SMARTIE Goal Documentation:

SMARTIE Goal Data Sheet:

SMARTIE Goal Analysis:

My SMARTIE goal was to track the students who participated in class each day during my two-week takeover in order to keep as many students participating in class. Before fully taking over, I noticed myself calling on the same students who were always participating to answer my questions. There were a handful of students in my class who were always willing to answer and participate and I realized this was taking away from the other students having an opportunity to answer, or taking away my opportunities to try and increase participation. Each time I was completing a lesson, I had a paper next to me and each time a student participated I would write their name down. At the end of the day, I would go through and put an x into the chart if the student participated at least once each day. By the end of my two-week takeover, you can see I started having most of the students participate at least once during the day.

I found many new tricks and tactics to help me increase participation. For example, I had students in small groups start doing different types of word sorts for reading. When we did word sorts we would go around and each chose one word to sort. This got students very engaged in the lesson and they found joy in doing it, as well as giving them all a chance to participate. Another trick I was using was when I would ask the whole class a question and only a few hands were up, I would say " These are my only students who have an answer to this question?". This almost instantly had the majority of the class raising their hand with an answer. I would also often tell the students that it is okay if their answer is not correct, I just want to see them trying and participating. Another trick I would use is taking time for whole group sharing. Students love showing off their hard work and giving them all a chance to come up to the document camera and project their work made them very happy, as well as increased their participation. Additionally, during my two-week takeover, we were testing out a new math whole-group style, where we would split the class in half and teach the whole group lesson in two halves. Here, this provided a much smaller group on the rug and students felt comfortable sharing with such a small consistent group. Lastly, I really enjoyed using popsicle sticks to choose students to participate. If the students chose not to answer they could always say skip, but the majority would try. Doing this increased attention to me or the speaker as well as gave those students who had ideas a chance to share but they might not just have raised their hand. Many of the students would have answers but just didn't feel like raising their hands to share. 

Towards the end of my two weeks, seeing the majority of their names with an x next to it at the end of the day was very rewarding. There are some students who simply always chose to never participate, which is something we were working on finding motivators for to increase their participation. I felt as if in my two weeks I was able to bring some of the students who did not participate in the conversation or into the lesson, which was gratifying to see! With this method sometimes tracking participation was overwhelming, or I felt as if I was stuck on how to increase participation in one lesson, but overall I was able to see a nice increase in participation from my students! I was able to learn that there are little tricks or tips that can help students feel comfortable participating in class, and even finding the smallest things to motivate them to participate, like getting to show their work on the board, can really increase participation in a class. It's all about learning your students and reading the room, and this goal really helped me achieve that goal of tracking their participation and trying to increase participation as much as possible. I was able to learn that there are so many chances to participate during the school day and there are so many ways to get students to want to participate!