DO YOUR STUDENTS USE RUBRICS?

In creating your own rubrics,

· Use more than three columns to prevent the gravitation to the centre. I like to use four.

· Put the best performance descriptor on the left hand side and progress across. This leads students to look across and consider the best practice first when selecting their position. Having the rubric laid out in the opposite way discourages the full impact of the best practice criteria as students stop moving across the page when finding their level.

· As you gain confidence, try involving the students in creating a rubric. You can select one and then work back wards. Look at your learning intentions and the success criteria.

· Have students use the rubric for self and peer assessment. Have them use a rubric to assess a task you undertake. Model this process.

Click here to check out the Rubistar site. I think it is one of the best I have come across. Sherry Chrisp introduced it to me. You can search for already made rubrics and use these to inform your own. You can follow the wizard to create your own online rubrics, available then on the site when needed. They can also be printed out.

Enriching Student Engagement within a Learning Culture (Posted late)

I am sitting here listening to Barbara Anne Alexander ask great questions and these have prompted my own...
- How focused are our students on learning in the classroom?
- Are they aware of why they come to school and into our class?
- How willing and able are they to discuss/share their learning, valuing working as an individual and as part of a team. Celebrating our differences.
- Do they see themselves, and me as both teacher and learner? Celebrating their thinking, having a go. Being part of a learning community, knowing what it is to learn and why? Knowing how they and others learn and taking an active response in this, excited by the opportunities.

We are focusing on Enriching a Learning Culture. Sadly too many students never get the chance to explore “What makes a Great Learner?” or “How Do I Learn?” Yep, students year after year, are still ‘doing’ “Who am I?” at the start of each year. What a waste! Surely they know who they are!

What difference will studying this again at the start of each and every year, make to them? Let’s all embrace the learning culture and make our classrooms all about learning – a real live Learning Zone. Our role as teachers needs to be on learning, having learning focused conversations, asking children what they are learning, why they are learning and how they are learning it and equipping people to become real life long learners who value their school, their classroom, the Principal and their teacher as deep and meaningful sources for learning.

Activities:
- Find quotes about thinking and learning and display them, posters around the learning zone
- QLC – Take a quote and pull it apart.
- Give chn the recipe for success, the cheat sheet to success is the curriculum
- Y Chart “Learning” Revisit at a later time.
- Poems about learning e.g. Acrostic, Definition
- Little Red Hen – Who is going to help us learn – We are said the Parents, principal, etc.

Where do you want your class to be?

The Key: "Not we are learning to" but "We are learning how to..."

Bronwyn is sharing her classroom practice in this area on the 26th April. Can't wait!

"The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write,
but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn."
~Alvin Toffler