The new school year is approaching, and it's time to make a frank assessment of our progress so far and to set some goals for next year.
Here's some we've discussed and agreed to as a group:
We'll all blog on the first and third Wednesday of the month at a minimum. It doesn't have to be a major, polished essay on education. It can be an article with a few lines of commentary or a snippet of a kid's work that demonstrates the success or failure of an assignment. It can be an assignment that attempts to help kids toward our goals. My personal goal here is to write those posts in advance and set them to publish automatically at the same time, twice a month, so my updates are clockwork-reliable.
The students in our piloted classes will build digital portfolios. Last year, I had students tag all of their work so it could be organized and viewed in different ways, but I didn't do enough to have them looking back over their own progress as writers and thinkers. A robust digital portfolio gives you an opportunity to self-assess in ways that are both deeper and broader than improvement that only goes from assignment to assignment.
Along the way to those portfolios, we're going to focus on developing assignments that value the search for the student's thought process. Assignments should set up students for those "aha" moments and ask them to record the key factors that made the moment possible.
We will meet to share and develop assignments that best encourage students towards our goals with an emphasis on interdisciplinary collaboration.
My last goal, which isn't a group one, is to be more concise. I get on a tear sometimes, and I'm not always sufficiently cognizant of the limitations of this format. So when it's time to stop, I should just stop.
