New beginnings

"I courageously embrace change in my life." Repeat again and let it soak to my core. The perfect affirmation for the beginning of a new school year, in a new classroom, which I'm going to share, with a different role where I will no longer be teacher of record. And I was just finding success with this style and format of instructional design, feedback and assessment! As I sit at jury duty and ponder the lack of control I have, I know that I must just embrace the change.

Well, if you know me or are beginning to get to know this Gweniepig through my blog, then you may have figured out it takes a lot to stop my forward growth, especially when it comes to positive change for kids! So, what did I do, I communicated the effectiveness of my work and brought the big dogs with me: Rick Wormeli, Judy Willis and Robert Marzano. And with big words, student examples, and a lot of passion, I brought 2 language arts teachers on board to my throwing out the traditional gradebook movement, one of whom I will be co-teaching with this coming year!

In our first discussion at the end of last school year, we developed a plan of practice for practice and a format for scales for all assignments and assessments. We discussed what would be included as the final assessment of mastery. It was a beautiful meeting of minds. There was an electricity igniting the room as the plan unfolded. Throughout the summer, the three of us contributed ideas via Google docs to scales for each learning goal and other implementation factors. 

In this way, my path as the gweniepig is growing rather than being truncated, which I guess could be called "a blessing in disguise" if you want to call in that, or an infusion that I was bound to create. Nonetheless, this way I get to be right in the middle of the classroom lighting the fire, rather than creating a soft glow from around the edges. Working with these enigmatic coworkers of mine allows me the outlet I need to evaluate my ideas and round out the implementation of scales for progress monitoring and student self-assessment. 

Don't misunderstand, this is not going to be an easy breezy implementation. The three of us, which may possibly and hopefully become 6 of us before the week or at minimum- the quarter, I have to put my passion somewhere at the moment, have to come to consensus on whether there should be an s at the end of assessment or not before we can move on to the next line for grammatical correctness. So, I can tell you, that we have tossed around the titles of our grading categories a few times, and how in-depth our scales can be. 

However, the benefit of all of us utilizing the same system will assist in the executive function growth for the students we collectively have, as well as, the progress our school takes in celebrating student success. In addition, we work extremely well as team in all of these decisions, it's just a matter of what it will be when we all finally come to that final agreement. 

And as you can see, at the student and teacher level it has definitely been a series of successes that is bound to continue, especially as we begin the school year with the system in place. So, as we embark on this "new" journey stay tuned as Gweniepig and friends take over the traditional evaluation system as we know it or come along for the ride and join in.