Pages

Monday, December 21, 2015

#MTBoS12days - Success Story

This semester has been insane.  I have wonderful students, wonderful colleagues, and really could not ask for a better life.  However, as great as this semester has been, it has also been one of the busiest semesters in recent memory, which means not a lot of time to blog about the good, the bad, and the ugly of the semester!

Today's #MTBoS12days prompt is all about the good... a success story from the semester. :)

The biggest success story I have about this semester relates to our summer #EduRead - Make it Stick.  If you haven't read this book, I highly recommend it! 

One of the suggestions from the book was to spiral homework and quiz often.  I combined these ideas and decided to do two main warmup routines... Multiple Choice Mondays and Flashback Fridays.

Multiple Choice Monday consists of 5 MC questions each week over anything we've learned so far.  The kids get them back on Tuesday to analyze and reflect on their answers. 

Flashback Fridays are half sheet quick answer questions over things I don't want them to forget. 

So last week was finals week.  The kids had time to study in class on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday, then finals were on Thursday and Friday.  To be honest, the kids weren't using their study time quite as much as I would like and I was worried they weren't taking their final seriously.  I voiced my concern to a couple of students and here were some of the response:

      "I'm not too worried about this one.  We've prepared for it all semester."

      "This is the final I feel best about!"

      "We are always reviewing old stuff.  This final won't be too bad."

Then Thursday came and by golly, they were right!  The kids did a GREAT job on the final and I'm very pleased with the scores.  I don't have the usual angst over submitting grades and only ended up with a couple of students that were on the "rounding bubble".

I consider that a success! :)

No comments:

Post a Comment