Earlier, this mid-winter, I completed a self-assessment of student motivation in my classroom practice according to Mike Muir’s Focus 5 strategies. I’m a big fan of these five because I believe they represent measurable, DOABLE dynamics one can easily affect in one’s classroom.

I was a bigger fan before I realized how relatively week my practice appears to be based on the evidence I make readily available: my classroom blog.

My methodology for the self-assessment meant going through two-plus months worth of blog posts and tagging each lesson with the applicable Focus 5 strategy.  I then used Tagxedo.com  to create a tag cloud.  This gave me a visual to see the frequency of those Focus 5 in comparison to one another.

I shared the initial results and reflections  with my colleagues in our MCL course and received some feedback.

Several of them hadn’t noticed my sticky notes on the screen and that’s okay — they noticed the same things I had noticed and had some good suggestions for how to share the results.

Rather than put the results all in narrative for this blog, I continued with the visuals and used ThingLink to make an interactive image that includes my strengths, weaknesses, and plan for improvement.  Also you will find links to my lesson that I believe highlight each of the Focus 5.