Question 1: During the first face to face we used the language of Urgent vs Important to help frame our thinking around our use of TIME. Reflect on why you joined Cohort 21 and your professional goals for this year. Now that the year has begun and you have met your students what IMPORTANT goal might you like to address and leverage this community to get support with.
Our school has launched a Growth and Development program to guide staff to reach their full potential by setting goals for their professional career. This year my goal is to incorporate Guided Math into my classroom in the same way we do Guided Reading. This idea came about during the pandemic where virtual teaching benefitted some students while completely disadvantaged others. Teachers are now finding that students have large gaps in their learning and are missing foundational literacy skills especially when it comes to math. This is both an Urgent and Important goal that I am choosing to put my time into to make sure my students are building their foundational skills and closing those gaps. My goal for this year is to set up math centres using the STACK framework (Small Group, Tech, Application, Creative, Kinesthetic) to allow for the time and space to work with students where they are in smaller groups and target specific skills. I joined Cohort21 to learn about classroom management strategies, how centres are run successfully and differentiation in the classroom.
Question 2: Which of the Season 11 Strands resonates with you and why? Share what you feel is both urgent and important about it for you and your school at the moment and some of the questions you have around moving forward.
I feel I resonate most with is Pedagogy, Belonging, and Wellbeing. The most urgent and important thing from this strand would be assessment. My students are second graders and often the biggest struggle I have is documenting learning in the moment. There are times when I have stopped to write things down or have had students record themselves sharing something insightful, however, I feel as though there can be a system in place to document learning in an effective and efficient way. This also ties into my larger goal with my STACK math centres as I have had some struggle with assessing student learning in the moment in my small group. I have had conversations with my coach about this and would love to learn more from my group at Cohort21. The questions I have had are: How do I know students have benefitted from this small group instruction? What will show me that? If an activity is no longer serving a group, do I scrap it and try something else? What effect does that have on their wellbeing? What does differentiation in math look like for students who do not have foundational skills (stripping the learning back to basics?)?