“Planning contingently” in formative assessment means that teachers will consider the range of evidence they might likely see in advance of a lesson, and be ready with instructional strategies—for individuals, small groups, or the whole class—that allow for in-the-moment responses to the evidence as it arises. Since we can never know just how students will understand new content, planning contingently may involve considering a broad range of possible next steps. In this first NowComment prompt, you will consider what the teacher planned, not only what evidence students might give, but also how to respond to six possible commons issues that might arise.

Common Core State Standards:

G-GMD: Explain volume formulas and use them to solve problems.

Standards for Mathematical Practice:

1. Reason abstractly and quantitatively
2. Construct viable arguments and critique the reasoning of others
3. Use appropriate tools strategically
4. Attend to precision
5. Look for and make use of structure

Learning Goal:

Solve volume and area problems

Success Criteria:

• Compute perimeters, areas, and volumes using formulas
• Find the relationships between perimeters, areas, and volumes of shapes after scaling
• Explain your thinking

Before the lesson, students work individually on the following task designed to reveal their current understanding and difficulties.

The Task:

The teacher introduces the above task and helps the student to understand the problems and their context:

“In the questions, the term ‘fair price’ means that the amount you get should be in proportion to the amount you pay. So for example, if a pound of cookies costs $3, a fair price for two pounds will be $6. Read through the questions and try to answer them as carefully as you can. Show all your work so that I can understand your reasoning.”

The teacher has thought about the following six common issues that may arise and has planned questions and prompts he/she will provide to students if these issues arise.

Integrating Reading Science and English Language Development
Second-Grade English Language Learners (ELL)
(All students are Spanish speakers who are designated ELLs)

Standards:

CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RI.2.1: Ask and answer such questions as who, what, where, when, why, and how to demonstrate understanding of key details in a text.

CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RI.2.10: By the end of year, read and comprehend informational texts, including history/social studies, science, and technical texts, in the grades 2-3 text complexity band proficiently, with scaffolding as needed at the high end of the range.

Next Generation Science Standards:

2PS1.A: Structure and Properties of Matter

2PSA1-1: Matter can be describe and classified by its observable properties

Language Structures:

Structure of how and wh-questions

Vocabulary:

Minerals, rocks, sedimentary, igneous, metamorphic and conglomerate

Prior Learning:

• Describing rocks and minerals and classifying them according to their properties
• Understanding the structure of wh-questions in English and comparing to Spanish structure
• Structure of informational text, including use of sub headings and diagrams

Learning Goals:

At the beginning of the lesson, the teacher tells the students that she is going to read aloud an informational text in English about how rocks and minerals are formed and that their job is to listen carefully so that they understand some ideas about how they are formed.

Success Criteria:

Next the teacher tell the students that to show their understanding of the text they will be able to:

• explain to a partner what they have learned; and
• write a question that they think the text answers.

After the teacher reads the text aloud, the teacher asks the students to talk to a partner about what they have learned about the formation of rocks and minerals. As they discuss, the teacher moves around the pairs, intervening to clear up any confusions or modeling language for them.

After the paired conversations she asks the students to individually write a question on a Post-it note that they think the text answers. She also asks them to write their name on the reverse side of the Post-it. Before they begin, she reminds them briefly about how questions in English are structured. She also tells them that their questions need to relate to the content of the text they have read together and that she or their classmates should be able to answer the questions by re-reading the text. When the students have written their questions, they stick their Post-its onto large pieces of paper that she has taped to the whiteboard in the classroom. The teacher tells them that she will review their questions and they will continue focusing on the questions and the text the following day.

Below are some of the questions the students wrote.

Teacher’s Interpretation of Student Questions:

• Show varying levels of understanding and language skills;
• Some show literal comprehension of the text by asking questions that can be answered directly from what is stated in the text (e.g.,“What is a mineral?” );
• Other students are more sophisticated in their questions, and even though the questions are not constructed accurately, they show understanding that the text has described fossil formation (e.g., “Why [are] shap[e]s of animals in rocks?” );
• Some are using targeted vocabulary; and
• Most are structuring their questions according the conventions of English. At least one has possibly translated the question structure of Spanish into English, which reads as a statement, not a question: “In the earth are always rocks”—a likely translation from the Spanish question ¿En la tierra, siempre hay piedras?

Tomorrow’s Lesson:

Based on her interpretation of the students’ questions the decides that she will:

• Discuss with them the structure of questions in English in contrast to Spanish;
• Highlight and reinforce the vocabulary associated with rock and mineral formation that they have used; and
• Examine details in the text that can provide answers to questions.

After Tomorrow’s Lesson:

• Stretch student thinking beyond the literal level so that they can ask deeper questions in which answers require inferences to be made from the text.