Dear colleague,
Sometimes I like to get my students to keep track of the quantity of work they're doing in my class. As I wrote about in These 6 Things, the first step to improvement in an area like reading or writing or speaking is often quantification: what is our current quantity of work (e.g., articles we're reading, pop-up debates we're doing, words we're writing)? From there, quality can follow. But a lot of potential quality gains are lost in schools due to simple lack of quantity.
What my students and I quantify can vary based on which part of my practice I'm currently aiming my improvement efforts at. (I don't have many improvement areas that I pick from; just six, really.)
Last school year, I created this printout (Google Docs copy link) for my students. Let me briefly explain why I selected these areas.
As I wrote about awhile ago, I like to build writing capacity in my students by first getting them producing a lot of words in not a lot of time. When you do the kinds of warm-ups I described in that article, it's amazing how many words students end up producing in a given semester or year. The first section of the tracker lets them get a sense for the scope of the work they're doing, which is a reliable means for improving their Efficacy. (It's hard to say, “I can't write” [anti-Efficacy] if you have written thousands of words over the past months. So much of Efficacy development in young people is about proving the student's ability to succeed.)
Similarly, I like having my students keep track of the number of textbook pages or articles they've read, and I like to make a big deal about how we read much more in my classroom than the curriculum calls for. When I mini-sermonize on this, I want them to get a sense of pleasure and satisfaction in having done so much reading.
The same idea goes for the Pop-Up Debate participations tracker. Whenever we do a PUD in my room, the requirement is that everyone participates at least once. (Recently, Edutopia did a feature article that explored pop-up debates; you can read that here.) If the class is large or has multiple grand-standers in it, I also include a cap on the number of speeches they can give. But even in my largest classes of 35 students, 99% of the time I allow for two total speeches for students (with the second being optional). This gives extroverts a chance to get a little more floor time and those who wish to get more public speaking practice some additional space to do so.
Finally, in the tracker I've shared here, I have a line where students write down their personal Everest statements. This helps remind them of what it is they're trying to do through this class and their time in school.
(By the way, Everest Statements are one of “one-pagers” I made in my new Student Motivation Starter Kit. It's pay-what-you-want and directly supports my work. 🙏)
I'm sure more organized or systematic teachers will be able to take this simple “personal best tracker” and make it 100x better and more useful. I'm sharing it for those folks to leapfrog past my practice and enjoy the results.
Teaching right beside you,
DSJR
P.S. I'm hosting a live session for school leaders on April 20 called “The Will to Teach.” It's about the Five Key Beliefs applied to teachers — and what leaders can do when the will to teach starts to erode. $29 for individuals or $99 for a team. [Details and registration here.]
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