I’m a little late post for my 2nd blog post and truth be told it’s because it was hard to pin point something that I wanted to focus on this time through Cohort 21.
Since starting at a new school this year – I’ve been thrown into some unexpected challenges that immediately shifted my urgent/important scale last term.
Now, being back from winter break and having it be a little more of what “normal” should feel like, I’ve been able to think about some needs we’ve been talking about as a music department. One topic that’s come up a few times in our planning periods is how we’re tracking our students’ learning skills across different grades and how effective those methods are. As a specialist teacher teaching more than 20-25 students daily, I’ve always found this to be such a challenge as I don’t want to track just for the sake of it but also finding it of value to me as a teacher and to students.
This got me thinking of building a tool to be able to help us track student’s growth in their learning skills as they go through our music program – and that’s how I came to my how might we question for this season of cohort – especially since I’m digging into this on the later end:
How might we create an efficient system that tracks and visualizes student progression in learning skills across Grade 6–10 in music classes, in a way that’s meaningful for identifying patterns and flagging areas of concern—at scale?
Now, trying to do all of this in less than one year is obviously not going to happen so I thought to pilot a tool with just my grade 6 students this year to see if it even works – if it does then I would like to try to roll it out to the rest of my team for next year. I’m choosing Grade 6 because it’s the group of students I have the most contact time with and they are at the start of their middle school music journey so if I’m able to roll this out long term – I’ll have the most data for them as they go through middle school.
Since I teach a lot of students – I wanted something quick to be able to check in on students of concern on a regular basis but also have space for students in moments of success and growth.
I feel I really have to hold myself accountable as it’ll be hard to complete this in real time. I’ll be keeping my current method of tracking while teaching then be able to use this tool to help me document and stay organized (which is a constant struggle for my brain).
My next step is to build the form and the google sheets to help display the information in a useful way – I’m not the most experienced with formulas and building spreadsheets so there will be some learning here too!
If any of you have helpful tips or tools please share!! I’d love to hear what works for you (even better what hasn’t worked) as I attempt to make some changes.