As a teacher I have two types of goals. Long term goals I make at the beginning of the year and refer back to while I’m lesson planning and short term goals that I make every Monday morning and aim to complete by Friday evening. As my teaching practice evolves I find these goals transitioning away from what I want to do to what I want my kids to do. I’m realizing that I didn’t give the people in my classroom enough credit. I’m excited about my big picture goal this year. I think that it is going to drastically change the learning environment in my classroom for the better.
My goal is to begin to shift the qualitative data collection, reflective practice, and some outlining planning from me as the teacher to the students as arbiters of their own knowledge. Here’s how…
- We are starting the year off by recording a class song. Since the classes have all shuffled and there has probably been some summer slide it’s necessary to have a “pulse check” at the beginning of the year.
- After this song is completed we will be using ThreeRing to record and upload the songs to our digital notebooks. This also gives us a public audience for all of our final products. ThreeRing will email everything uploaded to all families who were tagged in the upload for viewing/reflecting at home.
- Students will reflect on their final product while looking at the standards for their grade level that I’ve reworded to be grade appropriate without changing concept meanings or music vocabulary words. During this reflecting they will look for strengths and weaknesses as a class and decide which weakness they want to work on first. This will be highly guided and may include “That’s a great place to start, but in order to understand that we need to understand these standards first.”
- I’ll go home and write their next unit tailored to their interests and chosen standards.
- After the unit is completed we will have some type of performance based summative assessment that the students (and I) can reflect on and choose our next steps.
I’m hoping that this begins to pull the curtain away from the learning process for my students. I that because of the voice and choice they have in my classroom that students will be much more engaged and care more about their music education.
Leave feedback! New goal, help me tweak it!