Here it is another quarter. It seems they come faster than ever. I'm reading a great book of essays called The Right to Literacy in Secondary Schools. One of the essays is " Self-assessment of data: Empowering students to plan and own their own learning in Language Arts" by Lesli Cochran.
This teacher was tired of students just blowing off the standardized tests they were taking so she came up with a curriculum that was highly individualized based on the results of the standardized test results. She herself was not as excited about this testing as well but decided to try something that would motivate them all.
This was not her only curriculum and she didn't write lesson plans to meet each students' results but she included time for conferencing with students about their results and then in addition to their required Language Arts work they were given three 30 minutes blocks to work on their own needs. She put together materials that focused on the state standards that students needed to personalize their own work and could access themselves.
For the entire class, she posted a summary of class results and had the students do a gallery walk through the data posters to see what the class's strengths and weaknesses were. One student remarked " Man, Mrs. Cochran, I feel sorry for you. You have a lot of work to do. We're not good at anything." She used that comment to segue to what they were good at and what they needed to work on.
This all took some work in planning, getting materials that students would be interested in and showing students how to read data.
As a result, students scored 8% higher, and individual students raised their scores over 100 points, whereas in the past year they realized maybe 25 points.
Whatever works! What I appreciated is that her Language Arts curriculum didn't suffer, in fact it became richer as students provided more personalized feedback.
Enjoy the term!
Tuesday, March 22, 2011
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