{"id":251,"date":"2026-01-26T16:31:27","date_gmt":"2026-01-26T21:31:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/cohort21.com\/denisesimpson\/?p=251"},"modified":"2026-01-26T16:31:27","modified_gmt":"2026-01-26T21:31:27","slug":"how-might-we","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cohort21.com\/denisesimpson\/2026\/01\/26\/how-might-we\/","title":{"rendered":"How Might We&#8230;"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;m a little late post for my 2nd blog post and truth be told it&#8217;s because it was hard to pin point something that I wanted to focus on this time through Cohort 21.<\/p>\n<p>Since starting at a new school this year &#8211; I&#8217;ve been thrown into some unexpected challenges that immediately shifted my urgent\/important scale last term.<\/p>\n<p>Now, being back from winter break and having it be a little more of what &#8220;normal&#8221; should feel like, I&#8217;ve been able to think about some needs we&#8217;ve been talking about as a music department. One topic that&#8217;s come up a few times in our planning periods is how we&#8217;re tracking our students&#8217; learning skills across different grades and how effective those methods are. As a specialist teacher teaching more than 20-25 students daily, I&#8217;ve always found this to be such a challenge as I don&#8217;t want to track just for the sake of it but also finding it of value to me as a teacher and to students.<\/p>\n<p>This got me thinking of building a tool to be able to help us track student&#8217;s growth in their learning skills as they go through our music program &#8211; and that&#8217;s how I came to my how might we question for this season of cohort &#8211; especially since I&#8217;m digging into this on the later end:<\/p>\n<p><em><strong>How might we create an efficient system that tracks and visualizes student progression in learning skills across Grade 6\u201310 in music classes, in a way that&#8217;s meaningful for identifying patterns and flagging areas of concern\u2014at scale?<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n<p>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 &#8211; if it does then I would like to try to roll it out to the rest of my team for next year. I&#8217;m choosing Grade 6 because it&#8217;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&#8217;m able to roll this out long term &#8211; I&#8217;ll have the most data for them as they go through middle school.<\/p>\n<p>Since I teach a lot of students &#8211; 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.<\/p>\n<p>I feel I really have to hold myself accountable as it&#8217;ll be hard to complete this in real time. I&#8217;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).<\/p>\n<p>My next step is to build the form and the google sheets to help display the information in a useful way &#8211; I&#8217;m not the most experienced with formulas and building spreadsheets so there will be some learning here too!<\/p>\n<p>If any of you have helpful tips or tools please share!! I&#8217;d love to hear what works for you (even better what hasn&#8217;t worked) as I attempt to make some changes.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;m a little late post for my 2nd blog post and truth be told it&#8217;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 &#8211; I&#8217;ve been thrown into some unexpected challenges that immediately shifted my urgent\/important&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":463,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"wds_primary_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-251","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-face-2-face-sessions"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cohort21.com\/denisesimpson\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/251","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cohort21.com\/denisesimpson\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cohort21.com\/denisesimpson\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cohort21.com\/denisesimpson\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/463"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cohort21.com\/denisesimpson\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=251"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/cohort21.com\/denisesimpson\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/251\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":252,"href":"https:\/\/cohort21.com\/denisesimpson\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/251\/revisions\/252"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cohort21.com\/denisesimpson\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=251"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cohort21.com\/denisesimpson\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=251"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cohort21.com\/denisesimpson\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=251"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}