t control who is in their classroom, we can and should find out as much as we can about our students so we can choreograph an effective lesson.
This chapter will focus on knowing your students—learning about students academically, socially, and emotionally by way of preassessment. This information helps you plan the most effective instruction. The remainder of the chapter presents preassessment strategies that you can use to expose students to the content as well as prime their brains to activate and build on prior knowledge.
It might seem as if you should design content-driven lessons rather than student-driven lessons. After all, you are required to teach standards and students are supposed to master content. The most effective teachers we know are “students of their students” (Tomlinson, 2014, p. 4) who design lessons that are both content driven and student driven. They differentiate for a variety of readiness levels as well as for learning preferences (which is simply how students learn best).
To know students, teachers must answer the following questions.
• How can you learn about students?
• Why are preassessing, activating prior knowledge, pre-exposing, and priming worthwhile?
• What strategies can you use?
How Can You Learn About Students?
Teachers can get to know their students through observation, direct questions, or the kinds of assessments and inventories offered online. Search online for the inventories or surveys that fit your grade level. The multiple-intelligence survey provided at Surf Aquarium (www.surfaquarium.com/MI/inventory.htm) is one we like.
Students learn many ways, so table 3.1 (page 22) has considerations for different modalities. Ask these questions during student-teacher conferences or provide them in written format to students or parents.
The more you know about your students, the easier it is to plan your instruction. For example, if you realize a student struggles with bright lights, you may choose to use lamps rather than the overhead fluorescent lights. If there are lots of student athletes in your classroom, you might have students read sports articles and biographies, use trading cards to locate hometowns on maps, or debate about whether location determines success in certain sports.
Table 3.1: Factors in a Student Learning Preference
| Learning Preference | Description (Teachers will ask the following questions for each factor.) | Information Aspect |
| Learning modality | Do they learn best visually aurally kinesthetically or a combination of these? Do they like noise or quiet? Do they work best alone or in a group? Do they prefer lots of light or a darker area? Are they affected by room temperature? | Academic, emotional |
| Cognitive style | Do they think in more concrete or abstract manners? Do they start their thinking process more part-to-whole or whole-to-part? Do they prefer a collaborative or competitive situation? Are they more inductive or deductive in their reasoning? | Academic, social |
| Intelligence preferences | How is their brain wired for learning? Are they verbal linguistic, logical-mathematical, visual spatial, bodily-kinesthetic, musical rhythmic, interpersonal, intrapersonal, or naturalists according to Howard Gardner’s (1993) multiple intelligences? | Academic |
| Culture and gender | Does their culture or gender affect the way they learn, what they value, or how they interact with one another? | Social, emotional |
| Interests | What do they like to do outside the classroom? Can you use their interests to help them see the relevance in the lesson? | Social |
Source: Gardner, 1993.
Visit go.SolutionTree.com/instruction for a free reproducible version of this table.
Why Are Preassessing, Activating Prior Knowledge, Pre-Exposing, and Priming Worthwhile?
Preassessing, activating prior knowledge, pre-exposing, and priming enhance memory, increasing how well students learn content. They are important teaching tactics that occur at different times with different intentions.
Preassessing
Not only do you want to find out about how students best learn, but where they are with the content standards before planning the lesson. Preassessments can be formal, with a teacher-made test or quiz, or even by administering the post-test, or informal, by adding a warm-up or exit ticket question. Preassessing students’ content knowledge allows you, the teacher, to determine what to teach, who to teach, and how to teach in a way that best promotes learning. We typically ask the following questions while reviewing preassessment results. (Visit go.SolutionTree.com/instruction to access a reproducible version of them.)
• What do my students already know about these standards? Can I eliminate or combine learning targets?
• What major concepts are missing from their background knowledge? How might I build them within this unit? Do I need to create additional lessons? Should I prime their brain with these missing concepts before I even start teaching the unit? If so, how will I do this?
• What learning targets might I need to spend more or less time teaching?
• Will I teach these learning targets and standards to the whole group or a small group? If it is small-group instruction, what will the rest of the students do while I’m instructing?
• What misconceptions do they have about this unit or learning target? How can I address these misconceptions early?
These questions lead teachers to the following kinds of decisions.
• If the students already know the content, then there is no need to instruct the skill. We might integrate that skill or knowledge into other lessons.
• If some of the students know the content and others don’t, we may create different assignments adjusted to their background knowledge. (We call this differentiation tiered assignments.) This allows us to provide instruction and practice for students who need it and deeper, more rigorous work for students who would benefit from a deeper understanding of the content. Tiered assignments are explained