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Lauren Dellman - Teacher, Chesapeake High School
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Ms. Dellman is a highly qualified special education instructor who teaches a variety of subjects at Chesapeake High School including English 10, English 11, English 12, and Economics and Public Issues. She loves building relationships with her students and helping them traverse both the curriculum and their daily lives. In her classroom she teaches tolerance, introspection, and sportsmanship. Students are provided with high expectations and work together to meet them.
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March 2018
This year I had the opportunity to participate in a course on Responsive Instructional Design. It was divided into four segments that roughly aligned with our school-wide initiatives to improve long range planning, formative assessment, targeted small group instruction, and personalization. The class covered a wide range of topics, each one carefully linked to the premise of being “responsive,” but what I liked most about the course was the way it systematically dismantled assumptions.
One assumption that it helped me to address was about timing. The word responsive makes something sound subordinate – like it comes necessarily after something else in a sequence. And, of course, this makes sense. If you don’t know something about your student’s deficits or strengths, how can you hope to plan coherent lessons that bridge the gaps and push back the boundaries of course content?
But to say that “responsive” is a response is somewhat vague, because that ignores much of the proactivity inherent in our profession.
It also ignores what we are being responsive to.
One of the unconscious assumptions that I brought with me to our class was that responsive instruction was limited to formative assessments (often predetermined) and data collected from students during class, but that line of thinking is necessarily flawed. Being responsive to student data and FAs is only a subset of the manner in which the teaching profession calls me to be responsive each day. I also need to be responsive to my student’s emotional states, empathetic when they are struggling. I need to be responsive to their cognitive ability, to their stress levels, and to their level of engagement. I need to be responsive when the school rule is “only one student out at a time” and one of my students who never asks to go to the bathroom asks to leave. I need to be responsive to outside events in our community and in the country that seemingly draw student attention away from course content but are really opportunities for meaningful conversation and learning. I need to be responsive to how my students communicate, to the level of formality that they are comfortable with, and to the type of classroom environment they feel the safest and most productive participating in.
And so, one thing that the Responsive Instructional Design course has made me think about is emotional responsiveness. As adults, we are often called to match the emotional states of others in order to create empathy and facilitate communication, but many of my students lack the fundamental emotional intelligence to step outside of their own patterns of thinking and consider the feelings of someone else. Something that I am working on right now is modeling this type of thinking when students are frustrated and modeling it in myself when I encounter a problem. The assumption that they “should know how” has been dismantled. Hopefully knowing this allows me to be more empathetic and more responsive as I give them the tools that they need to move forward.
This year I had the opportunity to participate in a course on Responsive Instructional Design. It was divided into four segments that roughly aligned with our school-wide initiatives to improve long range planning, formative assessment, targeted small group instruction, and personalization. The class covered a wide range of topics, each one carefully linked to the premise of being “responsive,” but what I liked most about the course was the way it systematically dismantled assumptions.
One assumption that it helped me to address was about timing. The word responsive makes something sound subordinate – like it comes necessarily after something else in a sequence. And, of course, this makes sense. If you don’t know something about your student’s deficits or strengths, how can you hope to plan coherent lessons that bridge the gaps and push back the boundaries of course content?
But to say that “responsive” is a response is somewhat vague, because that ignores much of the proactivity inherent in our profession.
It also ignores what we are being responsive to.
One of the unconscious assumptions that I brought with me to our class was that responsive instruction was limited to formative assessments (often predetermined) and data collected from students during class, but that line of thinking is necessarily flawed. Being responsive to student data and FAs is only a subset of the manner in which the teaching profession calls me to be responsive each day. I also need to be responsive to my student’s emotional states, empathetic when they are struggling. I need to be responsive to their cognitive ability, to their stress levels, and to their level of engagement. I need to be responsive when the school rule is “only one student out at a time” and one of my students who never asks to go to the bathroom asks to leave. I need to be responsive to outside events in our community and in the country that seemingly draw student attention away from course content but are really opportunities for meaningful conversation and learning. I need to be responsive to how my students communicate, to the level of formality that they are comfortable with, and to the type of classroom environment they feel the safest and most productive participating in.
And so, one thing that the Responsive Instructional Design course has made me think about is emotional responsiveness. As adults, we are often called to match the emotional states of others in order to create empathy and facilitate communication, but many of my students lack the fundamental emotional intelligence to step outside of their own patterns of thinking and consider the feelings of someone else. Something that I am working on right now is modeling this type of thinking when students are frustrated and modeling it in myself when I encounter a problem. The assumption that they “should know how” has been dismantled. Hopefully knowing this allows me to be more empathetic and more responsive as I give them the tools that they need to move forward.
January 2018
November 2017
When I think about embracing “the lighthouse transformation,” I think about how iterative the whole process is. Since Chesapeake High School has become a Lighthouse School teaching and learning mirrors the learning process of our students.
Our teachers are overhauling their instruction, trying to change the way that they think about teaching, to make it more learner-centered. At the same time, we’re asking our students to shift their paradigm and make a lot of changes to the way that they learn.
Learning isn’t a passive activity anymore, it’s active and can be chaotic. I don’t write lessons to deliver to students, I plan ways that my students can learn material and even when the opportunities arise, to teach me. Teaching is increasingly about providing opportunities instead of providing data or facts. It’s about showing paths that might be taken, not dropping kids off at a destination.
To me, responsive instruction means that my students come first. At Chesapeake, we’ve been asked to ask ourselves different questions. We no longer ask, “What will we teach today?” but “How will my students learn best today?” This also means a lot of iteration. I am constantly modeling the revision process for my students, being open about my failures, and searching with them for new solutions.
Being responsive means being brave. It means being willing to throw out a lesson that isn’t working and to jump down a rabbit hole with your kids, even if you don’t initially see the light at the end of the tunnel. It means paying attention to each student’s strengths and weaknesses, to learning preferences, and to the form and function of the materials that you are using.
Since Chesapeake became a lighthouse school my teaching practice has had to adapt. Focusing on responsive instruction and taking a “student-first” approach to learning means that I can’t recycle old classroom materials or teach straight from my curriculum guide.
In order to best meet the needs of my students, I am constantly formatively assessing, far more than I did in previous years. I still backward map from my standards and from curricular learning outcomes, but more and more I am finding that I need to balance mapping backwards and mapping forwards.
There are a lot of little ways that I am attempting to include responsive instruction in my daily practice. Mostly it’s about making sure to jump ship on activities that are sinking and use instructional time meaningfully, but sometimes I do bigger and more targeted responsive instruction. The biggest addition to my practice from this year is incorporating a “Formative Assessment Day” at the beginning of major units of instruction where I do fun and engaging activities with my students, testing their background knowledge and pre-requisite skills. The information that I glean from that day helps to inform my targeted small group instruction for the entire unit.
Recently I did a Halloween Themed lesson where my students worked on the writing process. We started writing down our fears on spiders to assess idea generation before moving into doing a Madlib to assess diction and writing scary stories to assess narrative elements. It was a ton of fun and I am using the scores of my students to determine who to remediate, who to reteach in a new way, and who needs enrichment and to take the task further to continue to develop.
There have been a lot of advantages in being a Lighthouse school. In addition to having access to technology which allows all of our students to access, manipulate, and create information, being a lighthouse school has changed the culture at Chesapeake High School. Our administrative team was incredibly supportive during our first year as a lighthouse school and provided alternative methods for formal evaluation to facilitate risk taking. In general, our school culture is one of continued growth and development and I have always felt supported when taking risks and striving toward enhancing instruction and assessment for my students.
I graduated from Dulaney High School in 2009 which, relatively speaking, wasn’t that long ago. I completed many of the same performance based assessments as my current students and read many of the same “seminal works of literature.” I read Night, Chaucer, and Shakespeare. It’s not the content that’s changed, but the method of instruction.
Now everything is much more hands on and students are given more opportunities to drive their own learning. It’s not perfect yet, but Lighthouse technology has allowed for more personalization and as we get better at utilizing it and develop deeper understanding of our students, it will likely continue to enhance the learning process.
One caveat though – I think it’s easy to miss the forest for the trees and fixate on the role that technology plays in this “Lighthouse transformation.” What we are attempting to do is to redesign instruction so that it best meets the needs of our students, the technology is just one component element of that – and not even the most important.
When I think about embracing “the lighthouse transformation,” I think about how iterative the whole process is. Since Chesapeake High School has become a Lighthouse School teaching and learning mirrors the learning process of our students.
Our teachers are overhauling their instruction, trying to change the way that they think about teaching, to make it more learner-centered. At the same time, we’re asking our students to shift their paradigm and make a lot of changes to the way that they learn.
Learning isn’t a passive activity anymore, it’s active and can be chaotic. I don’t write lessons to deliver to students, I plan ways that my students can learn material and even when the opportunities arise, to teach me. Teaching is increasingly about providing opportunities instead of providing data or facts. It’s about showing paths that might be taken, not dropping kids off at a destination.
To me, responsive instruction means that my students come first. At Chesapeake, we’ve been asked to ask ourselves different questions. We no longer ask, “What will we teach today?” but “How will my students learn best today?” This also means a lot of iteration. I am constantly modeling the revision process for my students, being open about my failures, and searching with them for new solutions.
Being responsive means being brave. It means being willing to throw out a lesson that isn’t working and to jump down a rabbit hole with your kids, even if you don’t initially see the light at the end of the tunnel. It means paying attention to each student’s strengths and weaknesses, to learning preferences, and to the form and function of the materials that you are using.
Since Chesapeake became a lighthouse school my teaching practice has had to adapt. Focusing on responsive instruction and taking a “student-first” approach to learning means that I can’t recycle old classroom materials or teach straight from my curriculum guide.
In order to best meet the needs of my students, I am constantly formatively assessing, far more than I did in previous years. I still backward map from my standards and from curricular learning outcomes, but more and more I am finding that I need to balance mapping backwards and mapping forwards.
There are a lot of little ways that I am attempting to include responsive instruction in my daily practice. Mostly it’s about making sure to jump ship on activities that are sinking and use instructional time meaningfully, but sometimes I do bigger and more targeted responsive instruction. The biggest addition to my practice from this year is incorporating a “Formative Assessment Day” at the beginning of major units of instruction where I do fun and engaging activities with my students, testing their background knowledge and pre-requisite skills. The information that I glean from that day helps to inform my targeted small group instruction for the entire unit.
Recently I did a Halloween Themed lesson where my students worked on the writing process. We started writing down our fears on spiders to assess idea generation before moving into doing a Madlib to assess diction and writing scary stories to assess narrative elements. It was a ton of fun and I am using the scores of my students to determine who to remediate, who to reteach in a new way, and who needs enrichment and to take the task further to continue to develop.
There have been a lot of advantages in being a Lighthouse school. In addition to having access to technology which allows all of our students to access, manipulate, and create information, being a lighthouse school has changed the culture at Chesapeake High School. Our administrative team was incredibly supportive during our first year as a lighthouse school and provided alternative methods for formal evaluation to facilitate risk taking. In general, our school culture is one of continued growth and development and I have always felt supported when taking risks and striving toward enhancing instruction and assessment for my students.
I graduated from Dulaney High School in 2009 which, relatively speaking, wasn’t that long ago. I completed many of the same performance based assessments as my current students and read many of the same “seminal works of literature.” I read Night, Chaucer, and Shakespeare. It’s not the content that’s changed, but the method of instruction.
Now everything is much more hands on and students are given more opportunities to drive their own learning. It’s not perfect yet, but Lighthouse technology has allowed for more personalization and as we get better at utilizing it and develop deeper understanding of our students, it will likely continue to enhance the learning process.
One caveat though – I think it’s easy to miss the forest for the trees and fixate on the role that technology plays in this “Lighthouse transformation.” What we are attempting to do is to redesign instruction so that it best meets the needs of our students, the technology is just one component element of that – and not even the most important.
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