Reflecting on Goals

Currently as a staff we are discussing how we will report to parents whilst doing distance learning. I think we have decided on trialing a self-assessment style report. I was very encouraged to have Rob trial a template on his daughter with amazing answers.

It is very encouraging to hear the learning goals that Scout has been working on. These answers will be different around Kowhai class because I am beginning to have to differentiate learning quite a bit for each student. Having students share their learning with me has really enabled myself to give a next step to the parent for their child. And they do it the next day.

One student who did not share for a bit has found that the work we gave her in the past week has been too easy. I didn't know she was doing lots of work at home because I assumed she wasn't because she wasn't posting anything. This was quite an interesting revelation. Now she has lots of sheets of work that she doesn't need to do. Whoops!

What has made such a difference in the past week is encouraging students and parents to reflect on the learning goal. This is always something I am thinking about. Students are getting better at adding video recordings of what their learning goals are. I am also asking them to highlight in some way where they have achieved their goal. Or my comments are specific to the learning goal. Often my feedforward is the suggestion of a next step or new goal because they have often achieved their goal. My next challenge is to get parents and students choosing their own next step/learning goal. In order to do this I need to present these goals on the class site. That is my challenge in the weekend.

I am using the term learning goal to refer to my WALTs/LIs or whatever you may call these things. I think this is an easy term to use all of the time with families and students. I will often have success criteria to show they have been successful in achieving this goal. Sometimes they will say things like: "my describing word is yummy" and I consider that they understand the learning goal is to use adjectives and so am excited by those comments on their blog posts.

Comment about learning goal from a student/parent: 

walt: sound the letter as we write it. and write on the lines 

This was for a post on handwriting.

And this went with a post for a student showing me their sight word knowledge:

I am learning my sight words.

This is for a writing post:

today my describing word is happy.

A few students are encouraged by the parent who records a video of them to say what they were learning to do. This has increased over the past week and is encouraging to me because I think it has made a shift from 'sharing mahi' to 'sharing our learning'. 

It is difficult to know if it is students who understand the learning goal or their parents. However, I think it is a good step towards student agency and one I hope they will carry back into the classroom.