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- Beyond the Snapshot: Full Frame Views of Your Students
Beyond the Snapshot: Full Frame Views of Your Students
Assessments don’t tell the full story 🤫
Read Time: 3 minutes and 45 minutes
Think of a photo album that contains only a single photo from each of your birthdays. You’ll watch your own growth, see family members age, and even spot some beloved pets.
But, these pictures only tell a small part of your story. They’ll miss your favorite vacations, holidays spent at grandma’s house, countless accomplishments, and more.
As educators, we know that assessments provide that same, narrow field of view. They leave out a lot of valuable information and insight into a student’s learning journey.
While assessments are a key component of gauging a student’s progress, strengths, and weaknesses, we have to go beyond the snapshot to build a full photo album — allowing us a richer, deeper understanding.
What snapshots miss:
When we look at assessments, whether it be a pop quiz or a diorama, we are still only learning what the students understood on those particular days. Assessments fail to account for concentrated studying or just generally rough weeks — and this means that assessment-heavy instruction fails students in the long run.
We want to know how:
Their understanding deepens over time
They apply their knowledge in situations outside of the classroom
They function as part of a team
They face (and overcome) difficulties and challenges
They emotionally connect with the concepts they are learning.
Truth be told, assessments tell us little (or none) of this. To gain this wide-range view, we have to swap our lenses.
Building a full photo album will take some creativity and out-of-the-box thinking. At the end of the day, we will not only capture a student’s strengths, weaknesses, and growth, but also their excitement, curiosity, resilience, collaboration, and more.
Here’s a few ways we can do that ⤵️
Build learning journals
Across all grade levels, learning journals are a parameter-free, low-stakes, and stressless way to gain insight into students’ understanding and engagement. Used regularly, these can be amazing bell ringers or exit ticket activities.
For primary grades, it can be as simple as drawing a picture of what they learned this week. High school students could use these tools to write daily connections between in-class concepts and real-world experiences.
These activities can become an average-boosting participation grade, too. âś…
Student-led progress and goal-tracking
In conjunction with learning journals or as a stand-alone tool, progress and goal trackers pass the camera on to the students. Time for a selfie. 🤳
Younger students can set simple weekly goals, like putting up their pencil box every afternoon. Older students can set long-term goals, like acing all of their classes next semester or getting accepted into their dream college.
By setting realistic goals with achievable milestones, students can track their own progress. This holds them accountable (and involves them in their own success)!
Individual projects: Personal and passion-driven
Projects don’t have to tie into every standard. Students can complete projects on topics that interest them, even if they don’t neatly fit the bill for curriculum.
An All About Me board, word cloud, or drawing is a great first project at the beginning of the year or semester. Teachers can even have students complete these at the beginning of a semester and again at the end to see how they’ve changed.
Teachers can add a personality-led project as a layer to their normal curriculum, too. Learning about Ancient Egypt? Have students create their own “tomb”, including a list of things that are important to them. What if you’re learning about fractions? Have students create a list of 10 fractions they found while outside of school.
Incorporating the real world into the curriculum is a great way to understand students better while helping them make connections to the material. Win-win.
Personal projects like these are an easy, fun way to get to know your students in their own words.
A step further, passion-driven projects are an opportunity for students to express themselves, connect to material on a deeper level, and share a rich level of understanding. The key for passion projects? Use as few parameters as possible.
Starting with an open-ended prompt is best.
A prompt that states, “Create a tri-fold board about something you’re interested in, showing how it is relevant to movement,” can bring a variety of results.
Students who love monster trucks could talk about axles, wheels, and miles per hour. On the other hand, fashion lovers could cover the moving parts on a sewing machine.
If you want insight into students’ passions, giving them the freedom to make their own connections is the way to do it.
Reflection loops, interviews, and peer teaching
By placing students with their peers, they can lead the show.
Reflection loops can give students a new perspective while allowing them to make connections with their peers.
Creating student interview assignments can allow students to dig deeper into the material, ask new questions, and gain a richer, practical understanding of the curriculum
Peer teaching can help students who have grasped concepts lift up their peers.
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