I challenge I have faced this year is trying to help students understand and track their own progress in terms of completing the necessary number of tasks for particular NCEA Level 1 and NCEA Level 2 History internal assessments.

I have tried to address this challenge through the use of Vital Tracking sheets that use colour-coded spreadsheet cells to indicate levels of task completion: RED indicating that a task has been started, YELLOW indicating that progress has been made on a task and GREEN indicating that a task is complete.

Over the course of 2017 I have made adjustments to the Vital Tracking colour-coding system in order to place greater emphasis on certain aspects of the tracking sheets in the hopes that students will respond more readily to the information being presented to them. Initially, unstarted tasks were indicated by a blank cell but I have now changed these to BLACK to bring attention to the fact that work on a task has not yet begun and NEEDS to begin. I have also begun highlighting student names in RED to indicate that I am concerned at the number of uncommenced BLACK tasks that a student has beside their name. I have begun highlighting the names of students who have completed all tasks to a satisfactory level in PINK which is Mr Brown's favourite colour and emphasizes the fact that these students are 100% on track to achieving their credits for a particular assessment. Student feedback on the updated colour-coding scheme has been positive and I will continue to monitor the entire Vital Tracking system over the course of term 3.