Module 5 -Journal Entry 1- Connecting to my Professional Community - Project Zero

The goal of this module was to engage with my Professional Learning Community - Project Zero.

 Over the next week I will be using this blog to act as my electronic journal and recording my communications and in-progress connecting with Project Zero. (PZ)

 E-mail communications:

After returning home from Project Zero, even after a couple weeks, I am still continuing to process the experience.  I have been in contact with a few of teachers that I met at PZ.

Week of August 1-6:
Eric Gladstone - a Grade 4/5 teacher from Live Oak School in San Francisco.
Eric and I were in the same daily Study Group and we ended up having a few in-depth conversations about mathematics. We both are striving for the goal of having our students develop a deeper understanding for the purposes and applications of math, as well as provide them authentic and meaningful feedback.
Through motivation of this course, and since Eric and I said we would stay in contact after our time at PZ, I e-mailed him about a visible thinking routine that I had used in my class in the spring.

It prompted further dialogue about assessment. Eric shared with me this resource as a student self assessment of a unit. Eric’s feedback was that he used it at the end of each unit, where this year he plans to use it multiple times throughout the unit – to really emphasize the assessment of learning.


I also shared some feedback that instead of using a rating scale with numbers, to use a gauge and have the students draw an arrow to where they feel they are at.  Over google chat we shared a common problem- that our students get hung up on letter grades. The gauge provides a different way to share an assessment of their learning without them equating a 9 to 90% or A, or a 4 as 40% and a fail.

Comments

  1. Denise NielsenAugust 8, 2017 at 5:17 AM

    This is fantastic. I love that you have so many different avenues to explore with your PLN. The gauge for learning particularly caught my attention. It seems so valuable to have students self -assess learning, and yet they do seem shy about doing so. This might be one way to ease them into that process. Have you had any opportunities to try it? I'm curious as to the feedback you've received from students.

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