Students Transform Into Leaders of Their Own Learning Through a Variety of Student Led Activities and Student Engaged Assessments
As an EL Education school, we are constantly looking for ways to better serve our students and to learn and grow as educators just as we would ask our students to do. One way to create a more meaningful educational experience for our students is through authentic, student engaged assessment. In our classrooms, we work hard to establish a sense of crew or community. One in which students think of themselves as a team. If you walked into our classrooms, you would see students designing service projects, students leading conferences while parents and teachers listen and ask questions, students consoling peers, students teaching other students, students presenting their growth and academic successes to the community at a large scale event, and much more. When students see themselves as leaders of their own learning, they work hard to learn more than is expected of them and they learn for many meaningful reasons beyond the test or the grade.
Students at our school are able to articulate their academic progress to guests, parents, teachers, and peers. Our lessons begin with learning targets (“I can” statements) that students are expected to master. Students can clearly understand before the lesson begins what they should be learning. Students speak on their successes and challenges frequently through classroom meetings, checking for understanding moments, or within the Student Led Conferences. At Student Led Conferences, students share with parents artifacts that demonstrate mastery of learning targets, growth within a skill, or areas of struggle that they may still need additional support. Students celebrate their learning through Exhibition Night, an evening event in which the community attends to find out all of the amazing topics the students have studied. Students present in front of large groups, share authentic rigorous products, and discuss the process it took to create their products.
Crew is a word we use often at our school. We prioritize becoming a community within our classroom and our school. Students are assessed regularly on their Habits of Scholarship (Empathy, Perseverance, Integrity, Curiosity, and Quality); we often reflect and discuss how having these traits will help one to become a successful adult. As a crew, we work together to ensure that each person is able to achieve as much as possible. When students have a bad day, often other students will request that they be excused from a lesson or work time to sit with and listen to their crew mate offering advice or empathy as needed. When students become masters of skills, learning targets, or even navigating a new technology, they become teachers to help teach and coach other students. If I work with two to three students and teach them a new task, they can help me reach the rest of the crew with more efficiency. As a teacher, I can clearly see and hear who has firmly mastered standards when I hear the quality with which they explain skills to others.
Within EL education, we often use protocols in which every student has a job to do. Students may be a researcher, a timekeeper, a note taker, or a presenter when students are given separate jobs they are more likely to stay on task and engaged throughout lessons and within group work. Students are also challenged to lead their own groups within Book Club activities and create their own community projects. Students who master skills early may be inclined to lead and mentor those around them toward success or may be given a separate crucial activity to do: writing high quality thank you letters to experts, organizing a presentation for Exhibition Night, research how to start a club or organization in our school, write high quality biographies about our experts to display on our documentation panels, etc.
The more I implement student led practices into my classroom the more I see students thrive. My job has shifted from presenting and being THE teacher to being a conductor, if you will, of a classroom of scholars and teachers. My job is now simply to connect the right students together to support and enhance one another’s experience or to ask the right questions of students within their learning. As students are leading their own learning, I just observe, analyze, and redirect if needed. When you add in the authentic work that our crew does, students feel that vital need to create quality presentations and products. To learn more, read “Leaders of Their Own Learning” by Ron Berger, Leah Rugen, and Libby Woodfin or have a talk with one of my students.
Challenges or Obstacles:
- This practice is non-traditional. It feels more comparable to real world workplace experience than to the test prep type educational practices that we have become accustomed to. Therefore, it will take a intentional mindset shift for an educator.
- Teachers must be prepared to be present within the classroom. Students are doing a lot of the work and a lot of the teaching. However, students are easily distracted and easily influenced. The teacher must check in with groups, walk around the room, catch behaviors that show signs of becoming off track before they become distracting (like body turned away from group or partner even when eyes are on partner), etc.
Benefits and Successes:
- Our school has over 95% participation in Student Led Conferences, because this experience is important to the students their parents and teachers feel it is necessary to participate. This improves communication, collaboration, and trust from home to school as well.
- By using Learning Targets, Checking for Understanding, and Pre and Post Assessments, students can understand and analyze their own strengths and weaknesses. Students are able to then focus their attention on areas in which they need to grow.
Submitted by: Bridget Duggleby, Kayla Cange, Jack Eads, Haley Baugues, Jalen Keihn, Ashlynn Neukam, and Anye’a Carter, Inspire Academy – A School of Inquiry