TEACHER TIPS help you make the most of OGAP in your classroom this year. If you have comments or suggestions about TEACHER TIPS, please let us know at
[email protected].
November 7, 2017
The OGAP Quick Sort Mindset
The heart and soul of OGAP is the ongoing collection of evidence of student thinking to inform instruction and student learning
as students are learning. That means selecting OGAP questions or questions from your instructional materials that you can use at the beginning or end of the lesson based on the goals of your lesson, and most importantly collecting and analyzing evidence from these questions.
Using the idea of a
quick sort,
OGAP teachers can quickly gather useful information as students are learning to inform the rest of a lesson or the next day's instruction for the full group, small groups, or individual students.
In thequick sort,
teachers sort the student work into piles representing the different levels on the OGAP Learning Progressions. Teachers focus first and foremost on the evidence in the work and later deal with recording the evidence for future reference.
This strategy is very different from the typical way that teachers review student work - one student at a time recording evidence and later looking at patterns. This strategy starts with grouping by patterns of evidence based on the OGAP Framework and using that as a stepping-stone to making instructional decisions and providing feedback to students.
When the work is sorted into these piles one can quickly look through and take stock of the strategies students are using or the errors that students are making and thinking about how to adjust instruction and provide feedback to students.
Action Item
If you have not already adopted this mindset, try it this week. First, choose a question from the OGAP Item Bank or from your instructional materials. Administer it to your students. Now - instead of recording the evidence one student at a time - sort the work into the piles consistent with the OGAP Learning Progression for your content area
. Check the piles. What patterns do you notice? What instructional changes might you make and what feedback might you provide your students? Later you can record the evidence using your piles of work.
Did you know?
You can access the OGAP Item Banks online in two ways: find our new searchable OGAP item bank
here (
bookmark it!) or view the PDFs at www.ogapmath.com/item-bank.
