For those of you who do not know, I am a 4th grade teacher at Eagle Creek. I am assuming that we all have more than one professional goal that we try to accomplish every year. I have several goals, some bigger than others. I thought I would share one with all of you and see if you have any suggestions or "tricks of the trade" that might help me accomplish my goal.
My goal in reading this year is giving students more ownership of their reading. I have created a system where students will each have their own reading binder. The binder will contain all their daily journalling, graphic organizers, strategy definitions, and goals sheets. My goal is that every student will have a "goal" each week during reading. This will abe directed to their learning styles and skills they need improvement on, as well as the daily skill we are working on. I will meet with each student once a week to develop the goal and to check on their previous goal. This will alleviate me having to carry around my "pensive" that really never worked for me. This will also help me with the fact that during conferences or parent meetings I have all the student work for that quarter in one spot and can show them what their student has been working on for the past weeks and how they are progressing. The binder will also have their AIMs and DRA information. The binder will allow me to give students documents that we can continually come back to throughout a unit or year.
Wow! This sounds like a great idea. I particularly like the idea of the students being the holders of their information. I was always showing the kids what I was writing in my pensieve anyhow.
ReplyDeleteThe only time that I can see this being more difficult for you is when you plan for groups or at the end of the quarter when doing grades. If you're like me, I always end up doing the bulk of my planning and grades at home. My guess is that you wouldn't want to bring home all of their binders in order to assess reading. Maybe you'd want to have a notebook where you could put kids into groups according to the skills they are working on, or to jot down a quick note when something new surfaces in one of your conferences. In some ways, I suppose that's getting back to the idea of the pensieve, but it'd be less cumbersome.
I really like the idea of the students being independent and responsible for their own progress. I think that it is important for all the studetns to have a goal that they are continually striving for. What are you going to do if the student doesn't meet their goal? Will they keep the same goal or change goals each week? Great idea!
ReplyDeleteI was thinking that if students do not meet their goals they would continue having the same goal, and depending on the student, give them a second goal if they could handle it.
ReplyDeleteAs far as Erin's suggestion, everything is obviously three holed punched and instead of asking for their whole binder I will ask them to hand in specific days or assignments. I will continually be looking through their binders when I give them their goal every week.
Thanks for the suggestions!