Case+Studies

toc

** 1. The Case of the Mysterious Movie Project **
A Middle School language teacher contacted you to come in to “do iMovie” with the students. You sent an email back requesting a face-to-face meeting so that the goals of the project could be discussed before the contact with the students. At the meeting, the teacher mentioned that the students were already engaged in an assignment to create a movie of their homes and family with them narrating in the foreign language. You were requested to come in to the presentations of the projects and “critique” the movies that were produced. What would you do?

** 2. Creative Commons Conundrum **
While in a lesson you are co-teaching, a teacher directs the students to use Google Images to find pictures for their presentation. You of course want to advocate the use of Creative Commons images. What do you do?

** 3. Reflecting and Collating **
A teacher has developed a detailed Google Site to share with a class. They are excited to use a Google Form within this site to collate student goals and student reflections. You feel that there are better ways for students to set goals and reflect on their achievements. How do you develop a solution to supports students learning but also keeps the workload manageable for the teacher?

** 4. Getting a Reaction **
Had an informal discussion with a High School Chemistry teacher. He was interested in finding out if students really understood the concept of chemical reactions. The standard practise was use worksheets and students draw the changing structure of atoms, but he suspected students couldn’t explain the reasons for the changing structure in words. What would you do to develop a deeper, more analytical learning experience for students?

** 5. Classroom Management and Trust **
A high school teacher at your school comes into your office frantically, wanting to share with you a story from his Year 10 history class which just finished 5 minutes ago. He is quite agitated and tells you that when he walked around the room near the end of the lesson, he discovered that out of 15 students in the class, 7 of them were playing games while they were meant to be working on a paired assignment. They were given the assignment 3 days ago after he had approved all their topics (it is a combined essay + oral presentation on the U.N. and Collective Security). To help them with research for the assignment, he also gave (via email) all students a Word Document with a categoried list of URLs -- some are library resources, some web resources. However, he’s very upset that despite these scaffolds, he cannot tell who is doing their work in class and who is not. He asks you if it’s possible to turn off the Internet during their History class and he will put all his URLs in PDF form on the school portal or shared drive. What do you suggest for this teacher?

** 6. Assessment Changes **
A Year 7 Science year leader invites you to sit in on a meeting with the entire Year 7 curriculum team for Maths and Sciences. She has invited you because she is hoping to take one of their summative assessments for the next unit -- traditionally a paper-and-pencil test -- in to a digital form. She sends you a copy of the test and scoring guide in advance of the meeting: it has 15 multiple choice questions, two short answer questions, and one long answer question. It is a closed-book end-of-unit test for a unit on Light. What ideas do you bring to the meeting? What do you suggest to the year leader and the entire curriculum team?

** 7. Graphic Novels and Imagery **
A new curriculum is developed which includes the study of graphic novels in English. Students need to explain and analyse the themes and motifs that run through the novel but the teacher is struggling for ideas. The traditional pedagogy practise is to use words and quotes from a novel to support students analysis. The analysis is usually handwritten and submitted to the teacher. How can the teacher incorporate the use of images from the book to support the student deep analysis?

** 8. Time Management and Organization for Learning **
A Year 8 Drama teacher in your school comes to you asking your advice about how students keep track of their homework and projects. She is fairly tech-savvy and has with her students she has trialed several different tools for keeping track of assignments and due dates (e.g. Google Calendar, Fences, Outlook Task Manager, Sticky notes, etc.). However, she reports little success (“nothing seems to stick” are her words) and that her students are still routinely leaving large assignments (e.g. research for a dramatic role) and ongoing formative tasks like their journals until the last minute. She is deeply concerned about this because she has noticed that since students received laptops this year, the quality of their work has decreased. She has been at the school 4 years and knows many of her students well, and she tells you she suspects this decline in quality is because since using laptops, students no longer use a paper diary / planner which makes it difficult for both parents and teachers to keep track of student work. She has come to you looking for strategies to implement not just in her class but in a wider sense for the whole of Year 8. What do you suggest to her for both the short term and long term? How do you help her and her students get organized for learning?

** 9. Saving, Finding, Sorting, and Saving again **
A tech-hesitant middle school teacher calls you on your office phone to tell you that more than half of her 6th graders in two different classes have lost all their work -- their computers have crashed and they can’t seem to find anything, despite having visited the tech support office, who got their laptops back up and running. The teacher wants to help students find, locate, and save their work, and then learn to back it up. Where do you begin? How do you help her and her students develop a simple, user-friendly system?

** 10. The Case of the Torn-apart Team **
One member of a three member teaching team approaches about setting up e-porfoltios for her students. During the meeting, you learn that the other two teachers are using paper portfolios. The teacher has experience creating e-portfolios using Google Sites from her last school, but the school would like to use a different platform. What do you do?

** 11. Communication Modes **
The Visual Art Department team for all of Grades 6-12 at your school routinely sends out email newsletters to keep teachers, students, and parents up-to-date about what is happening in their department and what new resources are available. The newsletters are biweekly (every two weeks) and are written in PDF form. Within the PDF are often many visuals of displays around the school, but also scholarly research articles about the rationale of providing art education as part of a balanced whole-child curriculum. The newsletter also includes URLs to resources the department is using or wants to alert the community to. The head of the Visual Art Department requests a meeting with you asking for help to set up Adobe InDesign to create the newsletters because he has recently learned that very few parents or students read the newsletters; he tells you he wants to make them “flashier” so they have a higher readership. What do you say or suggest to him at your first meeting? Do you agree that InDesign and a PDF is the best mode to communicate learning to the wider school community?

Have a story that would make a great case study?
We'd love to know about it. [|Share it here in our Google Doc].