From the series: Developing Students’ Ownership of Learning—from a Distance, too!
Check out Post #1 here.
This week we’re back and ready to focus on a new aspect of developing assessment-capable, visible learners. As you probably remember, we’re interested in helping students take responsibility for their learning so they can become their own teachers. We started by explaining how to help students think about what learning means, understand what they are learning, and identify when they have learned it. Those are important starts, but they only represent the very beginning of the journey to developing assessment-capable, visible learners. The next step focuses on helping students monitor their progress.
The Power of Student Self-Assessment
It is likely that you have all kinds of systems in place for students to help them monitor their progress. And it’s likely those systems have been compromised as we moved to distance learning within the context of the COVID19 pandemic. At this critical point in time, let’s not forget about the power of helping students monitor their learning. We need to help them develop the skills they need to determine how large the gap is between where they are now and what they need to know (learning intentions). Success criteria communicate to students the final destination. But how will students know the stopping points along the way? In other words, how will they know if they are on the right path toward proficiency?
Lessons for Developing Self-Assessment
Self-assessment tools can be very useful in helping students monitor their progress. In addition, self-assessment tools provide students with an opportunity to reflect on their learning—building some metacognitive skills in the process. It may be that you want to add a self-assessment tool for each chunk of learning that students need to do. They could even use these tools as checklists as their learning progresses.
In these lessons, you’ll find tools that will help students self-assess so they can monitor their progress. Here are Lessons for Grades 6-12: Teacher Pages and Learner Pages and Lessons for Grades 3-5: Teacher Pages and Learner Pages.
Looking Ahead
What is the difference between a complex task and a difficult task? And how do we find a happy medium between student work that is either way too hard or just too boring? In our next post in this series, we’ll answer these questions as we explore the important question of how to help students accept the challenge of learning.
