C4T# 1

Post One

I was assigned to read a recent post from Becky Goerend's blog Live the Conversation. I read her March 29th post Turning it Over to Them--Success in Making . Goerend is making an effort to improve her class after discovering three major things students struggle with while in the classroom: staying on task, voice level, and showing respect towards others. She designed a rubric and an assessment for the children to use in order to interpret others' behavior. Her students are in control of interpreting everyone's behavior including their own.
Admiring that she promotes better classroom behavior, I told her that her project was time consuming but amazing. The students are our future leaders. Why not give them a little responsibility? She commented immediately with the news that she didn't finish her project because of maternal leave, but she did mention trying again next year with her new students. Awesome!

Post Two

Today I read a different post from Mrs. Goerend's blog. Since she didn't have a more recent post I decided to read her November 13th post The Checklist . She wanted her students to improve on self-evaluating their Narrative writing. According to her, the project isn't quite a one-hundred percent success but she did manage to see more quality writing and an improvement among her students. First she lets the student assess their work with the checklist (rubric) she created and then she grades it with the same checklist. Hmm...that's how you learn the honest students from the dishonest students.
Check out her checklist because it's something we could all use before we turn in an assignment to a professor. I told her that I could use her checklist on some of my personal writing. I also added that I wanted to use it in my classroom also!