It’s no secret that I believe access to data can transform learning. Data illuminate needs and areas for growth as well as successes and areas of celebration. For the past decade I have been using data to track my students academic achievement, their standardized test growth, their trajectories into upper grades, and more. It has helped me shape and improve my practice.
But what if instead, students were in charge collating and curating their own data?
What happens when you put students in charge of their own data? I’ve already done this in the form of creating an infographic to reflect on the year, but not as part of Distance Learning. Instead, it has typically been me that has curated the learning data and shared it with students.
Since distance learning puts a new level of ownership on students, it seems natural to come up with a tool that allows students to track their progress. I wanted this tool to do the following:
- Give a place for students to track their own completion
- Have a space for reflecting on the difficulty of the work and if they might need help
- Include the ability to track performance on measured formatives
- And to add a personal goal
My hope is that this could become a focal point for teacher-student discussions. So here is the tool I cooked up:
This tool tracks the learning targets as they correspond to specific lessons and gives each student a dropdown box to reflect on where they are and if they might need help.
I have each of my students create their own version by copying the original and sharing the link with me. THat way I can track their completion progress and their reflections. Important to note: I give them class time to complete this each week. Just leaving it up to them doesn’t seem to work for routine setting.
So far, as I launch into DL this year, I can already see my students reaching out more and taking more ownership. All it took was a little data 🙂
Want to use this student self-tracker in your classroom? Click here for the template.