Our monumental challenge!

The pictures above show us beginning the challenge of creating our own writing rubric that all the students at PBS could understand. We reflected on our earlier task of assessing our own writing against a rubric written in student speak. Although some of it made sense after we unpacked the language we felt that we needed a rubric that we could use in language that we could understand. Thus the idea of creating our own rubric was born. We started with sentence structure as that had been our learning area the day before and moved onto punctuation. The discussion taking place was amazing. We borrowed some ideas from exemplars but made sure we made the learning our own. I was stunned to see the students 'testing' whether their words were specific and easy to understand. Still very much a work in progress but we're off to a great start! Thank you to Ms Kirkpatrick, Mrs Millward and Mr Wong who helped us check if our thinking would make sense to their students.

Sentence Structure

Today I used my MIT group as 'experts' but have noticed that these students all have strong and dominant personalities. This often results in them taking the lead leaving those who need further support in coasting mode. However today there was a twist... the 'experts' could only question the people in their groups. This completely changed the locus of control, something my 'experts' found very frustrating. 

How did one 'expert' overcome this 'frustration'? 

St. #1: This is really frustrating Miss, they just didn't get how they had to write things in their own words.

T: So what can you do to help them?

St. #1: I could ask them different questions using easier words I think.

T: True... and while you're thinking about what you could say think about how Austin's friends helped him...

St. #1: Oh... I need to be more specific!

T: (thinking) Yah! Connection made!

Having worked through the collaborative challenge we played a version of whiteboard tag. Each group member had a role to play in sharing their understanding of our learning. Sajiha, Fine and Yvette created this quiz about sentence structures to help Room 5 consolidate their learning. We wanted everyone to be successful so allowed the 'open book' option using the group notes if answers needed to be checked. The best part was that by the responses I could see every student showed that they had made a connection to the learning.

Austin's Butterfly

The power of giving specific feedback. Amazing!