Kristina beamed into us today to talk to us about her new program Spinndle. I so appreciated Kristina’s enthusiasm about formative assessment and her determination to create a program for teachers to better facilitate formative assessment in the classroom.
My biggest takeaway from this presentation was the idea that student directed learning is a tricky thing to facilitate. The biggest reason for this being that we have trained our students to be very reliant on the teacher and many of our student do not have the tools to perform effective and meaningful inquiry. Kristina planted the idea with us that we need to be teaching our students the skills for effective inquiry. We need to provide structure to the freedom and that is the focus and utility of her app. I really connected to the continuum that she showed. Students must monitor behaviour ► track scope and sequence ►collect artifacts► reflect► assess. I like the idea of creating a lesson in which students can practice these skills while working on other curricular competencies. I have planned an ELA lesson for my practicum in which the learning intention will be: I can stay on task for 30 minutes. This will help students to conquer the first skill of the continuum: monitor behaviour.
Kristina’s program is still in its infancy, but I hope that she and her partner Jacqueline are successful in getting it up and running. I am sure we will be hearing a lot from both of them in the future.
Jordan Hall
I think inquiry is so key and your summary of what her program and presentation was about are spot on. As teachers we should be facilitating the inquiry process by teaching the skills to stay motivated, and focused. Students need to learn how to proceed with inquiry projects and we as teachers should be assisting students with this. I tried a few inquiry projects in my practicum and it was SO fun. We started out more as a structured inquiry however it turned into student driven and I was so proud of all of them.