This is the fourth in a series of posts relating to John Spencer and A. J. Juliani’s book Empower, which I am reading as part of #IMMOOC 4 and also #sau25bookchat. Each week I will be targeting suggested blog prompts and reflecting on how the ideas presented in #empowerbook resonate with my teaching experience.
I've realized I have been missing a huge opportunity. Although I do have standards to meet, I am not required to grade my K-2 students in library. That means I can spend most of our assessment time helping students practice self assessment. Why haven't I been doing this more purposefully? Well there's no time like the present to do my own self assessment and fix this problem.
Today I tried my hand at leading second grade student through self assessment. This was the first time I've asked students to tell me what skills they displayed instead of me declaring what I was assessing them on. I used this with the activity I recently blogged about where students created book displays in the library. Today I asked them to reflect on their work and identify some skills they'd used. Trying something completely new always has a risk feel and today that was compounded by Instructional Rounds in my building. I briefly thought about pushing this aside for something comfortable but this is where were were in the project and I felt ready for a little risk-taking after finishing #IMMOOC, #sau25bookchat and #Empowerbook.
My goals:
Opportunity for personal reflection.
Practice celebrating success
Identify skills demonstrated
Talk about constructive feedback.
I opened with congratulating students on successful displays. I admitted that I wouldn't have thought to choose the topics they did, and that I was impressed all week at the student response. They'd even returned twice to restock their displays. We considered meanings for the word "reflection". After some great student definitions, I asked them to reflect on their learning in this project. While sitting with their groups I gave them some hand mirrors and asked them to hold the mirror up for themselves or a partner and tell their reflection something they did in the project that they were really proud of. After a brief hesitation they really jumped into this activity. A demonstration of the importance of give themselves credit for parts of the project that went well.
There were six stacks of cards on their tables. I had created these based on the National Standards Framework from the American Association of School Libraries. As I read each "I Can" statement from the cards, I asked them to take a card if they felt that if was a skill they demonstrated on this project. After reading through all the skills, I had them bring their selections back to our meeting rug. I asked if all students took all cards - no they hadn't. Volunteers shared a card and explained how they applied that skill to this project. Many students were able to give solid examples of how they demonstrated skills. I pointed out that this was different from our typical approach where I tell them the "I cans" at the beginning and I thanked them for trying something new with me.
We wrapped up with some constructive feedback but I started with myself. I shared my reflections and talked about what it means to iterate. The next iteration of this project would be coming up with another class. I asked them to give me feedback on the project so I could make improvements. They had helpful suggestions about where they needed more time.
Somewhere in the middle of all this the Instructional Rounds team left but I'm not actually sure when. I was really so interested in what the students were doing that I didn't even notice. This was messy, and needs some work, but this is definitely a more satisfying conclusion to an activity. I can't wait to try again.
