PDSA
Plan - Do - Study - Act
by Julie Timm
April 07, 2008
Throughout the year in the district newsletters you’ve probably read something from Dr. Mulligan about implementing Plan-Do-Study-Act, or PDSA, in the classroom. PDSA takes a systems approach to improving learning results, in other words, it will help us continually improve so that we are ready for 4th grade!
As you saw at parent-teacher-student conferences in the fall, the students in 3T keep their own data folders that track their individual progress for their behavior and academic subjects like reading and math. All year long students have been setting goals for themselves. Then they would choose appropriate actions to meet their goals. After a period of time we would revisit the data to see if individually they were getting positive results. In class, we refer to this process as being a “Super Powerkid”.
We have now implemented PDSA in our classroom. For this group of students it’s not that big of a change. They will still be setting goals, writing actions, and get results, but now it will be done as a whole class. Each week we will have 1 reading goal, and 1 math goal. The teachers, and students then have a separate set of actions to reach that goal. At the end of the week we will have some type of assessment to see if we reached our goal. Our weekly goals are written to help us reach our overall goal. (You will see our overall goals on the back.) If we meet our weekly goal we will celebrate and discuss what worked so well. If we do not meet our weekly goal we will discuss what went wrong and what we can do better to improve next week. Each week I will update you on our new goals and how we did as a class the previous week.
Reading Learning Goal
100% of the students in Mrs. Timm’s class will meet or exceed the 3rdgrade reading expectations as measured by a DRA score of 38 or above and an Oral Reading Fluency score of 109 or higher on the DIBELS test, by the end of 3rdgrade.
PLAN
This week we will focus on…
• problem solving and making decisions
*We will know that we have met our goal by 100% of students scoring 4 or better on the comprehension reading test.
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Math Learning Goal
100% of the students in Mrs. Timm’s class will meet or exceed the 3rdgrade math expectations as measured by being in the shaded box, or to the right of it, on the quarterly Math Benchmark Assessment.
PLAN
This week we will focus on…
• Solving problems using the partial-product algorithm
*We will know that we have met our goal by 100% of students scoring 3 or better on the Friday Exit Card.
