This week, it was time to take those goals from this post and put them into action. That's right, school's in!
Mid-week, a group of teachers were hangin' in the hallway visiting after school, and caught me on the way to my room. One, a fifth-grade teacher and friend, told me that she had asked my last-year's kids what they knew about PDSA. They looked at her funny. Blank. Nada. No, wait a minute... and then they argued about it. *Sigh*.
My teammate rescued me. She said that because it's not presented as a new and different 'thing' and it's just part of how our classroom runs, they wouldn't know it had a name. I liked her comeback best, so we're going with that, lol!
In truth, I hope that's how it works. I've been teaching long enough to have seen way more than 31 Flavors of the Month. When I student-taught in 1991, we were right in the middle of the Whole-Language thing. Get this - you didn't explicitly teach reading or writing. You just read to them a lot, wrote a lot, and hoped they'd pick it up, since they were 'programmed' to. Teachers weren't to tread on creativity and kids shouldn't be bothered with silly things like spelling. We've since seen the pendulum swing to a drill-and-kill, test emphasis curriculum. In between, a whole range of new-and-coming ideas with crazy acronyms. Now the pendulum is beginning to swing back, but I've learned my lesson. I don't do trendy.
So, my conversations don't start with, "Hey, guys, we've got this great new way of planning our lessons! It's called PDSA!" They sound more like this:
"Each week, I set learning targets for our class. That's my job because, as a professional teacher, I know exactly what you need to know and be able to do to be prepared for fifth grade and to reach your life goals. However, one of the jobs we'll do together is to decide how we're going to meet those targets. Right now, until you know what tools and learning strategies are available to you, I'll do most of the picking. At the end of the week, though, I'm going to ask you which of those tools and strategies worked for you, helped you hit our targets and which didn't so much. Here's are this week's learning targets in reading. (I've got them ready on paper.) You'll notice that I started by writing 'All of us'. That's really important. In this classroom, we are a team, and we either meet goals together or we don't. You can't play a ballgame and have part of the team win and part of the team lose. How would you even keep score? A team either wins or loses together. Therefore, our learning targets and goals are for all of us.
You'll remember that two of our Eight Great Habits are Be Proactive and Begin with the End in Mind. We keep those habits when we set goals. We know what we need to learn. See here? It says, (This time it's "List books that we've finished or abandoned, why and what that says about us as readers in a reader's notebook entry...") we also know how we're going to be evaluated (... We will score a 2 or better on the grading rubric.") and when (... on Thursday.") OK. We know where we're going. Now we've got to figure out how to get there.
This week, I'm going to do the following things to help you hit your target and meet your goal. (This is where the T-Chart with the T (for teacher) on one side and an S (for students) on the other comes in.) I'm going to give you the grading rubric and explain it to you. I'm also going to show you some sample entries. One will be a good one, one will be a 'Meh' one, and one will be a poor one. (Write those under T if you haven't already.) You're going to use that rubric to grade those samples. You're, obviously, going to write your entry, but with the rubric in hand, so you won't forget what I'm looking for. (Write those under the S if you haven't already.) Then, you're going to grade a teammate's entry and your own. Then I'll give you time to make revisions, based on those assessment scores. (Add that to S.)
From there, we get to work.
So, how did that work out? It was a mixed bag. You would think that with all of this having been laid out so explicitly, they'd all have done really well. No such luck. Of the 17 kids I have for reading, 12 met the goal on the first try. I need to take some pix of the graph, rubrics, and entries to show you how all of that panned out before I write it up. I'll get that done this week.
