Using activities from Classroom Connections - Kath Murdoch and Learning Links - Kath Murdoch and Jeni Wilson.
The Question Game - useful for assessments and observations. 6 questions were developed for taking action and reflecting based on what was hoped would be achieved, why it is an important stage in goal setting and how will it make a difference to student learning.
From this activity the following statements were made about each stage.
Taking Action
Why is taking action important – to ensure that something happens! To achieve the goal or find success in the pathway.
Outcome – goal oriented, self managed with teacher guidance and scaffolding as needed. To think of others and the wider community.
How taking action makes a difference – gives a purpose and ownership to the learning. It empowers students so they can make a difference. It makes it real for them.
Reflecting
Reflecting – learners need to reflect back on goals to gauge their achievements or otherwise and then to reset or modify goals and learning steps. Reflection is monitoring how successful you are with your goal, it’s a spiraling process that is continuous through the process of learning.
Outcome – to think about their achievements, successes and what their next learning step or action is. It’s about self improvement.
How does it make a difference – by putting it back onto the students (self managing). Its OK to be wrong if you can see where to make a change next time. Self talk, internalizing and time to be self aware. Learners can learn from one another; it becomes more personalized.
A game called Metaphorically Speaking was used to visualise ourselves learning and to represent this using images of our efforts.- both thinking and feeling.
We used Morguefile.com to search for images and presented these back to the group talking about the metaphor.
This is an alternative to written or oral assessment tasks and is a strategy that is individualised. Not all students will have the same metaphor for their learning.
Finally we divided into syndicate groups to work on developing rubrics for Taking Action and Reflecting.
