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.\u00a0 One way to create a more meaningful educational experience for our students is through authentic, student engaged assessment.\u00a0 In our classrooms, we work hard to establish a sense of crew or community.\u00a0 One in which students think of themselves as a team.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n
Students at our school are able to articulate their academic progress to guests, parents, teachers, and peers.\u00a0 Our lessons begin with learning targets (\u201cI can\u201d statements) that students are expected to master.\u00a0 Students can clearly understand before the lesson begins what they should be learning.\u00a0 Students speak on their successes and challenges frequently through classroom meetings, checking for understanding moments, or within the Student Led Conferences.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Students present in front of large groups, share authentic rigorous products, and discuss the process it took to create their products.<\/p>\n
Crew is a word we use often at our school.\u00a0 We prioritize becoming a community within our classroom and our school.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 As a crew, we work together to ensure that each person is able to achieve as much as possible.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 When students become masters of skills, learning targets, or even navigating a new technology, they become teachers to help teach and coach other students.\u00a0\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n
Within EL education, we often use protocols in which every student has a job to do.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Students are also challenged to lead their own groups within Book Club activities and create their own community projects.\u00a0 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:\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n
The more I implement student led practices into my classroom the more I see students thrive.\u00a0 My job has shifted from presenting and being THE teacher to being a conductor, if you will, of a classroom of scholars and teachers.\u00a0 My job is now simply to connect the right students together to support and enhance one another\u2019s experience or to ask the right questions of students within their learning.\u00a0 As students are leading their own learning, I just observe, analyze, and redirect if needed.\u00a0 When you add in the authentic work that our crew does, students feel that vital need to create quality presentations and products.\u00a0\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n