Student Contributor: A. McDonnell
Students turn in work to a bin, 3 bins provided each with different label. This lets me know the confidence level each student had in the assignment turned in and then based on grading who needs extra supports.
When students turn in their assignments to me, there will be three different baskets each labeled differently. One thumbs up, one thumbs sideways, one thumbs down. This allows the students to self assess on how well they felt they completed and understood the assignment. This put thought on me while I am grading for the different situations and who needs supports further. This allows me to see who thinks they understand but don’t, or doesn’t think they understand but do and so forth.
This goes into the supportive phase. The students are evaluating themselves before the grading process and it allows me to gain some insight on where the students are at. I will be able to identify quickly and with ease who needs supports and where. From there, I can group students however I find necessary to make sure that they fully understand the content before moving forward. For example, the students that turned it into the thumbs down section but got everything right, probably just need to work on confidence in the section. Students that put thumb sideways and got some answers correct and some wrong, probably need the material presented to them in a different way.
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Tool Source: Pinterest
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I used the self-assessing turn in bin tool for my 7th grade English language arts class. It’s a suburban environment with 19 students. The set-up, planning, and explanation to the students was easy, and the bin itself was cheap. The success of this tool was made by the students, they fully understood its premise and reasoning and liked the idea. They knew I would have a better gauge of how confident they are with the work provided, and they knew they would receive feedback. It gave them a sense of ease knowing it was okay if they were not sure of their work, if I can also see they were not sure. The students knew their role for this tool and executed it to perfection, turning in their assignments based on their confidence in their work. The only adjustments I would make is adding a bin for questions about the assignment or assessment they are turning in.
I used the Self Assessing Bin in my 7th and 8th grade Math class. It’s in a rural area and each class has about 29 students. The set-up and explanation for this strategy was fairly simple, and materials i luckily found pretty cheap as well. It took a bit of time, but after starting to use it, the students began to kind of like using the bins because it was a little bit of feedback that they had over the lesson we went through and how well they were understanding the content. I would have them turn in their warm up sheet with a few notes on the back and any questions that they still didn’t understand about the section. The students felt like they were able to ask for help about specific things over the topic and not feel like they were on a stage when they had a question they felt like they needed to ask. The main adjustment that I ended up even using in my classroom is having the students write any questions they could think of on a separate page or on the paper that they still had so we could answer the repeating questions that we saw.