By the time we hit the midterm reporting period, students in my class had gathered a plethora of written and digital evidence of their learning. I relied heavily on the creative process to keep myself focused and organized within different learning tasks, and to ensure that students were receiving constant feedback from me. This also helped to create a framework within which students could assess themselves throughout different steps of the process, and help them to be aware of the learning that was taking place.
I leveraged digital when students were working in the Producing Preliminary Work, and Performing and Evaluating by the use of recordings and videos. The recordings not only acted as students' evidence of learning, but provided opportunities for students to comment and reflect upon their growth and progress, and the application of prior steps in the creative process that led them to their current stages.
As a part our midterm conference, students were asked to identify their strengths, weaknesses and next steps based on their physical and digital folders which housed all of their evidence of learning in term one. All of their pieces of evidence were either assigned a level by me, or by the student, so they would have some idea of their level of understanding. I also wanted them to describe what they were most proud of, and something that surprised them...again, to allow them the opportunity to demonstrate and articulate musical growth. To consolidate their learning in more of a formal format, students were asked to link digital evidence to their Course Learning Profile . At the end of the semester, students will link evidence of their learning to all 8 overall expectations of the course. For midterm, I asked them complete evidence of learning for the Elements of Music and Skills and Personal Growth expectations. Even if they had physical evidence of these expectations, they could take a picture of their artifact and upload it into Seesaw, in order to produce a digital link.
My student conferences took almost three days to complete. I did not anticipate that it would take this much time, but on the other hand, I was thrilled that students had so much to say about their learning. Having students talk about their learning, progress, strengths, weaknesses and next steps based on the expectations covered and the different stages of the learning process was fascinating. I've never heard students be able to articulate their learning as effectively as some students did during their conferences. That being said, I never gave student the opportunity to express their learning in past courses I've taught.
I did have some students who had a lack of evidence and did not demonstrate some of the skills required in term one. This resulted in important conversations that took place where these students realized that a lack of attendance or other factors were reasons why they couldn't show me as much evidence of their learning. The great thing was, these comments came from the student, not from me, and together we helped to develop an action plan and goals for term two.
During the conferences, students gave me a mark that they envisioned for themselves based on the evidence in their folders. Nine times out of ten, the mark I had for them in my head was very close to the mark that they present. However, there were some cases where the student and teach mark were off by 10-15%. Going through the evidence again with the student took some time, but meaningful conversations throughout this process, and determining reasons why we were so far apart in our marks was a great part of this process.
Before a conference ended, both the student and myself had to mutually agree upon a grade, and students had to articulate a strength, weakness and next step for their report card. I loved the fact that we constructed their midterm report together. There would be no surprises when the report card went home, and I think students felt empowered that they were a part of this assessment process.
For this reporting period, I had release time to do my conferences. I will definitely have to rethink the conversation portion when term two rolls around, or next year, as I won't be afforded the opportunity to have a supply teacher cover my classes. Overall this was a great experience for both teacher and student.
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