Tomorrow is the last day of the first trimester. My 8th graders have been struggling this year. I’m not sure if it’s because I have two classes, which means more students, which means a wider span of ability levels. Or if it’s something else. All I know is I have more students struggling this year than ever before.
In September, I missed our first district-wide professional development day (Covid), and was placed in the “Inclusivity” group. We’re focusing on ways to make the curriculum accessible to all students, especially those that struggle to meet the standards. I’m also being observed this year, and have decided to focus on supporting students at all levels. I’m quite pleased that my professional development focus is so relevant to my specific situation this year, and that I can incorporate it into my observation requirements. It’s rare when district obligations feel useful.
One “area of growth” I’ve identified for many of my students is knowing how to study. I have been giving them specific resources to study, and yet the ones that need to review them the most rarely do so. I’ve talked to them about passive studying (just looking over notes) and active studying (attempting practice problems or doing written practice that can be checked). I’ve also noticed that students rarely look at the rubric I used to score their projects, and lost points in the same general areas over and over again.
Tomorrow I’ll be giving students their first reflection; asking them to write down their scores for every test and quiz, and then mark down the specific ways they studied for each. I’ll also be requiring them to return to the project rubrics and record what score they got on each criterion.
Many students in my 1B classes want to skip Spanish 1 in high school and go straight to Spanish 2 as freshman. The foreign language program at the high school we feed into is rigorous. They move very quickly through a challenging curriculum. Not only do my students need to know the material to be successful in Spanish 2, but they also need to know how to manage a heavy workload, recognize when they need to review a topic, study for a test, and understand project requirements and meet them.
This year more students than ever before need explicit instruction in pretty much all of these areas. It’s adding a lot to my plate, but I hope I can rise to the challenge, and create the scaffold that students at all levels can utilize to be successful in my class, and their future language classes.
I also hope that these reflections help parents recognize where their students are right now, and what they are capable of, so they have realistic expectations going into the next school year.
A teacher can dream, right?! 😉
