Goal Setting Archives - Samantha Mosher

Digital Portfolios Go To Parent-Teacher Conferences

One of my goals when I started using digital portfolios in my 6th grade class was to improve communication with parents, and though I have my students email their parents every time they add an update, I’m not sure how often they look at them. Parent-teacher conferences seemed like a great time to show off the work and reflection that my students have been doing this year, and I’ve had some of the best conferences ever because of it.

Concrete Examples of Learning

Each students’ digital portfolio contains artifacts: videos, embedded Google docs, snapshots of the learning process, student-created image slideshows that show the steps in the process up to creating a final product. We try to use all the digital tools at our disposal to document the learning process. With these, we’re able to demonstrate a student’s growth and learning in ways that just weren’t possible with traditional portfolios. The portfolios contained mostly qualitative data (although some quantitative was included, like spelling assessments), so artifacts of the learning process that aren’t final, completed projects are included. For example, students have chosen to add snapshots of anchor charts in the classroom and used these as one piece of evidence that they are starting to implement a strategy, along with a snapshot of an annotated reading passage. My favorite example is a student included a video of himself attempting (and failing) to explain his process for solving a problem (complete with the student recording it in the background saying “Dude–I don’t think guess and check is a valid strategy here”), and then explaining how he can improve in his reflection. Not only did this provide parents with concrete examples of the learning process, they also provided a glimpse into their child’s self-reflection and growth. During the conferences, I was able to use these artifacts to discuss progress with parents and demonstrate student learning and growth.

Promoting a Growth Mindset for Students and Parents

When I talk to colleagues about trying to promote a growth mindset amongst their students, parental expectations are often a hurdle. By setting up our digital portfolios so they were a documentation of students’ growth and progress over time toward specific goals, I was able to communicate to parents the importance of perseverance, self-reflection, and positive self-talk in the learning process. Rather than the conversation focusing on what the student wasn’t doing, the conversation was focused on what they were doing and the progress that they had made, however incremental it might have been, toward their goals. That shift in conversation, I think, relates to the transparency that comes from the digital portfolio. Parents have access to artifacts of student learning, as well as what the students learned from the experience (in their own words). That’s a pretty powerful combination.

Overall, I think that the digital portfolios made for a better set of parent-teacher conferences this year, both because of what my students created and what parents were able to take from them.

How have you used your digital portfolios to facilitate communication with parents?

Checking-in in the New Year

Skyview Atlanta — The second-best picture I took in Atlanta. Again, there’s a metaphor here. I’m sure of it.

At the beginning of the school year I set goals for myself as a teacher. Right now I’m asking my students to check in on their progress toward their goals in their digital portfolios and the teachers I coach to reevaluate the goals they set at the beginning of the year, so I’m checking in on my progress as well. I also have finally set a coaching goal for myself after attending Pete Hall’s Building Teachers’ Capacity for Success workshop through ASCD.

Improve my behavior management for my “challenging” class

This is hard to admit, but I haven’t done a great job following through with this one. I’ve done many of the things that I said I was going to do, but in the more short term. The problem is, I know exactly (or at least partially) why things I’m trying aren’t working. I’ve been so focused on finding strategies to manage behavior and making those strategies work, that I’m not focused enough on planning engaging lessons to meet my students’ needs. I’m not walking into class with no plan, but I’ve been so focused on anticipating behaviors and what strategies I would use to manage these behaviors, that the content and concepts in the lessons I’ve been planning have been, well, less than stellar. So when my strategies work, the activities I have planned aren’t enough to hold the students’ attention and keep them on that good track. It hurts to admit that I dropped the ball here, but it happens and I can fix it. For the remainder of the year I want to keep implementing the strategies that are working, but refocus my efforts on lesson planning so that my students can be successful.

Better integrate the technology I have available to me into my lessons, including finding more ways to leverage “regular” technology as assistive technology for my students.

Here I’ve done much better. I’ve implemented digital portfolios for my students and I’ve been slowly refining them so they become spring-boards for student self-reflection and learning. Yesterday a student exclaimed as he had realized that our work with SRSD and Close Reading had been just as much about improving his ability to manage and regulate his attention as they had been about his reading and writing skills after going through a variety of digital and paper artifacts showing his work. I also am now able to very easily share student work with a parent who has moved back to Denmark ahead of the rest of the family.

I’ve also curated a number of resources for students on my Schoology pages for my learning support classes, including videos and interactive games (usually created by others), as well as graphic organizers (usually created by me). What’s even better is that some students are seeking out and using these resources. I think my next step here is to add more content that I’ve created (or that my students have created) to these resource pages, using podcasting, screen capture, and other methods.

Finally, the coaching goal: Go into classrooms regularly (1-2 times per week) for either very quick (30-45 seconds) or brief (5-15 minute) visits and follow up on these visits with teachers.

Or actually doing what Pete Hall calls “Rounds” and “Walk Throughs”. This goal sounds simple, but it involves a lot: coordinating schedules, figuring out “look-fors”, etc. But the biggest reason I haven’t done this is that I haven’t felt comfortable. I wasn’t given a clear description of what I would be doing as a coach at the beginning of the year, nor was it explained to teachers, so I spent most of the first semester in meetings with teachers, talking and building relationships. Now that I feel like I have a job description (even if it’s self-created with the help of a workshop and a book) and have built up fairly good relationships with many teachers, it will, I hope, be easier. The short workshop I led on Tuesday afternoon about checking in and reevaluating goals from the beginning of the year will also provide context for my visits.

How are the goals you set for your own teaching at the beginning of the year going?

Getting Started with Digital Portfolios

Front page of one of our digital portfolios — The front page of one student’s digital portfolio.

This year I’m piloting digital portfolios with my M2 (grade 6) class. I noticed last year that there wasn’t a lot of communication between the Learning Support program and parents. There aren’t really grades, and there’s the occasional email, but more often than not, no work goes home. Most of the work that parents do see are the results scaffolding and specialized graphic organizers, and other supplements and complements to classroom instruction. Last year, in my first year in the position, with the help of my principal we added more transparency by creating learning plans for students that contained goals for the skills that would be addressed during the school year (I know, for those of you in public schools this is SOP, but it something that seems to be slowly becoming a part of international schools). I thought this was great, but I wanted to do more. Then I got connected to Matt Renwick through Twitter and his blog, and started reading his book Digital Student Portfolios. I decided to create digital portfolios that were primarily designed to show growth, but that could be used to showcase certain pieces of work or activities that students were particularly proud of. I wanted to use digital portfolios as an opportunity to create a dialogue with students and parents about growth, and to continue to build a culture of self-reflection for learning in my classroom.

The first challenge I faced was finding the right platform to use to create the digital portfolios. My school has a pretty strict “no use of 13 and over programs and apps by students under 13” policy, so Evernote, the platform Matt discusses in his book, was out. The school’s Tech Integrator and I discussed Google Sites, Blogger (both part of our school’s Google Apps for Education subscription) or Weebly. I ended up dismissing Blogger because I wouldn’t be able to house several blogs on the same page, and I knew that teaching students how to effectively use tags would take a while. After making two sample portfolios, one in Weebly and one in Google Sites, I decided that Weebly would work best for my purposes and be easiest for the students to use. So far, I would recommend this as a platform.

Benefits

Weebly is really easy to use. It’s uses a drag and drop system to add pictures, buttons, URLs, and HTML code. I even taught my students how to embed Google Docs in their Weebly blogs (something I had thought would be easier with Google Sites).
Not having the easy-embed function from Google Sites led to a mini-lesson on HTML, which the students seemed to enjoy.
The school’s educator account provides some measure of privacy and security for students. Their sites are password protected.
If students forget passwords, etc they are all managed by our Instructional Technology department.
It’s easy for students to personalize and make their own.
It’s easy to share with parents and for them to navigate.
Creating individual blogs for each goal allows us easily see progress on individual goals, and the most recent activity (that, I hope, represents the students’ current progress toward the goal) is at the top of the page.
The blog format allows me, their classroom teachers, their parents, and, if they choose, their peers, to comment on the work that they share and ask questions about it.

Drawbacks

Weebly is extremely customizable, which is a good thing. I want students to take ownership of their portfolios I had to get through a few classes of students playing around with the design of their website, which was OK, but often what they thought of as a “good design” made their message difficult to understand. I think the next time I do this, I need to spend a bit more time on the front end integrating instruction on how design can influence the audience’s ability to understand our message, maybe using specific websites (possibly even my own) as examples.
Although there is a way for the student and I to be co-owners of a Weebly site, the Tech Integrator and I haven’t been able to make it work yet. This is something that would have been much easier with Google Sites or with Blogger, but I think the ease of use more than makes up for this.
The one blog per goal set up makes it more difficult to use tags to see connections between assignments and activities that match up to multiple goals.
Next year, I need to do a better job reviewing the difference between personal online communication and professional online communication (particularly editing one’s work before posting it online–see the spelling error above).

Overall, I have been completely blown away by all the things that I could do with a digital portfolio that I wouldn’t have been able to do with a traditional portfolio. I had just assumed that a digital portfolio would be a substitution for a physical portfolio or it would be an augmentation, adding some functional improvement, but not significantly different from the physical version. I am, however, starting to see that digital portfolios are really modifications of traditional portfolios, allowing my students, their parents, and me to do things that weren’t possible with the original paper format. I’m excited to continue our work and I’ll keep you updated as I keep working with the students on building their portfolios.

Have you used digital portfolios? What have been your successes? Learning experiences?

Pausing to Reflect: Self-Reflection on Teaching Self-Reflection

Image by David Whelan via Flickr CC BY-SA 2.0

Self-reflection is an important part of growth and learning. I’m trying to ask my students to do more of it this year. I’m asking my M2 (grade 6) students to create digital portfolios (more on them soon..check out Matt Renwick’s book though!) where they track their progress toward goals they’ve set for themselves, as well as the goals that I’ve created for them for the learning plans or IEPs. Within the SRSD writing framework I’m asking students to evaluate their own work, reflect on their progress, and set new goals for themselves. Many of them enjoy these activities, but I have had several students who were resistant. The most interesting response that I got was that it was “tacky” to do self-reflections. I still haven’t figured out what she actually meant. But given that resistance I thought I should practice what I preach and figure out what went wrong.

Clearly something was making this student uncomfortable, even if she was having difficulty articulating it. Did she mean that the task–write a note to your parents that I would share with them at parent-teacher conferences telling them how you thing you’re doing meeting your goals–felt inauthentic and maybe a little weird? I suppose I can’t actually argue with her there. It might not have been able to come up with something a little more authentic. Is “tacky” for this kid like Holden Caufield’s “phony”? Had she just been asked to do the same exercise in all of her other classes and it was just enough? I realized that in addition to all of those possibilities, I hadn’t ever actually made reflection something real–something that I engage in both at work and in my day-to-day life. I didn’t let her know about all the ways reflection happens in the real life of an adult. And, yes, none of them involve a letter to my mom…

When I’m teaching I ask myself whether lessons went well and why or why not, including how I interacted with students, and I do some self-reflection in writing on this blog;
When I improvise a recipe I reflect on cooking techniques and ingredient choices and I make notes for what I’ll do if I try it again;
When I bake bread I take a bite of the finished loaf and reflect on my technique and the choices I made about rising time and liquid-to-flour ratios;
When I finish I run I ask myself if I’m tired and whether I could have pushed myself to run faster or farther;
When I finish knitting a sweater I look at how it fits and make notes about how I might change things the next time I knit a sweater so that it will fit even better.

As much as I am philosophically all for letting kids know why what I’m asking them to do is important to their lives–not just their lives as students, but their lives as human beings–sometimes I don’t do a great job of remembering to tell them that these are things that I’m not just telling them that people do, but that I do. And because I’ve learned that this helps me to be successful, I think it’s important to teach my students. Maybe I need to look into ways to making my self-reflection practices more transparent to my students, the same way I talk about what I’m reading or ways that I used math that day.

How do you make skills that seem like “school” things, but are a actually a part of your everyday life as an adult, feel relevant to your students? How do you make self-reflection activities authentic?

Goal Setting for Everyone

Goal setting is an important part of the learning process. It is important for our students and for us for professional growth. I wanted to include more goal setting for students this year, and also set some goals for myself.

Goal Setting for Students

I’ve been spending some time at the beginning of this year getting to know my students, both as people and as learners. One of the first things we did as a class was to watch this video on growth mindset from Khan Academy. Then, we discussed goal setting and I handed out these great sheets designed by 3AM Teacher, and we proceeded to set goals. I love these sheets and they’re well worth the price tag on TPT; however, I would recommend not using the sheet that explains what SMART goals are, especially if you teach middle school. The tagline for Relevant is “Hello, Lover”, which caused a seemingly endless fit of giggles from my 6th graders, and some “ew, that’s gross” comments from my 7th graders. The rest of the handouts, however, are wonderful for guiding students through the goal setting process.

It seemed that for many of my students, this was the first time they were encountering SMART goals, so it was challenging. Although we talked through the process and I modeled how to set a goal that was specific, measurable, achievable, and relevant, we started out with things like “To get better at writing.” Several probing questions later we got closer to a SMART goal: “I want to write longer paragraphs with fewer spelling mistakes”. Sometimes the goals aligned with what their teachers the previous year had set as goals for them, and sometimes their goals were different. What’s important is that they know what they’re working toward (and have a purpose for it), and I know what is important to them, and can begin to incorporate it into my instruction.

Overall, the first effort was successful, but I think the next time I work with them on goal setting this year it will be even better. We’ll be able to really evaluate if our goals were specific enough and measurable enough for us to be able to evaluate our progress, giving them a clearer idea of SMART goals look like, and, I’m hoping, helping to motivate them. They did have some difficulty identifying steps to help them achieve their goals. I think that was partially my modeling wasn’t great, and partially that they’re still not sure what that means. I’m hoping some reflection will help us to create better plans, but I also realize that as an adult sometimes it takes me a lot of time to formulate a plan, so maybe they just need more time.

Goal Setting for the Teacher

I just had my beginning of the year meeting with my principal. As a “probationary teacher” (meaning not yet tenured, not “on probation” as if I did something bad…), I have a meeting at the beginning of the year, and then she observes me twice and we have follow-up meetings on those observations. This year I set goals for myself in three areas: instruction and management, coaching, and self-care. I’m going to follow the same format I asked the kids to (but without the fancy paper). I’m going to share my instruction and management goals here. The others will come another time.

1. Improve my behavior management for my more challenging group.

I have one group (who I adore), but they are very challenging in terms of their behavior. There are a lot of reasons for this. Some of it is group dynamic, some of it is the combinations of individual learning differences. Some of it is what we as educators know to be true about kids who are in programs like the ACS/Learning Support program at my school–after a while students make the decision that it’s better to be bad than to be dumb, and they act accordingly. Some of it is that more intimate environment that we work in allows a certain level of comfort for them which has enormous benefits, but also students sometimes feel that the Learning Lab is a place where they can “let it all hang out”, and they let all the pent up energy out. But some of it is within my control. I want to be more systematic about the approaches I try this year, and really keep track of what’s working and what isn’t. Even though I know that it takes several weeks before one can see if a behavioral intervention is working, sometimes I jump the gun.

My plan: Create a way to reflect in writing, even briefly and bullet pointed, on what happened during each lesson with these students, how I intervened, and what structures and supports worked. I’ve had a colleague suggest ClassDojo, which might be helpful for tracking data, but I’m not sure how effective it will be as a system.

Who can help: I have several colleagues who can help me with this. This is one area though, where observation won’t be effective–adding another person to the mix completely changes the dynamic in small group teaching. Maybe videos?

2. Better integrate the technology I have available to me into my lessons, including finding more ways to leverage “regular” technology as assistive technology for my students.

I am extremely luck to have a number of tech resources, both in terms of hardware and devices (1:1 laptops/MacBooks, my personal iPad, student smartphones, student e-readers, interactive whiteboard) and in terms of software/apps: Schoology, Google Apps, and a variety of tools provided by the school for use by both students and teachers. With so much available, it’s easy to get bogged down in all of that technology and end up just using it, and not necessarily purposefully, rather than integrating it into instruction, so I decided to focus on just a two things:

Creating digital portfolios to track progress toward student learning goals using my iPad, the student laptops, and a TBD app. I’ve been reading and rereading Matt Renwick‘s awesome book, Digital Student Portfolios, in order to get some ideas. Being able to curate evidence of student progress toward their IILP (International Individual Learning Plan) goals will really help with decision making for placement, and help foster conversations with parents. It will also make students think about I think Schoology might be the way to go, but I’m not sure how well it will work–it’s designed to be a learning management system, not a portfolio. I might be better off making individual Google Sites for each student.
Using Schoology to help provide support materials for students. Basically, I want to flip the front loading of content and supplemental curriculum support that used to be the main activity in Learning Lab so I can focus on skill building work.

I don’t have a plan for how to implement this yet. I’m still working on it. But I do know that I have a few educational technology specialists at my school who can help.

I’m excited to pursue these goals this year and share what I learn along the way.

Do you teach goal setting to your students? Do you set professional goals for yourself? How do you track your progress?