Making MAPs Meaningful: Individual Student-Teacher Goal Setting Conferences

Ever wonder how you would go about making MAPs assessments meaningful for all of your students?  How to motivate them to take ownership of their own learning, to set goals and create plans to reach them?  Last fall, our middle school consisting of 1300+ students and 100 teachers took this issue head on and succeeded. 

As part of a building wide SMART goal focused on helping all students improve their reading skills, we decided to hold individual student-teacher goal setting conferences with every student following each MAP assessment.  The entire building devoted an hour and fifteen minutes of instructional time four times throughout the school year, to meet with students one on one, to set goals and monitor individual student progress.  At the first conference, advisors shared with students their Baseline RIT score, Growth Target and Target RIT score.  Beyond setting goals, students identified strengths and weaknesses in their reading skills and outlined three to four action steps that they would take to help reach their goal.  After the initial conference, students and teachers used the conference time to discuss their progress, action plans, successes and struggles.  Students even charted their own progress on a graph or individual growth tracking form, which provided a visual to the represent the progress they had made. Everyone was involved! Teachers who were not conferencing with students were in the classrooms meeting with kids and leading activities connected to the reading initiative. 

As teachers were monitoring the individual progress of  their students, administration was monitoring the progress of the building.  By spring of 2012, our middle school made a 7% gain in the number of students who met or exceeded their growth target on the NWEA MAPs reading assessment.  This improvement can be attributed to the steps we took to personalize learning for our students and the efforts we made to make the MAP more meaningful. Clearly, these conferences proved to be a powerful tool used to increase student motivation and ownership and today have been woven into the fabric of our school and culture.   Before you suggest standardized assessments don’t have meaning to your students, consider individual student-teacher conferences focused on goal setting and progress monitoring as a way to build significance.