Abby Plassard- EMS 517 Effective Teaching and Planning

     In Chapter 6 of Rigor by Design, Not Chance by Karin Hess, she discusses the important independent skill of self-direction. Hess (2023) states, “Self-direction is a complex competency that includes both the intrapersonal skills of self-awareness and reflection and the intrapersonal skill of collaboration” (p. 261). With self-direction, students utilize this skill by identifying their interest about a topic, collaborating with others, and using their ideas to shape and mold their own learning experiences. Students’ learning experiences include goal setting, questioning, using prior-knowledge to inform decisions, assessing and revising based on feedback, and taking ownership for their own quality of work that they produce. Hess (2017) further breaks down self direction into five components: Self-Awareness- Students should be using past experiences to self-evaluate and reflect on one’s strengths, challenges, interests, and desires and how they are connected to a variet...

       In Chapter 5 of Rigor by Design, Not Chance by Karin Hess, she spends a lot of time breaking down performance-based assessments. In her analysis, she explains what high-quality performance-based assessments look like and she describes characteristics that these assessments typically possess. I have analyzed Hess’ (2023) seven characteristics below (p. 180) : Have open-ended contexts, meaning that students can answer questions in a variety of ways and there is not only one correct answer. Productively challenge students, meaning that students are challenged to reflect on the answers/solutions that they give and they may need to reevaluate their thinking and explore a different path. This concept connects to what is known as “productive struggle”. Uncover thinking, meaning that students’ answers should show their learning and understanding of different concepts. With this, students should support the conclusions they make with evidence and reasons. Promote auth...

       In Chapter 4 of Rigor by Design, Not Chance by Karin Hess, she discusses ways to scaffold that will ensure that all students’ struggles are productive. Students need scaffolding in different forms in order to ensure that the student’s learning is in their zone of proximal development. Hess discusses four ways to scaffold: Teacher and Peer Scaffolding: Teachers can provide supports to students when they are learning new concepts and those supports can be gradually removed. Teachers can create opportunities for students to challenge themselves and challenge their peers. Content Scaffolding: Teachers can pre-teach important key ideas and they can give students basic background knowledge on content that will be taught in class. Scaffolding might include using additional resources such as videos and paired texts to give background knowledge. Task Scaffolding: Teachers can break down multi-step tasks/directions into smaller and more manageable pieces. This allows s...

In Chapter 3 of Rigor by Design, Not Chance by Karin Hess, she discusses how building on existing schema, we can develop upon even more “sophisticated” schema. The one I am going to be highlighting from the reading is “Structural Schema”. The text goes on to talk about the SWBS chart and how it helps develop structural schema. What is a SWBS chart you might ask? Well, let’s dive a little deeper into that.  The SWBS chart stands for Somebody, Wanted, But, So, and it refers to a model that many teachers use when explaining the process of summarizing to students. Somebody (S) refers to a character or characters within a story. Wanted (W) refers to what that character wants, whether that be something they want in their position (object, person, animal, etc) or something that they want to do. But (B) refers to the problem of the story and how that problem was caused. So (S) refers to the resolution of the story and how the problem was resolved. As a Title Reading teacher, this is a mo...