I loved having the opportunity to walk through our building today and see the many wonderful things people at Lone Tree are doing to create visible learning. I was proud of the many strategies I have visible in my room, from my writing success criteria to the concept mapping done by students to describe aspects of our conceptual curriculum. I think that I have done a nice job this year of establishing our three main areas of focus within our conceptual curriculum umbrella, so that my students have been exposed to our social studies and science curriculum in many different ways and understand the vocabulary. This will support us going forward because students will have many examples and experiences to draw from when they develop their yearlong impact projects. In other classrooms, I enjoyed seeing how many different grades have some type of student accountability organizers or personalized learning planners. In our case, fourth grade uses a workshop planner that students use to keep track of their "Must-Dos" on a weekly basis. For most of my students, this is a successful tool to track what they need to work on and what they have finished already during independent work times or when I am meeting with small groups of students. Some of the other examples of this that I saw today were very similar, but had more teacher input and less student ownership. I like that our workshop planner has more space for students to fill out their own "to do" list, and many spaces for them to make choices about what they will work on at each point of the day. Still, I loved seeing many different versions of this type of accountability as other options for students who may not benefit as much from the workshop planner we are currently using. One new example of inspiration that I got from my walk-through today was that I saw several examples of classroom data walls to support conceptual curriculum. We have discussed creating a fourth grade data wall to monitor LTE's energy usage, but previously we had discussed making that an interest project for students who were passionate about it. After seeing a few examples of people creating one data wall for their classroom, I think that we could begin a data wall of the school's energy usage at a classroom level using data that we have gathered on each month's energy usage. This could be a powerful visual for students to observe how energy levels change and how we might impact them. Our next steps will be following up with the person who provides us with energy reports to hopefully continue receiving this monthly data, and then using a wall in the classroom to display it.
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My goal this year is to encourage my students to reflect through personalized blogs. My teammate and I began this endeavor "full speed ahead", and I have been extremely pleased with how my students have taken to it! Students have had their blogs for about a month and a half now, and they add new posts roughly every week to update their readers (myself and their parents - the blogs are private to anyone else) on what we have going on. I have seen growth in some of my "techy" students that I don't think I would have necessarily seen without this type of opportunity. There is something about it being their own blog that allows each child to fully express his or her own voice without holding back in a way that they might on Google Docs or in writing. We still use those mediums, and had a conversation about "formal" versus "casual or conversational" writing, and that there is a time and a place for everything, but I am loving the products that my students are creating so far, and I'm already seeing them improve in so many ways.
The first assignment was for students to reflect on their current educational goals. This was tough for students, but with some guidance they completed their first posts. Some students had trouble with pinpointing their goals and instead restated a to-do list in their posts, but many students were already to point out things that they were working on at that point. Either way, it was valuable data for me regarding which students needed to have a conference to discuss their goals and to make sure we were on the same page. Many posts followed where students simply reflected on educational experiences. We had several "Being There" experiences where we met as a class to come up with success criteria about what one needed to include in a quality blog about a field trip, and students were excited to share their perspectives on each trip. We also had a cooking experience to reflect on, where students were VERY honest and straightforward about who liked and who definitely did NOT like guacamole. Throughout these posts, I have been able to engage through commenting, and parents have loved reading their students' blogs and commenting on them to promote different types of discussions about what students are doing at school. Some students in my classroom use blogs as a motivator, whether it is as simple as "you can work on your blog layout/theme/colors once you finish your assignment", or more complicated, as in helping other classmates edit their blogs. I'm so glad to have introduced this new learning format into my classroom. Last week, my students were asked once again to create a new blog post about their goals. As I read through their new posts, I was so impressed by how much more detailed and specific these posts were than their first few posts. For me, as well as for parents, these blogs will be valuable artifacts to display student growth and self-awareness, and to remember learning experiences from the entire year. |
AuthorCourtney Hayes is currently a teacher at Lone Tree Elementary Magnet School in Colorado. She has teaching experience in both primary and intermediate grades, and is passionate about personalizing her instruction to meet the needs of all students. Archives
April 2021
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