Tracking Student Progress and Intensity of Classes — Connecting These Ideas to Student Learning
As a teacher, how do you know your students are learning?
Although this question may seem simple to answer, the way a teacher or coach answers the question has profound philosophical and practical effects. Changing the answer affects what is taught (curriculum), how information is presented (instruction), and the ways students practice and perform (assessment). In addition, combining the answer to the question with how quickly the learning needs to occur changes the tempo of the learning, producing widely different learning environments.
Knowing how well your students are learning requires tracking student progress; this process can take many forms. A teacher can track student progress for every student during every class for every activity — or once for the entire course on one activity. In addition to the number of times that students progress is tracked, the intensity of individual classes can be different. The intensity can range from every class at maximum intensity to every class at low intensity; changing the intensity level gives different experiences for students and teachers.
To guide my thinking around part of this question, I’ve developed a couple of different scales — plus considered how the scales interact on a two-dimensional graph.
