Many of you are aware that I’ve been trying to follow 180 Days by Kelly Gallagher and Penny Kittle. Recently, I attended a day-long workshop by the pair, and they ended with the reminder that we can’t adopt their whole practice at once, but if we can try to get 5% better each year, that will be progress.

Good for me to hear, because at times this year, I felt the authors would be disappointed in me if they knew I had let some things drop. I still have to work against a tendency to see where my practices fell short of the gold standard in 180 Days.

Which prompted me to go back to my notes from last summer. I had jotted down a page of my favorite ideas from the book, the ones I would most want to adopt:

1. Quickwrites with mentor texts
2. Write in front of the students
3. 10-minute reading time at the beginning of class
4. Have students write more volume but I grade less
5. Try using criteria instead of rubrics
6. Get students talking every day
7. Choice in research
8. Portfolio grade at the end

Of those eight favorites, I incorporated seven into my teaching practice this year. Woo hoo! Some of the daily activities such as quickwrites and reading didn’t happen every day, but an overall tone was established in my classroom that you are a reader and writer. At the moment, I have stacks of student notebooks on my desk. The volume of their writing makes me so proud of my students. I rarely collected notebooks and gave out nominal points for them. Yet even yesterday, they were writing book reviews and ranking all the books they’d read this year from easiest to hardest.

So yes, more volume and less grading on my part. I also tried out all sorts of single-point rubrics, criteria lists, and other ways to assess, and I tried out methods to reduce my grading time and to get them writing more. (Most recently, students wrote four drafts for a single essay and instead of grading each draft, I graded their overall process + metacognitive comments. More volume, less grading!)

I didn’t get to the portfolio at the end, and I was wisely advised to hold off on that. But I did use a new system of organizing student work in shared Google folders so that by the end of the year, they essentially did have a portfolio. They spent a couple days this week looking back over all their work to reflect on how far they’d come. Next year, I will have a better idea of how to lay the groundwork for a true portfolio project.

The good news is that I have a ton of experience to build on, plus a stack of teacher books to delve into, so that I can refine these wins and improve for next year. I have to fight my perfectionism in order to type this final line: I am proud of my progress.