Picture this… It’s January or February and your students are entering your classroom. You are greeting each student as they enter the classroom and in-between greeting students you hear yourself say, “Lana, what should you do after your backpack has been put away?”, “Jordan, where should you be right now?”, “Maria, should you be playing with that right now?”. It is only 10 minutes into the day and you already feel like your students have forgotten many of your class expectations! Have you had a situation like this lately? I have been in this spot myself many times and often feel like my upper elementary students forget some of our class expectations in the middle of the year.
Instead of feeling frustrated day in and day out about my students not following class expectations, I decided to do something about it! That exact situation is the reason I tried using Glows & Grows charts as a classroom management technique AND it was a game changer! Instead of feeling like I was saying “don’t” and “no” every day, I now was celebrating with my students what expectations they were following well while encouraging them with the expectations that they needed a little additional review on. Check out how I use Glows & Grows in my classroom below.
Steps to Create A Glows & Grows Chart with Your Class
- Have Your Students Review & Brainstorm Expectations: Start by having your students work with a partner to jot down what they think the class is doing well and what they think the class needs to improve regarding class expectations. If you have a class contract or expectations chart in your room, tell students to use that as a reference, but to think specifically about what the class is doing well and needs to improve too. I like to have my students write what they are doing well on one color sticky note and areas to improve on another color sticky note. Then, they place these sticky notes on the board. As they place them on the board, I group together similar sticky notes.
- Decide on Class Expectation GLOWS: Have your students come back together as a class and start with discussing the GLOWS that they brainstormed with their partner. I always point out to my students that we always start with what’s going well and what makes them proud of our class. I start the chart by putting a GLOW that I have seen the class do the past couple of weeks. As students share GLOWS or I share GLOWS that many students wrote on sticky notes, I have other students do a thumbs up if they agree that it is a GLOW for the class. If there aren’t many thumbs, we discuss it. If most students gave it a thumbs up, I put it on the GLOWS side.
- Decide on Class Expectation GROWS: Next, we move to the GROWS and repeat the same process that is in step 2. I remind students to be specific on their GROWS so that we know as a class what we need to improve. For example, instead of saying, “Work on lining up”, we talk about what times we need to work on how we line up. So, we may put “Work on lining up before lunch and recess”.
- Revisit the GLOWS & GROWS Chart Daily: We revisit this poster at the start and often at the end of every day. If we made any improvements on a GROW that day, we put a tally next to it. After about 3 tallies (you can decide the amount with your class), we move the GROW to the GLOWS side. Check out the picture below to see any example of this.
Are you teaching virtually this year or would like to create a digital version of this chart? I have created a FREEBIE just for you! Click the button below to check out my digital Google Slides version of this chart this is easy to edit and easy to create your own digital Glows & Grows Chart!
