When students own their learning, they do better. With traditional data-tracking models, a teacher will add assignments and assessments to a gradebook for 100+ students. There is barely enough bandwidth for the teacher to analyze all that data and create interventions for a small subset. Students check the gradebook, and teachers (myself included) then say it’s the students’ job to check and advocate – which they seldom do.
But what if instead the data was collected and analyzed by the student? What if reflection and personal goals were built into the process? Perhaps the tool below could be valuable for such goals and shifts.
- Each unit a new tab is created with learning goals
- At the beginning of the unit, students copy the new tab over to their personal version
- Students share their personal version link with their teacher
- Time is given weekly for students to update their tracker
- The tracker is a focal point in conferences and 1 on 1 conversations
At the end of each week, students spend 10 minutes on their self-tracker using the drop down boxes to reflect on how much they have completed, how they feel about their understanding of the topic, and how they’ve done on recent formative asessments.
We have created a template for you to use in your own classroom. Feel free to make a copy, and update the KEY and the amount of rows needed to customize it for your units.