my many quirks...

Day 10 Prompt: What blogging classroom task takes up a lot of your energy?

 

The district where I teach has participated in the Professional Learning Communities institute by Rick DuFour and his Solution Tree colleagues. So we administer common assessments to our students enrolled in the same courses with different teachers. And then the team of teachers collect data and analyze the assessment results to determine the next best course of action within our classrooms.

 

I believe PLCs inspire communication and collaboration. And collaboration inspires creativity and rigor. And all of these actions are extremely beneficial to our students and their learning process. Every aspect of functioning as a highly effective team requires time and energy from all parties involved.

 

Currently, writing and tweaking the Algebra 1 common assessments is requiring quite a bit of my time and energy. Ongoing time and energy. Haha! And I'm actually much more of a creating lessons kind of girly...that's the fun stuff! ;) However, I spend lots of time ensuring that our new assessments are aligned to the standards. And that the questions from form to form are parallel. Now...I truly love working math problems (add another quirk to the list!), but given the choice of working assessment problems or creating a new game I would choose the game hands down.

But one of my many quirks is that I absolutely must begin with the end in mind. I simply must analyze where my students are headed so as to choose the appropriate options for their learning paths. Alas, my big picture quirk requires that a finished assessment be at my disposal before I start a unit. Otherwise, your guess is as good as mine on our final destination.

Oh goodness! Please tell me that I'm not alone. Surely someone else possesses crazy quirks that conflict with their energy-draining tasks! Spill. I'll be stalking the comment section for support. :)

This post is part of the BlogHer #NaBloPoMo challenge.

Happy Friday Eve to YOU...make it count!