Hey wait, did I forget to finish this series?! Yikes! Summer trainings got the best of me. I should have a checklist for my checklists. I would probably live my life in a checklist if I could. Just kidding! Sort of…
In our Power of the Checklist series, we’ve featured checklists for standard operating procedures and for school events, like field trips. Coming soon, we’ll share checklists for ongoing routines and habits, and projects (like finishing grad school!).
I told you I loved checklists!
But for today, let’s look at Leah’s checklists for Student Mastery and Student Stuff. Just to be clear, we don’t care if your checklist is typed, handwritten or somewhere in between. Leah’s happen to be handwritten in her lovely Erin Condren planner.
Checklist A: Student Mastery
Leah’s first checklist is for tracking student mastery in real time, much like the one Jenny created for her guided reading and math lessons.
Leah describes,
The tracker is based on exit tickets my students do at the end of class. If they mastered the objective, they get a check. If they did not, the space is circled indicating the student needs to work on that skill and be pulled for a review. What is really convenient is that the mastery tracker is right in the same book I use for my planning. It’s so functional to have it all in one place.
Okay, I LOVE this. Too many of us divorce our informal student mastery data from our planning materials—thus defeating the purpose of using data to inform instruction.
Checklist B: Student Stuff
Most of us send home a TON of stuff to our students and families. Who knows when (or if!) it will ever come back? Trust me, as the mom who lost the Mother’s Night info form in the bottom of a four-year-old’s backpack, I get it: we’re busy, and parents are busy, too!
Leah describes why she created this checklist:
I needed a way to track the crazy numbers of permission slips, progress reports and more that we send home for a signature. The checks are for when a student has submitted one of those papers, the circles show when it’s missing.
Because Leah’s list is already set up, she doesn’t have to waste any precious time creating new rosters or sorting through old stacks of paper. Her checklist is ready to go for each new item that goes out or comes back in.
Leah, thank you for sharing your wonderful checklists with us!
Who else is feeling inspired? I’m loving both the focus on student learning and the attention to juggling the millions of pieces of paper that go with teaching.
