As you prepare for parent-teacher conferences next week, you might want to have students complete a brief self-reflective piece that will help focus your conversation with parents. An adaptation of a form used by Shalaunda Spencer last year can be found at this link:
http://fhn.fhsd.k12.mo.us/swillott/studentselfeval.doc
It is a word document, so you should be able to access it and edit it to your liking.
This blog is all about sharing best practices, including those that are backed by research. Remember that the first post to the blog dealt with homerooms and getting to know students in your homeroom. Research indicated to the FHN family that a homeroom would be a beneficial addition to the day because students who find an anchoring adult in the building tend to perform better overall. Research also indicated that it was important to maintain homerooms intact throughout the high school years, rather than shifting and balancing numbers annually, in order to maintain a sense of community and the connections built between the students and the homeroom teacher.
The R&D PLC wants to know how your homeroom is shaping up. Have you taken the opportunity to call students over to discuss grades? What has worked for you in homeroom and what hasn't? Has your homeroom developed a focus on improving academics and a sense of community? We want to know how things are going. Remember, you can comment anonymously, if you choose to do so.
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5 comments:
I was a little wary when this year started about a permanent homeroom, especially since I was assigned Freshmen. I must say, though, that I've been pleasantly surprised. I've taught freshmen before so I was really strict at the beginning about seating arrangements, homework rules, etc. we've developed a surprising sense of communitity. I forced my homeroom students to do all sorts of ice-breaker activities at the beginning of the year and now they get really excited about the various team building activities we play during the year. I also really emphasized my role as a mentor at the start of the year. Since I am a Spanish teacher, the students in my homeroom know that can come to me for any tutoring in Spanish. At the start of each homeroom I take attendance by going down the rows asking a question, like "what do you like best about FHN so far?" or "what was the coolest thing you did last weekend?" The discussion that ensues exposes similiar interests among my students. I see my nervous freshmen slowly develop friendships with their classmates.
I'm thinking of other ideas to build an even greater sense of community within my homeroom. The Miracle Children's Network allows donors to "adopt" a child in a third world country. I was thinking of collecting a dollar from each student in my homeroom and sending the money in to pay for food and medicine for a needy child for a month. Or, at a local level my homeroom could compete against other homerooms in my department to raise the most money for a needy family. One last idea I had was allowing my homeroom to "decorate" my classroom by making some holiday arts and crafts and displaying their work around the room. The possibilites are endless!
I also spent time talking to my homeroom, freshmen, about doing something for our community. They brought up cerel boxtops for money for this school.
I think the one activity that shows my students' learning is my zero checks. I told them that they are in charge of the letter grade they get in the class, but I was watching the number of zeros they received in each class. Yesterday, we went over their first quarter grades. If they had fewer than ten zeros in all of their classes, they join my "candy bar club." They knew I was going to check the zeros twice in a quarter. At the end of the quarter all but 2 of my 21 students join the club. Over half of the student had no zeros. One student said that he never had higher grades and the only class with a C grade had three zeros. "No more zeros next quarter," he said.
I know that we are working on lowering the F grades for the freshmen. I know that sophomores at FHN have had the greatest numbers of F's for several years. Maybe my zero watching this year will change the trend for my kids.
What else have you done to support the first quarter grades? Or what other ideas can we use. I don't want to over use the same motivation. Share your ideas, please.
I tried a copy and paste of that address several times and couldn't get it to work. I'd like to use the eval, what am I doing wrong?
If you can't get to the student self evaluation, just go to the part up to and including the /swillott and then look for the peach colored box on the left that says "teacher materials" and then you can find the form from there.
Well said.
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