The year has been so hectic that I have not been able to post anything new and that should give you a clue as to how my year has been! Even though our team worked hard over the summer to prepare for our new adventure in multi age personalized learning we were not prepared! I feel like a new teacher again and have put in many late nights at work. The “I Love Lucy Candy Factory” video really depicts how my team is currently feeling! We were a bit overconfident and once the year began “rolling” at full steam we realized that asking for help rather than trying to fix it all alone was the necessary choice. Here are the challenges we are facing:
- Gathering materials for exit tickets for grades 1 through 6 (this is our starting point based our our testing). We use exit tickets once a student has shown through practice that he/she is ready to demonstrate their learning. I thought we had plenty of options for this but found out otherwise once the year began. This has been a huge time consumer. Searching, creating and evaluating materials has takes time and that is one thing that is in short supply. As we move forward this year I would like to include more options for exit tickets including the option for students to create their own.
- Time to meet to analyze data, plan and modify our multi age groups. Since our groups are fluid we need to continuously evaluate student progress to make sure they are in the correct groups. We are short time to do this. We have tried lunch hours and after school. We are now going to begin meeting once a month from 2:45-4:00. An aide will take our classes for 30 minutes to enable us to make this happen.
- Student learner profiles are still in progress. I thought I would have these done by the end of September but have run into some snags. I created Google forms to send out to students. These were created in a Google Team drive with the thought of sharing not only the forms but the results. Students could not take answer the questions on the forms unless I added them to the team drive or gave them editing rights. After messing around with a bunch of settings I made a copy of the forms and put them in my drive and shared them that way. Even then some students had problems and I ended up giving them a print version. Nothing seems to create more chaos then technology glitches!
- Building relationships with twice as many students! We have two switches during the school day, one for math and one for reading. I teach two reading classes and no math. My reading classes are the multi age ones and I now have twice as many students to build a relationship with and less time to do so. Add this to the fact that I moved to a new building in our district this year and have no prior relationships with any students. This created an unforeseen problem for me since I am used to our small country school and knowing all the students in the building. Meeting with my team has helped to share information about students. I spend as much time as I can in the hallways between classes, lunchroom and after school in the library trying to get to know students. I also started an after school robotics club to help me get to know more of the students.
- Establishing classroom procedures and expectations. I went into this pilot of personalized learning knowing it would take longer to establish procedures and expectations but did not expect it to take nearly 8 weeks! I am just now feeling like we are getting into a routine of how the classroom is run and the procedures for everything from how to practice for an exit ticket to how to find materials. A large component of this is logins for the online learning resources we have. The 2nd through 4th graders are first timers with one to one technology!
We went to our building principal to ask for some ideas that would help us out. Since our district is in a budget crisis we knew that anything that required money would not be an option. We came up with having some meeting times at the end of the school day. An aide will take our classes the last 30 minutes of the day and we will meet at the administration building from 2:45 to 4:00. Leaving the building helps because we do not get so many interruptions. We know that we would love to have even more time and are working on creative ways to find it. I would love to hear of any suggestions other districts have tried and found successful!