Saturday was a good day, I relaxed a lot and by the evening felt rather creative so I decided to make some DIRT Sheets for Directed Improvement and Reflection Time.
The idea will be that pupils will be provided with feedback in their books on how they could improve certain pieces of work. Then they will have the opportunity to improve a piece of work during DIRT. They will focus their improvements on one of three key areas – improving their spelling, punctuation and grammar (SPaG), their answer as a whole or trying to improve the level of their response (levelling up as I like to call it).
I’ve never used DIRT sheets before but figured it would make it easier to demonstrate the work completed during DIRT as well as making it easier to find the improvements in their books.
At present the school policy is that you leave comments in the books and pupils respond to them every 4 lessons. I find that because I only have my classes twice a week, by the time I mark the work and get it back to them they need reminders of what the task entailed and this usually results in botched attempts at improving it. This way I hope they decide how to improve their chosen pieces of work and it will result in better quality improvements and greater progress over time.
I’ll give it a go and see how it works. Update to follow.
You can download free PDF versions here
Have you ever used anything similar? Does it work for you?
Acknowledgements – Source of the lined paper in my DIRT sheet