As you do this, you might gather from last year:
Certainly, it will be overwhelming and likely not productive to pour over the minute detail in these artifacts. But you can look them over and think big picture. You might use a subject area, reading or writing, as a lens and think about trends. Did your students’ work and your instruction improve in ways that met your goals? Were there places where either students’ work or your instruction seemed stuck or challenged?
Or, perhaps there was a particular unit or two with an outcome that was less than you’d hoped. In this case, you might study these artifacts with a finer focus, using them to think about where in the unit things might have gone off the rails, and what you might do to course correct next year. For example, you might look across students’ work and your conference notes to identify places where your instruction didn’t always stick.
If you didn’t collect this data last year, this is a great opportunity to set some goals about the kind of data you’ll collect this year so that you can reflect on your teaching in these ways in the future.
At this week’s TCRWP Twitter chat, Staff Developer Mandy Ehrlich and Janet Steinberg, Research and Data Manager for the TCRWP, will lead a discussion on ways that teachers can take what they learned in reading and writing last year and apply their reflections to plan for next year.
Each Wednesday night at 7:30pm eastern, The Teacher's College Reading and Writing Project hosts a Twitter chat using the hashtag #TCRWP. Join @MandyEhrlich1 & @eriuqse695 to chat about reflecting on this year to plan for next year tomorrow evening.
Not on Twitter? Take Heinemann’s free Twitter for Educators course here.
Follow her on Twitter @annagcockerille