Superpowered Learning with Checklists: Google Sheets + itslearning

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Superpowered Learning with Checklists: Google Sheets + itslearning


Featuring tips from Corie Williams, CNHS / CEHS UDL Facilitator

What do skyscrapers, surgeries, airplanes, and Warren Buffett all have in common?

Have a guess?

The answer: A checklist is critical to their success!

What:

A checklist is a simple way to track a task, manage information, and reach a goal. Odds are, a checklist has helped guide your process to reach an end goal at some point during the day-from compiling a grocery store list to gathering ingredients for a recipe. Lists are helpful tools for managing our day to day tasks when our brains need a reminder (or ten).

Why:


The significant impact of checklists, however, goes beyond usefulness for daily tasks. Checklists break down complex tasks and ensure consistency and efficiency, especially if more than one person is working on a project. Lists equip individuals with strategies to manage emotions as well as a complex task at hand. Furthermore, lists can develop metacognitive awareness of intellectual processes, helping to identify areas of struggle and success. Checklists do not make a task "easy" or oversimplify a task. Checklists can be the difference between success and failure-even in serious situations.

In his book Checklist Manifesto, surgeon Atul Gawande describes the importance of checklists in the medical profession and argues that lists should be a tool used by all, and often. Specifically, Gawande states: "checklists provide reminders of only the most critical and important steps-the ones that even the highly skilled professionals using them could miss. Good checklists are, above all, necessary and practical." Motivated by the success of checklists in helping to prevent catastrophes in the airline industry, Gawande spent time studying the practices of Boeing and other major airline providers and applied his research in hospitals in Boston. After eight hospitals implemented specific checklist standards for surgeries, surgery complications reduced by 36% on average and cut the number of deaths in half. 

 In the business world, checklists also play an essential role, anywhere from managing the inventory of a small business to helping guide the decisions of billion dollar investors like Warren Buffett. A team of psychologists, led by Geoffrey Smart, studied a small group of venture capitalists over time and noted the vital role of lists in the success of said capitalists. The study showed that the capitalists who took a more checklist-driven approach when selecting employees had a far higher return in investment, and a higher success rate in avoiding a circumstance where they regretted their hire.

Pretty powerful-right?

If checklists are effective for pilots, heart surgeons, and businesses, shouldn't students use them as well?

Checklists can help students in many ways:


  • Improve engagement:
    • Increase autonomy and help students feel in control.
    • Minimize threats and distractions by removing obstacles to success, such as chunking complex tasks and removing any lack of clarity on what part to do next.
    • Provide students with a strategy to manage work and emotions.

  • Provide options for developing executive functioning skills and higher-order thinking.
    • Foster the development of metacognitive awareness of intellectual processes.


How:

Teachers can provide checklists to students in many ways. If you are looking for a simple way to share checklists with students all within the itslearning platform, you can "app smash" the itslearning assignment tool with a Google Sheet to provide each student with an individualized, editable checklist-in only a few clicks!


Curious to get started creating your own? Utilize the video or written guides below for assistance.




Have an idea you would like to share? We would like to hear your ideas! 
Submit the survey or via the "Contact" tab.



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