- One of the most important things for me

is really helping my students to become more independent.

I spend a lot of time really teaching them
that they often can find the answers to their questions
and that they don't just have to refer back to me.
One thing I've gotten in the habit of doing
is being really intentional about making my criteria
for success clear for them, so at the end of a lesson
or the end of a unit, they know that they're responsible
for having learned and having produced.
We also spend a lot of time together making tools
that they can use during their work time.
So they have charts that they can refer to,
they have checklists that they can refer to.
Sometimes they draw pictures of different ways
they can improve their work and then they can refer back
to those tools when they're working independently
and it helps them see how the quality
of their work is progressing.
What I really like about this is it helps kids sort of
internalize really strong, high quality work
and then also when they reread their work,
they become better at noting what they're doing well
and what they still need to do.
The great thing about a tool is it also teaches you
what you can do next.
It gives a lot of tips and it gives a lot of feedback
without me having to be the one really helping kids work.
And instead, they become more independent
and they take more ownership of their learning.
This also works really well in partnerships.
My students have partners for every subject that we do
and they feel a real responsibility
for helping their partner improve.
Which I think is really lovely.
They also love giving feedback and pretending
that they're the teacher and I think in a big way,
it helps them look at their own work more critically,
which we talk about a lot in class.
You don't wanna look at your work and just say,
this looks good, this looks good, this looks good.
You want to really analyze it and make sure
that you're holding it to the highest standards.
And I think when you show kids that you have high
expectations for them and they can have those same high
expectations for themselves, it really motivates them
and leverages the quality of their work.
In my class, kids are used to getting a lot of feedback.
They get feedback from me when I confer with them,
they get feedback from their partners
when they look at each other's work.
They also spend time self-assessing and figuring out
what they're doing well and what they need to work on next.
The thing is, we also have to make sure that we're
holding ourselves accountable for taking our feedback
and then doing something with it.
So that's something that I try really hard to build
into my everyday classroom culture.
I often spend time checking kids work and they actually
have to show me where they improved their work in a certain
way or where they tried out a tip that I showed them.
They also do this with their partners.
Where they'll say, "Okay, this is my plan,
"This is what I'm going to work on."
And then, at the end of a lesson, they'll have to go ahead
and show them where they did that and how it worked.
And then their partners can give them tips on how effective
it was or maybe what they need to do next.
We also spend a lot of time looking at our work
kind of before and after, side by side,
and noticing how it's improved.
And I think that helps kids really see the importance
and the effectiveness of taking feedback
and applying it to their work.
- So every week, we take what we call
an understanding check.
We check for understanding of what the kids can and can't do
based on all the material from the previous months
of the course.
And I find that they can share a lot of their knowledge
and they practice that recall of information
while they take the understanding check.
But the day after, they're presented with the understanding
check again and I circle where they made a mistake.
I don't tell them what they did wrong,
there's no points associated with it,
minus two or anything like that,
I just circle what they've done wrong
and then they do a understanding check reflection.
Where they first need to explain in words
what they did wrong, then they explain in words
what the right solution is and then
they solve it correctly at the bottom.
And it's really important for them to explain the
what I used to think and what I think now
in their own words, maybe with the help of a peer,
maybe with the help of a teacher, maybe just by looking back
at their notes, before they do the correct answer,
to confront that misconception that they used to have.
And I think that students learn more in that reflection
than they do in the rest of the week
because they've seen what they've done wrong
and they've made corrections to that.
And they're highly motivated to do that.
When they get that test back, they look for the green star
because they know that's the part
that they get to make right.