Reflecting on Progress: Term 1

Over this term I have made a start. My students have begun to track their writing learning. With a focus on sentences we have used the rubric to assess our work. The students have then gone through and sent their work to the Picasa Album. This has made their work visible for their peers and others which makes them accountable for their work.
Next term I will make sure I take time to continue getting the students to self assess, justify this and to send their work to the exemplar folders. 

Visible Learning: Creating a bank of exemplars

We have begun! Over the term the students have been using the sentence rubric to judge where we are working. The students have then orally justified the year level of their work and sent it to a Picasa album which is embedded in our site.

Please visit our site and look at our writing exemplars.

Picasa Albums!

After an inspiring conversation with the amazing Dorothy Burt, I have created Picasa albums to go with my sentences rubric.

Using the rubric, I plan to conference with the children about their work and agree on a year level their work is sitting at. Once they have decided, the students will then take a screenshot of their work and email it to the correlating Picasa album. 

This will create a bank of exemplars with which we can refer to throughout the year. It also makes their learning visible and the students accountable for what they are producing.

Over the following week we will hopefully have some work to share so watch this space!

Teaching Inquiry 2015

How can students knowing where they are working and what their next steps are increase the ownership of their learning?

This year I am lucky enough to be teaching in a Year 4/5 class with the amazing Ben Baxendine. Our brand new open modern learning environment currently caters to 60 eager students.

We have set our teaching inquiry on raising student ownership of learning through clearly guiding students about where they are working and what their next learning steps are.

I have decided to begin this journey by focusing on using rubrics for each of our learning goals during writing. 

As you can see in the example below I have broken down for the students what is expected when writing sentences at each year level. The students then use this to judge where they are working and to set their goal for what they need to do to progress to the next level.

My aim is to make this visible for the students with examples of their work on our site and also on the wall. It keeps the students accountable to themselves, their pairs, and myself and will hopefully inspire progress.