Lindsay Unified School District is empowering and motivating for today and tomorrow. Learn strategies and methods for teaching in a performance based system with lessons from LUSD professionals.
A student explains how she is able to tackle mastery of both ninth and tenth grade standards by using out of school time.
Transcript:
Student: I’ve been working on ninth and tenth grade. I do ninth grade in class and I do tenth grade by myself.
Interviewer: And how were you able to work on ninth and tenth grade? That’s not something that every student does, right? How were you able to do that?
Student: Well, I use a Lindsay website. LindsayEnglish.com. And it has all my assignments. Sometimes my teacher prints them out but most of the time I go online and search for everything I need.
Interviewer: Okay. And how are you able to actually do tenth grade English while you’re doing ninth grade English?
Student: Well, I usually finish everything for ninth grade in class. Like homework, I don’t really get it ’cause I finish it in class. So I just do everything else at home. With the tenth grade.
LPS uses a template to help students reflect after diagnostic assessment.
LPS uses a template to help students reflect after taking an assessment.
Sophia Thomas, teacher, explains how student have multiple ways of showing mastery through different resources linked to the same skill area.
Transcript: Sophia Thomas: Students have their own dashboard. It has the curriculum embedded by units. Units break down to lessons. Lessons break down to learning resources and assessments. There are also several at bats at one scale or learning target so they have different ways to show mastery. Practically, it’s the same thing but they’re asking you to do it in a different way, using different strategies.
How a student chooses learning resources for a learning objective.
LPS initially built and tested their Academic Numeracy course in Google Sheets, and many of those practices have been captured as Blended and Personalized Learning Strategies. LPS has worked with Gooru to create Navigate Math, a free tool any school can use. These screencasts cover strategies that can be applied through both Google Sheets and Navigate Math, though the latter is used in screencasts for demonstration purposes.
Sophia Thomas, teacher, shares how she supports students in their self-paced learning by monitoring progress against goals in the dashboard and checking in on assignments as they work.
Transcript: Sophia Thomas: After our warm up, kids use their dashboard and where they were previously to identify what they want to focus on for the day. Generally, I encourage kids to move through the dashboard in a linear fashion. There are some students who don’t do that. But most students actually do that. They’ll identify at least two things that they want to work on. They’ll put that on the to-do list. Then they have to go through the to-do list and move it over to the planner and make at least one of those items current. So that shows up on my teacher dashboard. That gives me an idea of what exactly the student is working on or is planning to work on in class that day. […] Some students have this tendency to feel that the writing tasks are really hard. It’s going to require me to stop and do a team check. I’m going to leave those until the end. A lot of times I’m able to catch up on that. I’m able to say I noticed you skipped this assignment. Talk to me about what’s happening here. Why haven’t you done this? Bring the assignment. Let’s look at it together. Let me get a feeling of where you’re at. Once we have that talk they recognize it’s not as hard as I thought it was. So they’ll go ahead and do it.
