MIT Update #3

With our year 7/8 camp over and the work to celebrate the amazing learning we had outside our usual four walls completed, my MIT group are back in action. We are still in the create stage of our 'student speak' rubric and know that if this is to be a success we need to dot all the i's and cross all the t's. I think the most exciting component in our rubric is our decision to include DLO's created by ourselves to help make the learning visual for others. In effect we hope to create a tool that facilitates and support independence when revising a piece of written text, thus helping to shift student achievement.

We realise one size does not fit all. Many of my students stated in an 'anonymous' google form questionnaire that they needed something that allowed them to check their own understanding before they felt confident enough to give others feedback. It was that realisation that if all students in our class were not able to use the rubric with confidence, then it would simply become digital decoration. That is most definitely NOT what we are striving to do. Our aim is to create a tool that becomes embedded in our learning environment and is used often and accessed by many.

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.