I found this interesting post on the Road to Teaching blog. They were talking about how rare it is for K-12 schools to seek feedback on teachers. They state that students know effective teaching when they see it. I think this would be a great idea to use with students in 5th-12th grade to participate in teacher feedback. I especially think that high school subject areas teacher get into ruts; they teach the same curricula the same way every year. I can only imagine how boring that would be for the students who fail the class and have to take it again!
They offer four different ways to get student feedback and they are:
Exit Slip: They can be given out at the end of each day/activity/unit. The students can describe what they learned, what they still have questions about, and suggestions for future lessons. Using this student feedback, teachers can reflect and adjust their practice to better meet their students’ needs.
Interviews: Interviews can be formal or informal. Teachers can ask their students how they feel the class is going. What instructional methods/activities do they learn best from? These direct questions usually elicit some interesting student responses.
Focus groups. Teachers can use this strategy by first having students write down their individual thoughts about the topics they teach and then proceed with a class discussion. Ask the students for their suggestions and maybe what they are concerned about. Teachers can use this activity to demonstrate that everyone has a role in their own learning.
Surveys: Teachers can make one of their own or find one on the internet and tweak it to their needs. These would be good to use throughout the course, grade, unit, etc. This will give teachers ongoing feedback on student growth and allowing them to make necessary adjustments of their teaching practice.
I found a lot of neat ideas to use with your students on teach.net blog. There is a post about making your own kites and they list a website that helps you craft some. There is a weather activity for the month of March and it also includes web resources for you to use. There are a couple of ideas for you to use to play April Fool’s jokes on your students. There is a Clover Match game that can be played on your SmartBoard and tells you what website to go to let your students play the game. There is also a President’s Day Pop Quiz that is a free printable you can print off for your class. I know there are probably lots more ideas from this blog, but this is all I am listing from it for now. I will definitely put this in my favorites so that I can use ideas from it for my future classroom.
Two Writing Teachers blog has posted a couple of books that sound very interesting. The first one is Hugo Cabret that one of the authors read to her young son. She got it for him for Christmas; she said that she likes to move through books quickly but her son likes to read them slowly and savor them. Once they finished it, he wanted to recommend it to his friends, so he wrote a letter to his friend Mimi (there is a copy of his letter and the translation on the post). The other book is a book of poetry titled The Arrow Finds It Mark: A Book of Found Poems. It comes in handy with April being National Poetry Month. I will have to find copies of these books and read them!
No comments:
Post a Comment