5 Classroom Activities that Will Help you Meet Any SLO (Yes, Really!)
If you’re a teacher, it’s no doubt very important to you that you help students meet the benchmarks for their grades and move successfully to the next. Only by deepening their understanding of math, literacy and other subjects can students successfully move on to secondary education, higher education and meaningful careers.
One way in which the state and federal governments are trying to encourage meaningful, lasting learning is through the implementation of student learning objectives. These target specific skills to strengthen lessons and impart the competence students will need to succeed. As the Reform Support Network says, “At the heart of an SLO is a specific learning goal and a specific measure of student learning used to track progress toward that goal.”
Happily, American students are improving overall. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, the average reading score for 4th-grade students in 2013 was 222, measurably better than 217 in 1992. No doubt this is in part due to the fact that parents read to their children more than they used to: as of 2005, 86 percent of children aged 3-5 had parents who read to them, as opposed to only 78 percent in 1993.
Student Learning Objectives to the Rescue
If properly implemented, student learning objectives help teachers bring more science to their art, strengthen instructional support to the classrooms and improve the quality of the outcome.
~ William J. Slotnik, Founder and Executive Director of the Community Training and Assistance Center
Many of these skills, however, are still lacking. The introduction of student learning objectives, or SLOs, helps teachers and schools target specific goals, set up an environment to achieve them, measure those goals and reflect on what works. If we use these more frequently and effectively in our schools, we can help increase and cement student learning and ensure the success of our youth.
To accomplish this, it helps to have a set of stock activities on hand that you can turn to for help accomplishing any SLO. Rather than having to devise new activities each time, you can use these repeatedly in a variety of lessons and subjects to deepen student understanding and work toward objectives.
- Reading Nonfiction Text
Reading nonfiction text is one of the best things students can do to enhance their learning and help them meet challenges in a range of subjects and learning environments. Introducing each lesson with a short piece of nonfiction text is an excellent idea no matter what subject you’re teaching: math, Earth science, engineering, history, art. Each of these subjects will benefit from reading that helps students deepen their understanding of the subject and hit important literacy benchmarks.
- Socratic Discussion
Socratic discussion is blowing up in classrooms around the world, because it is such an effective way to introduce topics and draw out big ideas. Coaching students through 20-minute discussions (and sometimes longer) that focus on a particular topic and answer particular questions is an incredibly effective way to help them exercise their critical thinking muscles and internalize the subjects you’re currently focused on. Plus, it also imparts valuable communication and analytical skills, as they listen to and assess their peers’ thoughts.
- Prototype Design
Helping students learn to design and build prototypes is one of the best activities you can do to meet any SLO. A prototype is a model for something, such as a car, a catapult or any other device. It can even be a computer program or a model for artistic pieces. The idea behind building prototypes is designing and testing a product that you may or may not want to duplicate.
Why is this important? Because prototypes teach all sorts of math and literacy skills. While student math skills are increasing in recent decades (for instance, 8th graders earned an average of 285 points on math assessments in 2013 as opposed to 263 in 1990), we still need to ensure that students are getting all the math exposure they can. Building prototypes provides an excellent, real-world opportunity for students to take measurements, follow a plan, record data about what works and what doesn’t and apply it to new prototypes. This also helps with nonfiction writing and discussion.
Education is the most powerful weapon, which you can use to change the world.
~ Nelson Mandela
- Guided Internet Research
Internet research is something that adults use everyday and students will need to be proficient at it in order to succeed in later life. Don’t just simply sit students down in front of a computer, though; break them up into groups and set them a specific task related to the SLO. This will encourage deep thinking and problem solving skills, both of which are needed to meet objectives and be successful later.
- Reflective Journaling
Reflective journaling on a lesson or activity encourages analysis, evaluative thinking and creative problem-solving. Where possible, you should always give students a brief period to journal on what they learned, which will help them cement the knowledge and be more incisive about future learning.
Tracking Your Progress
Of course, in order to track the progress of your student learning objectives, it’s necessary to keep track of the lesson plans themselves. That’s where Planbook Plus comes in, an easy way to keep track of all your lessons in every subject, for weeks or even months at a time. Now you can make sure you’re working toward SLOs in an integrated way, teaching all subjects in tandem rather than in isolation and building bridges of student knowledge.
With flexible features that allow you to organize your lessons, use simple-to-customize lesson plan templates, integrate thousands of national and state standards, and share your planning with students, colleagues and administrators, you will find meeting SLOs easier than ever. With these activities in your pocket and a thorough planning system at your disposal, you can help students meet their goals more easily and more reliably than ever.
