Curricular Design Goal for Improvement!

I wrote my curricular design on a unit about polygons and special quadrilaterals such as parallelograms, rectangles, and the like.  Students could write a song to the tune of a nursery rhyme that describes the traits of a special quadrilateral as one of the strategies from Worksheets Don't Grow Dendrites was to incorporate music into the learning.

Leadership 9/14

Dusty and I have been Student Council advisors for a number of years now.   We have a great deal of confidence when it comes to what we are doing for activities throughout the year as we have had plenty of experience with it.  Our strength definitely resides in maintaining our sense of purpose as our group knows exactly what it is that we are doing.  Our goal this year is to try to build a more cohesive council by implementing lots of motivational and community building strategies.

Growth Mindset 9/14

Goal:  In what ways will you help your students develop a Growth Mindset?

In one of my classes I am currently having students recorded the daily learning targets each day and rate themselves at the end of the period.  Every Friday we have a quiz on the learning targets from the week and also includes targets from previous weeks.  After the quiz they have to take out the sheet they recorded the targets on and write a reflecting that's at least three sentences and answers the following three questions:

• What did I have success with this week?
• What did I struggle with this week?
• What will I do next week to improve?

I am writing a little comment on each of these reflections and attaching them to their quizzes.  In addition, students are able to retake quizzes for any specific learning target they want to improve their score on.

Relationship Building

As you watch (or listen to) the video, start a BLOG entry.

• What ideas stand out to you?  What Enduring Understanding could you write that incorporates the big ideas of this presentation?
• It is important to recognize that the contributions that others make matter.

• What are you already doing to build relationships with your students?
• I try to make time to have one-on-one meetings with my students after quizzes and tests to go over things that they did well on and things that they need to improve on.  I always try to mention at least one positive comment along with any comments about what they need to improve.
• I like to stand outside of my room before each period to offer my students a "hello" or some sort of greeting/comment before they come in.

• In what ways do you show your students that they matter?
• I like to use students names when I talk to them, especially when recognizing some sort of contribution they made to the classroom learning.  "As Alex mentioned before..." or "Thanks Shawn for helping us out there."

• Thank about some ways that you could go further with relationship-building.  Set a GOAL and blog about the actions you will take to meet your goal.
• I can attend more school functions beyond those that I am involved in (swimming and student council.)  Attending an occasional football game, band or choir concert, or school play can go a long way towards showing students that what they do outside of the classroom matters just as much as what they do inside the classroom.

9/14 ROL Goals

After going through the "Rainbow Review" with Kathy, Kiesha, and Sarah I have established the following goals for my ROL:

• Find ways to inject more opposing views as to the pros and cons of implementing a standards-based grading program.
• I also plan to put in more of what I am actually implementing as at the time that I wrote this current draft I had yet to decide how I was going to use standards-based grading.