One of the big questions that arises when attempting a flexible grouping structure is how to keep track of students achievements and next steps. Several years ago I worked with ccpensieve.com from The Daily 5 site. This is an online record keeping programme for conference notes. My past experience was limited to individual conferencing of Reading. This year I am attempting to use it for individual conferencing in both reading and writing as well as group teaching sessions in reading and writing. My aim is to increase student agency of determining next steps and ownership of their learning process. ​

Here is an example of writing conferences for an individual student. I complete the observations and Next Steps with the students.  ​

This year I am working in a collaborative professional inquiry of 3 teachers. We are documenting our meetings on a shared google doc as well as documenting data and analysis in a large scrap book. At times it feels like we are repeating ourselves, doubling or trebling our workload as we are recording data in multiple places. On the other hand, the scrapbook in particular is helpful in focussing the data on our target students, rather than the class as a whole.

Already I am seeing changes in my practice that appear to be contributing to strong gains in reading, our gaol area. The biggest challenge now is to find ways to support a similar growth in reading for my newbies who have just arrived into a very different classroom environment than the initial children experienced.