Quality Tool of the Week: Consensogram

Our school has recently taken the initiative towards implementing Quality Tools into our teaching. If you aren't famliar with quality tools, they are also commonly known as the Baldridge model or continuous improvement. The idea is to use these quality tools to help improve student achievement, motivation, goal setting, and ownership of student learning.

I have decided to share a tool each week for you to possibly try in your classrooms. There are so many tools you can use, so I recommend trying to implement one at a time until you feel comfortable using them in many ways.

There are various ways this model can be used in the classroom, but I won't bore you with all the details. Today, I am just going to share my favorite way. It is called a consensogram and it can be used in a variety of ways and it is the easiest one to implement into your daily routine. A consensogram is a tool used to gather data quickly to gain a group's perceptions, knowledge, effort, or understand about a particular subject.

Here are some examples:

I use it most often to have students select their reward of choice. I write several different options on a piece of chart paper, and students put their sticky dot on their choice. It's clear to see the class choice.

Other ways you can use the consensogram:

*Surveying the class by asking questions to learn about them
*Gauging whether or not students are prepared for a test.
*Behavior
*Pre and Post Test knowledge
*Learning what students favorite topic learned was
*Letting students determine what they want to learn next
*Reflecting on activities such as field trips, lessons, assignments, etc...
*Determining which vocabulary words students know
*Displaying data (grades, MAP test scores, standardized test scores, etc...)
*Assessing which skills students need more work on
*To identify student motivation (or lack of)
*For student views about classroom/school environment
*What worked well-wrapping up a unit

There are so many other ways you can use this tool. The sky is the limit! Please share if you have any ideas of how you use the consensogram or how you would use it if you never have.