The discussion about ending our classes every day with self reflection/metacognition happened after Jason left, around 19-20 February. Annemarie has written about her own experience with it here:
I’ve had a lot of trouble managing my 7th graders, and I have the idea of videotaping my 6th graders during PQA or a story and SHOWING it to my 7th graders so that they can see what it’s supposed to look like. I also have many truant students, even at the middle school level.
Our school has a tremendously high transient rate also, which I find so frustrating – I’ll get a new 8th grader who has little or no Spanish half way through the year. That’s why it’s such a good idea to have the “check list” [ed. note: she means this: https://benslavic.com/blog/2012/02/18/rules-2012/].
We’ve been discussing and continually going back to it and reflecting upon it. If we create the culture in the classroom that students take responsibility for their learning because they know what’s expected of them in the class, then a student will see and feel this culture and will have no choice but to enter it as well.
At my school right now we are focusing on the “metacognitive” piece around students learning – they are constantly assessing themselves on their knowledge of content as well as their habits of learning while being given clear learning goals or targets, as we call them.
The idea is that if they self-assess and monitor their progress on the learning targets, they are more likely to reach that target. Using CI in the world language classroom lends itself so well to student engaged assessment because there is power in reflecting upon the way they are learning – they can really get better at it.
My learning targets don’t look like this “I can distinguish between a subject pronoun and a verb in a Spanish sentence” but rather like this “I can recognize when I don’t understand something in Spanish” or “I can following along while reading in Spanish with my finger.” It helps that the teachers in the rest of my school are focusing on using learning targets and students engaged assessment.