Term 3 - Journey to engagement & ownership

This term the two words that come to mind when I consider the next part of my journey are engagement and ownership. At this stage I have the structures in place for my students to be able to identify where they are working at within a SOLO based rubric for mathematic strategies. But I need my students to fully engage with it in order to get results.

Previously I have had my students complete problem solving tasks, then use the Steps to Success rubric to identify what level they are working at and what they need to do next in order to move up a step. The main constraint to this is that the students simply find it just another thing to do and another thing that they can't really be bothered with. When thinking about this issue, I think engagement and ownership are the keys to enabling students to use these steps. If I can get my students to take ownership of their mathematics learning then it would hopefully change this attitude. If students were aware of what level they are at, and then feel personal responsibility to get themselves to a higher level, then lack of engagement would hopefully not be such an issue. Whilst ownership is the ideal goal I think there needs to be other goals/motivations in order to achieve ownership.

This term my focus is to get students more engaged and take more ownership within mathematics. I have a couple ideas of how I could use competition based strategies to get students to engage in their Steps to Success with the hope of their attitude and commitment to learning mathematics improve.

Term 2 Pitstop

Term 2 Reflection on my personal inquiry. This term my inquiry took a big change from being focused within Writing to now within Maths. I introduced a number of new learning methods which my students quickly took on board. These methods are to give my students the opportunities to develop their strategies for problem solving. These strategies are what they are then able to track their progress with and use to decide what their next learning step is. Here is a presentation that I presented to a group of teachers as an update on my Term 2 journey. 

The next leg of the Steps to Success journey

Here is an update of what I have been doing in my inquiry and where I am heading next...

Term 1 Pitstop

Term 1 update on my inquiry.

Steps to Success

Over the past couple of weeks I have been trying to develop an chart that will enable students to identify where they are and what they need to do to achieve a higher standard. To begin my inquiry I have focused on writing and specifically punctuation. Before getting to my final chart I went through a number of steps to ensure that they would be accurate and also work well digitally on student blogs.

Chart 1: I inserted progressions into spreadsheets but these were too broad to be effective.

Chart 2: I took on specific writing progression and using SOLO made a chart which students could identify themselves on and see their next step. The downfall with this chart was when embedding a Google Spreadsheet into a blog the size adjustments are not very smooth and it is too difficult for students to do it themselves.

Chart 3: Using the same information as the previous chart I make this chart in Google Presentations. This worked much better because the process of embedding a presentation into a blog is easier and students can easily adjust the size to fit the layout of their blog nicely. The bonus of this chart being embedded into the blog means that student can add links to pieces of writing as evidence and they don't need to update their blog because it updates automatically. Also another bonus is that these links work when embedded on their blog so any viewer of their blog to click on and see their writing evidence. 

Chart 4: After presenting this chart and working through it with a number of students I quickly discovered that I needed to make each step very clear and give more detail. For example I needed to state how many sentences a couple is. So my final process has been to amend each steps and this is the final chart of which I am using with my students at this stage. 

Going SOLO

How can students being aware of what they are learning and what they need to learn to accelerate cognitive engagement? 

Over the past few weeks I have put much thought into how I could physically carry this out. Initially my plan was to use progressions with each student to identify what level they are working at. Then to make these progressions visible to the students so that they can see what is expected at the next level. But, I have faced a number of problems with this initial plan. Firstly our school progressions are very broad and are not worded in such a way for students to understand and identify achievement clearly. Secondly because the progressions are per year, the progress of a student is going to be very minimal. Therefore, such a goal could potentially be too hard and take too long to give students any sense of achievement and motivation. So this has left me with the need to have small achievable learning steps for each specific learning intention/WALT. 

The new direction which I have now taken to try satisfy this need is to use SOLO Taxonomy. In a recent meeting as a whole staff we explored SOLO and how it provides a model of understanding with several steps. From previous experience I value how SOLO breaks down learning intentions to give the learner explicit steps of their understanding. Therefore students are able to answer these three questions. What am I learning? How is my learning going? What do I need to learn next? 

As a result of this new direction with SOLO my original goals are the same but instead of using progressions directly I will break down each progression with SOLO to create achievable and visible learning steps.