Self-Assessment Rating: 3
At Mater Gardens Academy, students are empowered to personalize and self-direct their STEM learning experiences. Students are provided with the opportunity to set and monitor their personal goals and track their data through leadership notebooks. The leadership ship notebook opens the doors for students to take ownership of their learning through learning contracts, tracking data, and individual mission and vision statements. During data chats, students are self-reflective and express their growth and areas of improvement. The leadership notebook is the perfect tool to engage students in elaborating in discussion with their teachers.
In addition to the leadership notebooks, students interactive with a variety of personalized adaptive technology programs. i-Ready is an online program for reading and mathematics used at our school. The program assists in determining student needs by personalizing their learning and monitoring their progress. Students review their performance and track their learning gains throughout the year using their leadership notebooks. Accelerated Reader is another program that is used at Mater Gardens at this personalized to the student needs. Accelerated Reader monitors reading practice and progress. The program provides the students with a reading level range that reinforces fluency and comprehension. Students are provided with different reading selections of their interest. The program lends itself in providing student choice.
An area of improvement is to continue to reinforce a problem-based mindset where creativity and critical thinking is demonstrated through trial and error. By providing more opportunities to engage in STEM challenges, our students will be able to strengthen their acceptance that failure leads to the path of success. This allows students to think critically when brainstorming and testing possible solutions when presented with a challenge. As learners, this is a difficult mindset to obtain due to the feeling of discouragement. By continuing to build a school culture that embraces the idea of testing and revising in order to reach a solution, the sense of student empowerment will increase as well as the creation of self-directive learners.