Summer Reflection

Now that I am deep into summer mode, it is time to  begin preparing for the next school year.  Before I can do that though I feel I need to put last year's experience to rest with a bit of reflection.

Last school year was an exciting year for me and I hope my students.  Together we tried new was of teaching and learning.  Some ideas were met with great success, some were not, and some we realized simply needed more development.  When evaluating our year together, I asked myself these 3 questions:

1) What should I start doing that I was not able to do last year?
2) What should I stop doing that did not work?
3)  What should I continue doing that worked well?

1.  The one thing that I know I need to work on is formative assessments of my students.  I need to come up with a system that works for me that not only allows easy assessment, but also to share those assessments with my students as well as work with them setting learning goals for themselves.

2. I need to stop trying to do too many new things at once.  Although I work well on the fly, my students need more structure in order to feel secure in what they are doing.

3.  I will continue to bring fun into the classroom while inspiring my student into independent learning. I will continue blogging and having student's bring their own device into class as a way of giving my students confidence in having their own voice in the world and responsibility for their own learning,

At the end of the school year, I asked my students to list 6-10 words that described our year together.
Below is a word cloud I created with their words.