Wednesday, March 4, 2015

Own It! - Our journey with children owning their own learning!

Own it!



What do we mean by student ownership of learning? In my definition, it is students becoming the driving force in their education, becoming actively engaged in their learning from where they have been to where they are going, reflecting on their learning, as well as setting their learning goals and working toward them. Over the last few years, I have been working toward fulfilling this definition, and this year I have come much closer. Marzano has shown that students who track their own learning learn at a much higher rate (an average of 32 percentile point gain in achievement).. Through the Battelle For Kids Modules, we learned the importance of student ownership of learning, and I immediately tried to find ways for kindergarten students to track their learning. I had tried many different approaches (just posting I can statements as learning it without tracking, roadmap on board with a race car to show where we were as a class - before differentiation, and put stickers on a ladder of math skills in individual folders), and none of them seemed to be effective or efficient because they were either not practical for a whole group or it was too hard to keep up with..
Midway through last year, I tried something completely different. I put the learning targets on my bulletin boards, and students marked off their names once they mastered each skill. This worked really well, and my students were more excited about learning than ever before. They knew what we working on, where they were with each skill, what they needed in order to master each skill, and what was next when they learned the skills. These all developed from conversations because I posted what we were working on and gave them the opportunity to mark it off when they knew it. I set up my new room the same way.
This year, I am working in a K/1 Fusion with two awesome colleagues - Miss Wright, an Intervention Specialist, and Miss Fry, our 1st Grade teacher, who is a first year teacher. (We all remember our first year teaching and how overwhelming it is. Not to mention that she had to jump in with Miss Wright and myself with this K/1 Fusion, and was forced into a huge learning curve.) We began with baby-steps. We started the student ownership project by ensuring that we had the the correct procedures in place to make it effective, efficient, and not too overwhelming. We ensured that we had our formative assessments created, and the percentage in which mastery would be determined for each learning target. We fortunately were given a day on Nov. 18th (no water, teachers still reported) to organize, align, and create learning targets and formative assessments.
It was becoming apparent right before Christmas Break that Miss Fry was ready to jump to the next step in student ownership. (I  had continued to have the “I can” boards in my classroom and was marking names off of skills for my Kindergarteners, as well as any first graders who were in any of my learning groups.) When we were trying to decide what she should take down in her room to allow for room for the boards, Miss Fry had said that it would be nice if we just had one board for everyone to mark their names off on, but she didn’t want to have to interrupt my groups to mark off names once they master a skill. THEN IT HAPPENED! I LOVE HOW IDEAS JUST COME TOGETHER! Someone mentioned it would be great if we could do it in the hallway between our classrooms. We then decided that we could incorporate all Kindergarten and 1st Grade in the hallway. To do this, we would need bulletin boards mounted in the hallway and new Learning Cards for each skill (I only had K skills, and they needed remade in color!). Miss Wright and I immediately went to our principal to advocate our new idea and to see what the chances were that we could continue with this project in this new direction. He was all for it! During Lunch, I pitched the idea to the our other Kindergarten and First Grade teachers, and they said that they were willing to join in too. By the end of the day, our principal had 3 bulletin boards in our hallway, and they were mounted by the end of the week. Over Christmas Break, I created the Learning Cards for Math and Literacy, and we decorated the board in the hallway. (Miss Wright is an amazing artist!)
I can board (1).jpg


Also over Christmas Break, our principal, Mr. Moore, shared with us a new app that just came out called SeeSaw. www.seesaw.me  This app allows you to share personal learning journals with families. This was a perfect fit to what we were doing, and now it could be extended to give families an opportunity to see what their children were learning. I figured out how the app worked and the easiest way to set it up to do what we wanted it to do. We created our students’ personal learning journals on SeeSaw. I also created Learning Checklists where parents can check off skills at home once the skills have been entered in children’s learning journals. This allows parents to see what is next.


Currently, our K/1 Fusion children have the “I Can” board caught up with everything that they have mastered, and the excitement has begun! Our parents are connecting to the SeeSaw app, as well. We even have had our first groups who have mastered new skills since the board has been up, take snapshots of their learning skills.  Some students have added a voice message to their learning journal. Parents are excited when they get real-time notifications that their child has mastered a new skill. I had one parent tell me that she got teary eyed when she got the notification and opened it to hear the excitement in her daughter’s voice that she passed a new Reading Level. Another parent stated, "I LOVE the SeeSaw App! I downloaded as night. The girls were so proud to show me! "
What started out as one teacher using an “I Can” board in their classroom for students to mark off skills once they learn them turned into one system that we all can use K-1 to empower our students, engage our parents, and simplify our workflow! Since we do this at the time of mastery, our next steps are to immediately talk with our children to ask them where they are headed next - the final step in Student Ownership: students setting their own goals!



Links to our “I can …” cards


These are the little cards in the hallway. We put little strips of children names under each card.


These can be used in the classroom to display what groups are working on. I refer to these prior to teaching and during the Plenary after the lesson.



We put these checklists together for families to know the progression of learning, and they too can track their child’s learning journey.


These are the little cards in the hallway. We put little strips of children names under each card.

Math Posters
These can be used in the classroom to display what groups are working on. I refer to these prior to teaching and during the plenary after the lesson.

We put these checklists together for families to know the progression of learning, and they too can track their child’s learning journey.

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