Graphing Our Goals!

Whew, it's been a while since I've had a spare moment to think about anything that's going well in my classroom! Mostly, I've been living in the moment & tirelessly trying to get a brand new classroom of students from Point A to Point A+.

I've been spending a great deal of my time graphing and charting pretty much every piece of our day with my students. I do this so that I have evidence of the progress that's occurring in my room, and also so that the students can celebrate their progress and self-reflect on their behavior. With the help of iPads, students can now do it all on their personal devices - saying goodbye to embarrassing, public behavior and academic goal charts.

Students start by downloading a chart template which I create, save as a PDF, and store in Google Drive. Then, students can open the chart in any PDF annotation app, such as Skitch or Noteability.

From here, students can mark up the document, save it, and share it with me! You could try Google Drive, Showbie, or even AirDrop to share daily or weekly progress with your students.

Since everything is organized in one system (in theory), these graphs are simple to share with parents - especially during student led conferences.

Here are some examples of things I graph with my students:

• Behavior - This has looked a lot of different ways for my students. From the youngest learners graphing their "color" throughout the day to older students graphing their ClassDojo points in an effort to view how close we are to earning our incentives.
• Class Averages  - Class averages are a great way to publicly celebrate growth (because they don't single anyone out), and graphing as a "team" inherently encourages teamwork - we are all working toward the same goal and we all need to grow to reach our goals. 
• Independent Reading Levels (How many levels did you grow on average?)
• CBM averages
• # of Minutes used to transition
• Silent Reading Stamina
• # of books read or conferences held
• # of published writing pieces presented
• # of compliments received by adults in the hallway

The biggest piece to graphing and tracking data is to make sure you use the information, reflect on how and why we arrived at these findings, and then create action plans for improvement. Celebrate the small victories as often as you can to keep morale high. 

Good luck and happy graphing!