CFCE -- Quality Tips

Jason Schmidt, science teacher at Greenville Tech Charter High School, shares his experiences using Consensograms.

I used a pre-unit Consensogram using thumb tacks. The nice thing about this is that I could tell that my students feel confident about the content. It has given me confidence about challenging them with higher level thinking sooner in my curriculum. Also, lots of times, I've noticed that when students simply acknowledge their confidence, they are more likely to persist through challenging content and less likely to "give up and shut down".

I used the Consensogram at the end of the unit to assess student learning. Because I had a few students still in the IDK (I Don't Know) range and some on the edge of the "decent" range, I decided to delay my test by a day to provide some concentrated study and review strategies for the test. We'll use the review time to get closure on our unit project, visit the projects from other groups, and highlight our science notebooks for important information. Because nearly all of the "sort of" students moved up to at least the edge of "decent" I feel the need to move on to the test especially since I have some more enthusiastic "TEACH" students way at the top! I am also aware that some students in the IDK may be surprised to find themselves more competent than they feel. I'm going to try this again in the next unit, too: Classification and Properties of Matter.

For more information about

how Jason implements

Quality in his classroom,

contact Jason Schmidt at

Greenville Tech Charter High School.