The (Few) Things I Track

Dear colleague,

My classroom practice is simple by design, and part of that simplicity is because of the few but important things I keep track of. In my career, I've noticed two unhelpful tendencies in the realm of tracking:

1. I track too many things, and as a result, I can't maintain the tracking system as the year progresses and the data piles up.
2. I track too few things, and as a result, I place too much burden on my mind to remember stuff that could be better remembered through externalizing my memory onto a tracking device.

Here are the things I keep track of; all of them are analog, as is my preference.

• Mini-sermon attempts: The thing with mini-sermons is that we all give them — every teacher in the world. We all have those moments where we're “feeling it” and we wax poetic on the beauty or wonder or grandeur of what we teach. The trouble is not that we never do these; it's that we don't do them nearly enough. Mini-sermons — especially when given by Credible teachers — are, therefore, a largely disused lever for improving the Value belief in our schools. This simple little tracker helps me ensure I'm attempting at least 100 mini-sermons per school year, which I believe places me in the top 1% of teachers in the world in terms of quantity of attempted mini-sermons. Additionally, the more mini-sermons I give, the better I get at their effective delivery. And, oh yeah — the better I tend to feel, too, as the mini-sermons have their most reliable impact on the inner world of the sermonizer.
• Classroom management (CM) builds: When I notice something isn't working right in my classroom management, I'll sometimes make an index card like the coffee-infused one in the picture. In this case, I was trying to keep track of the consecutive days in which I Woodenized or reinforced things like the bell is our boss, giving your personal best on provisional writing warm-ups, or the RESPECT callback thing my students and I do.
• 2x10s: Because the effectiveness of this intervention depends on having 10 consecutive non-academic conversations with the target student, I keep track of these in a separate spot from my MGC clipboard. I simply jot down the target student's initials and create 10 checkboxes. (I conduct only two or three 2×10 interventions per year and have yet to be disappointed by the noticeable improvements.)
• MGC attempts (not pictured): This clipboard sheet has one job: tracking my attempted moments of genuine connection. As I wrote about earlier this week, the power of this list comes from the oft-neglected middle group of students. (Read that article here.)
• Pop-Up Debate participation (not pictured): I started keeping a separate clipboard sheet for these when my principal lovingly dinged me on an eval for not tracking formative data in a distinguished manner. The tracker is nonetheless very simple and allows me to keep notes on how individual students are developing.

Those, to me, are the most important little trackers I use. What kinds of things do you keep track of?

Teaching right beside you,

DSJR