CEC FIPP Activity Report
Name Ruth Roach
Date August 31, 2010 through
September 2, 2010
Department English
FIPP Partner Chris Richardson
Class title & section # English B, Section 9635
Name of Activity/Strategy Letter-to-Self or Goal Setting
Category: (Please select only one.) (Reminder: You will submit one report from each of
the categories.)
Classroom Activity
Classroom Environment
Classroom Expectations
Feedback & Evaluation
Homework & Out-of-Classroom Learning Experiences
Briefly describe the activity/strategy, providing enough detail so that a colleague can
replicate the activity/strategy.
1. Introduction I wanted students to set specific goals to master their problem
areas of English in this beginning level, basic skills English class, ultimately to
achieve student success.
2. Set-up & Supplies I did not need additional supplies or set-up beyond the
syllabus, and they provided their own pen and paper.
3. Directions Students were sent home from the first day of class to write a journal
entry on "the past, present, and future of their writing" as homework. They
should discuss in their journal entry their past writing and/or previous teachers'
comments on their writing. Next, they should discuss their present feelings
about writing based on their past experiences with writing, and finally, they
should state where they wanted to be as far as writing level in the future. At the
start of the next class, they were asked to look over the scheduled topics on
the syllabus once again to identify specific grammatical topics they needed to
master individually or personally, to add to the future picture of their desired
personal writing level. They were also told to give this journal entry the heading
of "Letter-to-Self" so they could look back at this letter at the end of the class
and, say, in 2015, to see if they achieved their goals.
What worked well? Students really expressed their dreams well in this journal entry or
letter-to-self, which I find positive as I have heard many times that people who write
their goals are more likely to reach them and I had a more general goal declaration in
my classes as part of their self-introduction posting at the online class discussions area
of the class website of all my web-enhanced classes. Here, I learned about both my
students perceived and real weaknesses, and their superb ambitions. I feel motivated to
help them achieve their goals in English excellence as I discovered that I have several
aspiring book writers and an aspiring English teacher! Furthermore, several were
actually analytical of their own writing when told to scrutinize the topics on the syllabus
to identify their areas of special concern. This made them more self-aware.
What would you change? Students would benefit from additional time--at least five
minutes more-- for those who came in late or who were in class for the first time to add
and therefore needed time to complete the first part of the journal entry about their past
writing and present attitudes about writing based on past experiences. Leading to this
conclusion, in reading their journal entries I observed that some did not get beyond the
general future goals, and I am assuming that this is due to a lack of time for the reasons
mentioned. They would have needed slightly more time to peruse the syllabus topics
and write their specific writing mastery goals in addition to their general ones. For those
students with incomplete goals, I may return them to ask that they complete the entry
with specific grammatical goals. I may also bring a board and post-it stickers, much like
we did in our FIPP workshop, to have students write those grammatical goals and set
them forth in this visual way; and then bring back the board with their post-it stickers at
the midterm point in the course and the final week of the course to see which ones can
be moved from the "goals" side to the "achievements" side of the board.
Would you use the activity/strategy again? Why or why not? I would definitely use this
strategy again. I like the increased self-awareness they showed, among those who
actually said specifically they would focus on "verb agreement, spelling, and fragments,"
for instance. That is a marvelous statement to receive from a beginning English student,
and I anticipate better success from that student at the end of the class from attending
to specific topics so closely. In future, I want all of the students to be that specific.
Please describe any student learning and/or changes that you observed after the
implementation of the activity/strategy. As stated above, I anticipate better success from
students who have found specific areas to improve because I think they will be more
invested in the class content and attend to it more closely as a result. I was surprised to
have experienced greater satisfaction from a personal goal-setting exercise in FIPP,
and I paid closer attention to the workshop content that I had previewed closely like this
and identified as my particular areas of interest. I am hopeful that this exercise will have
a similar desired effect on my students as it seems, based on personal experience,
more powerful and transformative when students see their needs for themselves rather
than are lectured about their needs, especially with a follow-up midterm check on
progress before the final week of class as the final supervised check.