
Namely:
As I read that passage, I was struck by my own need to grow in this area. You see, I'm a planner. I spend summers plotting the skills that I will teach along the timeline of a year. I analyze the big picture and the day-to-day. I know the standards and I know how each project, assignment, and paper will fit into the mastery puzzle. ...But I've always kept those locked in my own head. I thought I was saving students from the planning burden, but after reading that passage, I was suddenly convicted that I was not saving them, I was depriving them. So here is what I set out to try this school year:
- Involve students directly in tracking their own mastery of the standards.
- Provide more opportunities for meaningful and authentic self-assessment and peer-assessment to give students a better understanding of their own mastery.
Here are some of the ways I am reaching for those goals:
1. Mastery Tracking by Unit:
For each unit, I have been selecting power standards and then having students track their progress on these standards throughout the unit. Students assign a mastery level and reflection to their progress, effort, and feelings. At the end of the unit, they assess their overall mastery and provide links to evidence, which can be in the form of docs, slides, projects, screenshots of tools like NoRedInk or Vocab.com, images of notes or annotations, etc. Here are links to view the mastery trackers: Narrative, Rhetorical Analysis. Note: These are still a work in progress. I'd love to talk about ways to improve this practice if you have ideas!
2. More intentional visible thinking strategies:

3. More peer feedforward:

For this step we mostly use:
1. Padlet. I make a column for each student. They post their product on the top and then others comment below. (See image)
2. Google Forms. Students create a google form asking their peers to answer specific questions about their work and then analyze the trends.
4. More assignments with built-in authentic audiences:
I think that assignments like blogging and commenting lend themselves to a natural and authentic peer and self-assessment process.
What strategies do you use to encourage students to understand the standards, track mastery, and plan for improvement? Leave a comment, question, or suggestion below.
<3 Emily
Your creation has inspired our new IB MYP program to adopt this to meet the #T3 challenge provided by the OUHSD and Dr. Sonny Magana and to ensure that all students are able to build in their reflection capacities. Thank you for all your persistence and skill.
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