How do your students self-asses?

Lately, I’ve found myself having conversations with many educators who think self-assessment is a good idea… but just aren’t sure about putting it into practice. Consequences of thoughtful self-assessment:

1. Students reflect on their process, performance, actions.

2. Students become more aware of their learning and/ or actions- in the moment!! “Johnny, don’t you ever think before you speak?!?” (which never has any impact, BTW) —-> “Johnny, I noticed you stopped yourself  before responding to Maria (how responsible of you)… tell me a little about your thinking.

3.  Students begin using on the language of the self-assessment in their classroom dialogue. (And I wasn’t even trying to teach content specific vocabulary!!)

Here’s a Scientist’s Self Assessment I plan to use this week in a third grade science class. You’ll notice I’ve embedded a home-school communication component as well!

Here’s a Self and Group Assessment Tool I created and have used successfully with grades 4-8 to encourage academic discussions.

Here’s part a Class Behavior System program my teammate and I have used for a few years now. We tweak it regularly… The weekly self-assessment and twice quarterly goal setting have really strengthened student- family conversations around progress at school. We use the data (student-collected) as the basis of our Student-Led Family Conferences.

Before Open House, we complete this Personal Responsibility Self Assessment on our team. Then, at Open House, we weave in some of the elements of Personal Responsibility that we plan to encourage during the school year in our talks with families. We revisit this list often throughout the year, students add new ideas to it and we track our progress.

Here’s another self-assessment that supports student reflection and analysis around Quality of Work. I like to use it on days that we add work to our portfolios.

I hope you’ll consider trying these out! Modify them to meet your needs and please let me know how they impact your students’ learning.

How are you encouraging reflection, goal-setting and self-assessment?