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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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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