Sticker Charts - Visible Success

Last year I spent a RIDICULOUSLY long time colouring in blocks of rectangles to show student's credits.

This year... I was smarter.

I went to Uncle Bill's (seriously the most amazing $2 shop-esque in Rotorua) and found stacks of neon coloured round stickers. Grabbing four different colours, Orange for Not Achieved, Green for Achieved, Magenta for Merit and Yellow for Excellence, I headed back to plan out how this new sticker chart might look.

For future reference next year...

Each sticker is 2cm - diameter.
Name stickers were 7cm long.

With those measurements I created sticker chart sheets for all three of my senior classes.

A few things:

I started these in Term 2 - if I'd started earlier to not only track the student's credits, but to identify students lagging from the get go... it might have had a more positive effect overall.

The Y11 charts look amazing. We do six internal assessments with them. But our Y12 class only do four (five if you count oral text but hardly anyone ever takes me up on it...) and this year what with the two students in 12L not finished their writing portfolio, the massive majority on both the 12L and 12A students who didn't participate in the visual verbal assessment... there are a lot of orange stickers.

I wonder whether making the Y12's writing portfolio have a larger space to add two stickers - one for each piece of writing they did - and then an overall sticker to show their overall mark?

...

Last week I made some sticker charts for my juniors. They had been asking for a while for their own also.

Pics to come. More analysis to come too.

Kia Eke Panuku Obs

Have been thinking about my Kia Eke Panuku obs from this week.

At the crux of it... I'd probably call my teaching style, organised chaos.

Students arranged at random, per choice of students. We don't do seating plans. In fact, student led decision making on where they sit and why has become incredibly important.

The shared power in the room - can be seen too. Learning tends to be more co-constructed and we learn from each other.

At any given moment with certain classes there is self-directed learning occurring. 

What this looks like is different in different classes, with different students.

There is constant monitoring. Awhi, support and encouragement.

Wondering about my shadow coaching sessions and how KM modelled her lesson off of what I'd done in mine. Very cool. Loved her Numbered Heads strategy as well as how she had all the students e tu to refocus them :)

It was good to see that in both obs my relationship strengths came into play and that my giggly, humorous nature came out very obvious in the ob too.

I wonder how different my classroom is to someone who is much more traditional.

Two areas of focus for myself:
- Wananga - need to make the most of teachable moments and use that time to dig deeper, one on one.

- Develop more confidence with my Y9 social studies class. The revision stuff we're doing is mostly new. So we need to find a more concrete way to share this knowledge. Google Docs? Slides even? Not sure. That's my plan for this weekend. Figure it out.

I'd like to do more obs too because I need to improve my way of observation. I'd like to see more and dig deeper.

I really like the shadow coaching too. Different styles there - the side by side and the korero and discussing different points that came up.

I wonder how I might further improve and capitalise on the organised chaos and relationships in class.