Signs of learning by Camilla Holck Hemmingsen and Susanne Djurhuus VUC
Skills and competences, Evidence of learning, Feedback, Action pansSigns of learning in the hybrid classroom
By Camilla Holck Hemmingsen and Susanne Djurhuus
Working in hybrid classrooms, it is important to use digital tools to follow the students’ learning process and give the right feedback in time to improve the learning process. The two blogposts are examples from English on a basic and intermediate level.
Work in progress
At the exam, the students at level D – intermediate level – must show that they can make a written discussion, and it is never an easy task for them. The goal in this lesson is to show and improve how to write a written discussion. Prior to this task, we have read about school uniforms, and we have been introduced to some pros and cons. Now it is time for the students to write a discussion on the topic. The students work in groups and instead of handing in their results to the teacher, they use Class Notebook in TEAMS in the collaborative area, so everyone can read and write their points of view.
The students are divided into two groups – one group is dealing with the advantages of school uniforms and the other group investigate the disadvantages.
The group working on advantages give the teacher a notice in the chat on TEAMS that the work is done after 10 minutes. The teacher checks out their work in Class Notebook and realizes that they didn’t quite understand the work of a written discussion. They only made dots or headlines as if it was key sentences for an oral discussion.
The teacher then checks out the work of the group working with disadvantages, and it is the same picture. But those dots are great as starting points. Now the groups are suspended and the whole class work together in the next step.
The work continues as a cowritten assignment where the teacher works as the secretary and all the students give inputs to make sure that the statements are explained, and the sentences are combined and completed.
After the cowritten exercise, the students reflect on the work: What happened? What is important when writing a discussion?
Next step: The students are back in groups, but now both groups work on the disadvantages of school uniforms. They use the dots from the original group and make their own cowriting exercise using the experience from earlier. This is an example of a written discussion showing signs of learning; no dots, explanations of points of view and starters such as however, one disadvantage …. And another disadvantage…
The students assessed the cowritten exercise, and they say that they felt more comfortable with this kind of task now. They were actually looking forward to next written discussion, so they could use this work in the Class Notebook as a scaffold.