![\"\"](\"https:\/\/cohort21.com\/jasonbornstein\/files\/2018\/02\/classroom-engagement.png\")
<\/a><\/p>\nA total of 36 students (53%) admit to doing little or no homework this year. I instituted a policy in September that I would be checking homework – not every day, but at each test. Students are to upload their homework to OneNote, where I will check it and give a completion mark. This is a mark that counts, but with a very low weighting. Let’s look on the positive side: 47% of students are doing most or all of the homework, which is a pretty significant number. If I did this survey in the past few years, 47% would probably be a high water mark.<\/p>\n
As for marks, a whopping 43 students (63%) rate themselves as “not bad” or “well below expectations”. Only 3 students are completely satisfied with their achievement based on their hard work so far. This seems like a fair and honest assessment. My students could definitely do a little better.<\/p>\n Now for the especially interesting part. I took each student’s current mark and subtracted it from their Mark Goal. Not surprisingly, each goal was at least 1% higher than the student’s current average. Kids want higher marks. However, the difference between their goals and achievement so far was staggering! The\u00a0average<\/em> difference was 11%. Students set lofty expectations as much as 40% over their current average. Only 25 students (37%) were within 6% of where they currently stand. I think this whole exercise only proves that our students lack the metacognition to properly self-assess their performance and abilities! That will be an action plan for another day.<\/p>\n Kids want better marks. That’s no surprise. The key is in the “Actions” – how will they go about attempting to achieve these higher marks? Will they take a hint from the first two questions and pay more attention, or do more homework? Or is it up to me to make the classroom a more engaging environment so that they forget about distractions and want to do homework? Let’s find out!<\/p>\n Here’s something that I have been thinking about for a while and finally got down to doing, thanks to some good old fashioned Cohort Guilt\u2122. Plus, it fit perfectly with my chapter on Human Body Organ Systems. I broke my class up into four groups, strategically splitting up the chattiest and goofiest kids. During a class period, students rotated with their groups between four learning stations. Our periods range from 45 – 75 minutes, depending on the day, so each station lasted about 11 – 16 minutes. I encouraged students to take notes at each station, adding to one big note for the topic. Each day focused on one of the human body organ systems and I did this three times with each class (Digestive, Circulatory, and Respiratory systems).\u00a0I also said that if any time was leftover during a station that students should start on the homework.<\/p>\n During initial feedback, some students suggested that the time for each station was too short. So I put Watch and Play together, giving them an opportunity to do either or both, and extending the rotations up to 15-18 minutes. It seemed like the vast majority of students rated “Listen” as their favourite station, which is bizarre since so few of them were actually listening during my previous lessons. I have just decided to get concrete data on this, rather than rely on anecdotal evidence.<\/p>\n Students complained about the usual things, I suppose (mostly not being allowed to choose their group members). Overall, I’m not sure that I accomplished much, but I am glad that I tried it. I will take a class survey this week and see if they would want to do this again. It required a little bit of prep work to find the links, but otherwise wasn’t too hard or time-consuming. Be sure to comment if you have any suggestions!<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" How Might We Improve Student Engagement in High School Science Classes? Here’s the motivation for my action plan: most of my students are very social. They are also (for the most part) lower achievers than students I’ve taught in the past. So, I have many students who are more interested in talking than listening, and … Continue reading “Will “Station-Based Learning” increase engagement in science class?”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":153,"featured_media":102,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"wds_primary_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-101","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-action-plan","category-classroom-reflections"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cohort21.com\/jasonbornstein\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/101","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cohort21.com\/jasonbornstein\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cohort21.com\/jasonbornstein\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cohort21.com\/jasonbornstein\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/153"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cohort21.com\/jasonbornstein\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=101"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/cohort21.com\/jasonbornstein\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/101\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":111,"href":"https:\/\/cohort21.com\/jasonbornstein\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/101\/revisions\/111"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cohort21.com\/jasonbornstein\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/102"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cohort21.com\/jasonbornstein\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=101"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cohort21.com\/jasonbornstein\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=101"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cohort21.com\/jasonbornstein\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=101"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/h3>\nLearning Stations<\/h3>\n
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