Are You on Target with Your Effort?

My first few weeks of school have been going well.  I have been very busy trying to finish up setting up my room and getting class list and seating charts ready.  I also spent a lot of time trying to update my website. This week I will be introducing all my classes to my Effort rubric.  We are an Expeditionary Learning school and having students self assessment themselves is one of the components.  We use a rubric of 1-4, 4 being the best.
I will discuss how a 4 is a person who has full colorful music.  They even go back and fix mistakes without being told to (that's why it has a repeat sign).  I will also go over each of the bullets below.

A 3 is a person who does good work most of the time, but makes a mistake (the rest).  Sometimes they will fix them on their own, but occasionally they need a little reminder or they just excepts the one mistake.

A 2 is a person who does sloppy work.  Their work is not complete and they make several mistakes.  A 2 is also a person who is starting to be a passenger.  We always say "We are Crew, not Passengers".

A 1 is a person who doesn't get any work done and they often give up when things are hard.  They are being a passenger.

Many classroom teachers have their students record their answers either in a notebook or on an effort sheet.  I teach 500 students and that would be a lot of paper and it would take up valuable time getting out the paper and pencils.  I have created an Effort scoreboard.  Throughout class I will move students names.  I only move their name when they are not doing good work.  During our debrief time I will move students names up.  All students start off on a 3 "Ready to Learn" they have to earn the 4 or whatever score they will end on.  Students who got moved down to a 2 can be moved up to a 3 and students who got moved to 1 can be moved up to a 2, but they cannot be moved up to a 4 since a 4 does high quality work and follows all the expectations. 

When a student gets on a 1 it is Teacher's Choice this means that I will decide what needs to happen to help the student to make better choices.  Most of the time I will ask them to go and sit in the Isle of Rest.

The Isle of Rest is a quiet place where students can go to refocus or to calm down.  I do not make students write or owe a recess because they went there.  I have provided some tools for students to use to help them to refocus. There are sand times, liquid timers, stuffed animal, paper to draw or write their thoughts down or just to doodle.  I also have a copy of the rules to help remind them of the expectations.  Sometimes I will ask the students to go practice the rules.  I don't micromanage this.  If students do it, then great, but it's okay if they just sit their.  The only thing I care about is that they are quiet and they are not distracting the class.  I will call the office if the student refuses to comply to this expectation.
If anyone wants a copy of my PowerPoint you can click here to download it.  I will also put it on my download page on my website.

Effort Rubric Download

I know some people want to sign-up to receive an email when I update my website and blog, but unfortunately Weebly doesn't have this feature yet.  I am hoping that this feature will be coming soon.  They did a survey last month asking users what we would like to see and it was one of the choices.  Crossing my fingers that it will be the next new feature.

Tami