“You have to know them before you can grow them.”
Unknown
The new school year starts for me tomorrow, and I have intentionally been doing less than usual. In fact, whenever I notice that I feel compelled to be productive, I think to myself, “do less,” which is becoming my intention for this school year. Years of mindfulness practice have taught me to see patterns in my thinking and behavior. A frequent thought, especially during the school year, is “I’ll just do this now so I have less to do later.” But I never really have less to do later because I keep having that thought and acting on it. There is always something to do, so unless I am intentional about not doing, I trap myself in the busy-ness hamster wheel.
But I can’t go in to school tomorrow having done nothing. I have done a lot of reading and thinking and a little creating related to one of my big goals for the school year: improving my pointless grading practices. I need my assessment framework to be more efficient and sustainable so that I can actually do less more effectively.
My experiences with pointless grading last year taught me many things, but the two most significant lessons that will inform my structure this year will require me to do a little more in the beginning:
- I have to more actively help my students set appropriate goals so the goals are meaningful and more likely to lead to growth.
- Larger tasks, like writing assignments, need to include some form of standards-based assessment. (More on that in a future post.)
Many of my previous posts describe the problems I encountered with the ways I implemented the goal-setting approach last year, so I won’t go into detail here. To summarize, goal-setting worked well for many students (especially the really strong, intrinsically motivated ones), but the weaker students struggled to choose appropriate goals and to provide evidence of growth. So this year, goal-setting will be a collaborative process.
And it starts by getting to know my students in all kinds of ways: as people first, but also as readers, writers, and class participants. This usually happens organically as the course progresses, but I need to speed up the process a little if I am going to have students set goals first quarter. As I heard someone say during a workshop this summer, “You have to know them before you can grow them.” And since I cannot wait until 2022 to starting growing them, I need to get to know them right away.
Enter student inventories—and a more intentional process for using them. I have often used a basic inventory to gather some personal information from students at the beginning of the year, but I never really did anything with these after reading through them once. I would ask standard questions like, “What’s your favorite subject in school?” and “What do you hope to get out of this course?” And students would give me pretty generic responses. So I would skim these the first week and never look at them again. Basically, I wasted hours of my precious time.
This year, I created four different inventories, each with a slightly different purpose. The personal information inventory is a starting point for getting to know the students as people. It includes standard questions like “What do you prefer to be called?” and “What is your favorite food?” It asks students what their preferred pronouns are and what three words they would use to describe themselves. This inventory also asks about their learning experiences last year since no one attended school in a “normal” way. In order to make sure I actually remember this information, I have put the questions at the top of my data tracker doc (described in my post on digital assessment notebooks). This way, I will see it every time I open each student’s file. Once I have learned the information, I can move those questions to the bottom of the doc so I don’t have to scroll through them every time.
To create the other inventories, I thought about the major learning strands of my course: reading, writing, speaking, and listening. I then created a series of questions for each strand that would help me understand each student’s relationship to that strand. My goal is to confer with each student sometime during the first month of school about their responses to the inventories and to then help each of them set appropriate, meaningful, and individualized goals for each learning strand. (I don’t yet know where this time is coming from, but I imagine some of it will happen during independent reading time.)
As I write these intentions down, I feel slightly overwhelmed. But I am also excited. I think the questions combined with the conferences are going to help me establish strong connections with each student. I just have to remind myself that everything is harder in the beginning of the year, and that by investing this time up front, I will save time later.
I created all the inventories in Google Docs because I prefer that format to Google Forms. I find it easier to read Docs, and I think it is also easier for students to write more thorough responses in a Doc. More importantly, it is MUCH easier to save and link the responses when they are in Docs. I know I will be referring back to these inventories frequently, especially in the beginning of the year.
To create your own inventories, think about the overall goals you have for your students, and then work backwards to create more specific questions that will help you learn each student’s starting point. In reading, for example, ask how many books they read last year for fun. Ask about genre preferences and how they discover new titles. Make sure to phrase things in a way that invites rather than alienates reluctant readers.
If you’d rather save time and energy by using the inventories I created, they are all available in my Teachers Pay Teachers store. Here is a link to the bundle; you can also purchase each inventory individually if you don’t want all four. Each product contains both an editable Google Doc and and editable Google Form so that you can choose your format.
I intend to assign these as homework during the first few weeks. (I’ll spread them out to avoid fatiguing the students; I expect each one to take about 15 minutes to complete.)
As much as August means rising anxiety in my house (my husband is also a teacher, and I have school-age children), it also means new beginnings. My wish for everyone this school year is that it is safer and more ease-ful than last year. (It doesn’t seem like it could be worse, but it also seems like anything is possible these days.)
To beginning again—again.
Ms. Hastings 