Conferencing with Students =
Communicating with Parents (part 3)
What a difference a school year makes! Remember the first week of August when you received your students entering the classroom for the first time? Questions swirled around your head: Will I be an effective teacher? Will they LOVE learning in my classroom? Can I build their character, self-esteem, and confidence? What will be my challenges? Well – we find ourselves at that time of year to “wrap it up” and we feel excited as we reflect on the outcomes. Do our students think or feel the same way?
Teachers reflect all the time! So how can I produce reflective students?
As you have noticed if you’ve read my previous posts, I have focused on conferencing with students in order to facilitate student reflection and then share this with parents. I have used familiar tools/resources such as Renaissance Learning (Accelerated Reader) since these provide quick reports that can be used in a student conferencing session. At our school site, our wonderful principal has created a Principal’s "Challenge" in which each grade level is challenged to gain a certain amount of reading points (through computer quizzes). These challenges are six-weeks in length. Incentives include an extra recess, student brag tags and an end-of-year celebration.
This week I ran a report that informs my students their total reading points for each Principal’s Challenge. I gave each student their personal slip in order to reflect on their reading motivation throughout the year. Here is a picture of what this report looks like:
Next, I used this free website https://nces.ed.gov/nceskids/createagraph/ to generate a blank graph template for students to chart their data and to set a goal for the remaining Principal’s Challenge (challenge #6). Finally, they had to write a statement about why they chose this goal. I made sure to make no judgments about whether their goal was too low or too high. I left it to their discretion and overall the majority selected goals that were reasonable. Here is an example:
It was interesting to me that this particular student wrote: “I want this goal (30 points) because I want to get more points than any principal’s challenge points I ever had.” It warms my heart when I read these introspective conclusions that students come to and it also motivates me to continually find other ways to facilitate goal-setting. Of course, students take these home in order to share with their parents how they plan to keep improving their reading habits.
Student reflections will undoubtedly lead to teacher reflection.
After I read through each reflection and goal-setting analysis, I thought about how I could help students become more voracious readers and whether goal-setting more often can help in this endeavor. I did observe an overall trend of point decline especially after the third Principal’s Challenge. This challenge comes right after the Winter Break and I am assuming students return from break still holding onto a “vacation” mentality especially when it comes to reading. I am thinking of ways to incentivize next year’s students after this break perhaps setting goals right away after the break and more frequent progress monitoring such as reading log check-ins or offering a teacher-student lunch bunch for those students who take weekly quizzes.
I hope you have enjoyed these morsels of information and a small “peek” into my classroom regarding student conferencing. May you enjoy your summer vacation and we will see you next school year!
Learning and growing along with my students!
Gus Macuil
