Diagnostics
Reflection on Class and Student Profiles
The fifth Standard of Practice speaks to the importance of knowledge and professional practice and learning with regards to ensuring student learning and effective practice. Knowledge of our students should be used to inform our practice and direct our ongoing professional learning each year towards meeting their learning needs. Creating and maintaining accurate class and student profiles provides educators with the knowledge to be effective facilitators of learning and to seek out new ways to meet students' learning needs.
When we believe that it is our students who are the starting point for our unit and lesson planning, not the course content or textbook, we try to live that belief by getting to know our students’ learning needs and preferences and then responding to that knowledge through the opportunities we provide in our classrooms. (Ontario Ministry of Education, p. 34)
Teaching from a textbook is a personal pet peeve of mine as an educator, and this quote from the course reading sums up one great reason why creating student profiles is so important. Throughout our practice and this course, we’ve all had numerous opportunities to read and ponder curriculum documents. As a young teacher, I often found the process of engaging with the documents scary and difficult. The vague, broad wording of the learning standards often left me at a loss for what I was supposed to teach my students. I wanted someone to tell me step-by-step what I needed to ‘cover’ in my classes. Since the documents didn’t lay it out in detail, I often fell back on teaching pages from the textbook, and crossing out the learning objectives in the curriculum book once we’d read through some pages in our text and answered the questions.
Having a bit more experience with curriculum and unit planning, the reasons for the somewhat vague nature of learning standards have become clearer to me. One of the reasons is so that we as educators can exercise professional judgement and choice in how we will teach our students, what we will teach them, and the resources that we will use to do so. Each class and individual is different and responds better to different approaches and topics. Knowing the nature of our learners by creating profiles early in the year allows us to view the curriculum through our students’ eyes and create units and lessons that will excite and engage them.
Having a bit more experience with curriculum and unit planning, the reasons for the somewhat vague nature of learning standards have become clearer to me. One of the reasons is so that we as educators can exercise professional judgement and choice in how we will teach our students, what we will teach them, and the resources that we will use to do so. Each class and individual is different and responds better to different approaches and topics. Knowing the nature of our learners by creating profiles early in the year allows us to view the curriculum through our students’ eyes and create units and lessons that will excite and engage them.
“Individual student profiles can point the way to greater precision and personalization in instruction and assessment, particularly for students who: are not reaching their full learning potential; are facing social-emotional, behavioral, or organizational challenges; have personal circumstances that are interfering with their learning; have become disengaged from school activities; may have special education needs.” (Ontario Ministry of Education, p. 43).
Our most hard to reach students are the ones who need our understanding the most. It can take months to finally understand and get to know students who struggle in class, and to begin to use this knowledge to teach them more effectively. Creating student profiles makes this process of learning about hard-to-teach kids intentional and organized. It allows teachers to keep detailed records of growth, interests, and issues. Also, at the beginning of the next school year and grade, these profiles can be shared with students’ new teachers, saving them a lot of time in assessing and teasing out information from the student and allowing them to begin effective instruction immediately. (Ontario Ministry of Education, p. 44)
A few questions remain for me after reading about student and class profiles. I was really inspired to read about how some school are creating databases of student profile data for their teachers and staff to access. One question that I feel I will encounter as I try to implement this in my school is how to determine which data to include in a school-wide database and what needn’t be added. A full class of twenty or more student profiles is a lot of reading, and the more data-rich the profile the more difficult it becomes to skim for important data. The templates provided on pages 60 and 61 of Learning for All (Ontario Ministry of Education, 2013) are great long-form profiles, but I feel that teachers might benefit from a more streamlined data set in many circumstances. I would like to create a simple set of data that teachers could use including only the most pertinent information for teachers to use at the start of the year as students transition to a new grade. I wonder if anyone has ideas about criteria and information that you think would be of in this situation. Comments would be much appreciated!
Reference:
Ontario Ministry of Education (2013). Learning for all: a guide to effective assessment and instruction for all students, kindergarten to grade 12. Toronto: The Queen’s Printer for Ontario.
Ontario Ministry of Education (2013). Learning for all: a guide to effective assessment and instruction for all students, kindergarten to grade 12. Toronto: The Queen’s Printer for Ontario.
