Margin Notes

We have been working on a collaboration with our colleagues Michelle Wuest and Shelley Hanson at Leo Hayes High School.  Inspired by Making Thinking Visible and Visible Learners, we have embarked on a bit of a professional inquiry guided by these key questions:

• How can we create the conditions for students’ learning to be visible?
• How can we/they document this learning?
• What can we learn about teaching and learning from this documentation?
• How can we make our own learning from this project visible to others?

Michelle and Shelley teach multiple grades but they both have Grade 11 English in common, so we decided to use that as our focus in order to make it easier for them to co-plan and to allow Kelly and Melissa to regularly schedule time in each classroom.  Over the course of the first few months of school, we discussed many iterations of what this work could look like and decided to focus on student reflection and the myriad ways it provides a window into the learning that has occurred.  By creating spaces where students are reflecting on their processes and products, we are able to examine the artifacts of student learning and make observations about teaching, learning, and instruction. In other words, we can use these artifacts as formative assessment for ourselves, thus inviting our own reflections.

Each student now has their own public blog which is open to readers beyond just their classmates.  This allows them to post writing and reflections and to provide feedback to one other via comments.

In the spirit of walking this walk ourselves, we are committed to making our own learning visible by posting about it here on Margin Notes. We hope you’ll follow us on this journey and join the conversation.