The Data Speaks!

I was super excited/nervous for final exams to come around this year. I mean, this is what all the grading reform has been leading up to--right? All my hard work hinged on one test score. Well, the moment came and went and I am pleased to say I have great news. I graphed my final class averages (all the standards tests) and the final exam scores. The correlation was certainly positive, but I needed a number! After using the conveniences of Excel (**drumroll**) 0.89 correlation coefficient!!!!! This is super exciting. I almost could have given my students JUST the final exam.

A few things I noticed:

• The Special education students were the subgroup that had the lowest correlation coefficient. However, it was still 0.74. 
• The high performers had the highest coefficient at 0.91. 

I am anxious to see what May will bring with the state testing. So far all the tests (to include the final exam) has been made by either me or my department. The state test in May will be the true measuring stick for what I've been teaching this year.

On another note, I haven't been updating as much as I had hoped for this year. I will, of course, do my best to post relevant information in a timely manner. That may or may not happen more often next semester.

Purposeful Assignments

Ever since I have been using Standards-Based Grading in my classroom, I have noticed that I have been making my assignments much more purposeful. In the past my schedule would look something like this:

Monday:5.1 vocab/notes, guided practice
Tuesday: 5.1 guided practice, independent practice
Wednesday: 5.2 vocab/notes, guided practice
Thursday: 5.2 guided practice, independent practice
Friday: 5.3 vocab/notes, guided practice

Etc..., etc..., etc...., the boring cycle continued. Every now and then I would throw in a cool activity or two, but I would stick with the routine for the most part. I would assign problems just because it was independent practice day and not necessarily because it was what the students needed at that time. I would "worksheet" the kids through the chapter and then we would test at the end...simply because we had "covered" the material.

Now that I am working with SBG I feel like every assignment I give has an actual purpose. I am trying to learn more about what my students know or how I'm going to teach them something in particular. I don't lecture. I don't really give too many notes. I don't give homework. I give very carefully selected assignments.

The reason I am able to select the assignments so carefully is because I know what each of my students know and are able to do. Instead of giving endless worksheets, I give "mini-quizzes" several times a week. When the students are performing well on the mini-quizzes I give them their standard test.

It really seems like this system might stick around my classroom permanently.

...thoughts

As the semester is getting further along, I am enjoying SBG more and more.  I truly do not remember what it was like to be on the other side of the grading fence. I know my first two years of teaching I spent my days “grading” endless stacks of paper. Usually I ended up putting “+”, “+-“, or “-“ on the papers which had nothing to do with the actual content mastery. If they finished the entire assignment they got a “+”. If they finished more than half but not all of it they got a “+-“. And if they finished less than half (but at least turned something in) they got a “-“. I had so many papers to grade that I never really gave any one paper a good review. I was basically grading participation—behavior.  I was the teacher at the parent conference that scrambled to defend my grades when a parent asked, “Why is my student failing if they keep getting 100s on all the homework and classwork? Doesn’t that mean they should know it for the test?” And then I would say something like, “well, um…yea…anyone else wanna talk?” Embarrassing. I knew it wasn’t a good practice, but I didn’t know how to really fix it. I am so thankful that I finally decided to jump into SBG this year. This system makes sense. I am still embarrassed at parent-teacher conferences, but the difference is that I am embarrassed for my colleagues that haven’t figured it out yet. I watch them scramble to justify silly grading practices just like I used to. I really want to help them, but this is a philosophy that you kind of have to adopt on your own before you are willing to listen to others ideas on the "how to do it" side of things. 

One of the principals at my school said, "If you just change the grading system but nothing else, it won't be any better than it ever has been. In fact, it might be worse." I agree with that statement. SBG is more than just a way to grade papers. It is an entire philosophy. It has changed the way I teach and assess. I truly believe it is making me a better teacher.  

Wow...it's been a while!

As the title says it has been a while since I've posted, but I have reasons!!! (Don't we all?) Anyway, things are calming down at work a little bit and so I should be able to post slightly more often (but no promises).

At this point I have given my first four standards quizzes. I have a surprisingly low failure rate right now but I feel like it truly represents what my students know and are able to do. I love that I can look at my gradebook and know *exactly* what skill each kid needs to reinforce or refine.

Other things I like:

• The kids are starting to really buy into the system. I still get the "are you grading this?" type of question, but I no longer have to answer it. It never fails. When a student dares to ask that question, another student (un-prompted) says "Yes, she will grade it and give us feedback on it. This is evidence." Score in my column!
• The students really know what they know and what they don't know. If you ask almost any kid in my classes why their grade is what it is...they could tell you which standard (in their own words) that they need to improve. Score again!

 Things I need to get better at:

• Keeping a better paper trail of the formative formal/informal assessments than I do. At this point I grade them and give them back to the students. Occasionally (if I have used clickers or some other technology) I have kept records of the scores. Most of the time I just return the quizzes marked up with feedback to the students and move on. My plan is to devise some type of paper gradebook system that I can keep up with easily, but so far all my attempts have failed.
• Giving more timely feedback. Ideally I would like to give students their "evidence" back within day. Currently it is taking me a couple days. The more immediate the feedback is, the more meaningful it will be for the students.

Standards Quiz #2

Today I finished grading my second round of standards quizzes. We just finished standard #9: The student will be able to describe and/or order a given set of real numbers (rationals & irrationals). This quiz was much easier to grade than the first one. It only had 9 questions (3 easy, 3 medium, 3 hard) and it was all multiple choice. I made the students show work anyway. However, this saved me a lot of time. I was able to quickly skim the multiple choice responses for right/wrong and then any questions I wanted further clarification on I could just look at their work. I finished grading all four classes worth of quizzes before the day was over. I had just as much information as I did from the previous quiz and I was able to spend more time providing written feedback.

I will probably do the majority of my quizzes this way from now on. The state test is multiple choice anyway, so they might as well get used to it.

As a side note, I used a web-based program called Discovery Ed to make the quiz. It is a service my district has subscribed to. You are able to select the course and then drill down to the individual standard. It provides a whole back on easy/medium/hard questions. The questions are remarkably similar to the state test my kids will take at the end of the year. This has saved me a TON of time this year. I can pick through my choices and have a beautiful standards quiz in a short amount of time. So thankful for Discovery Ed.

First Assessment - Grading

My students took their first big standards quiz on Wednesday. I had no idea what to expect about grading. I didn't know how long it would take or how difficult it might be to score it correctly. So far I have finished two out of four classes and it is taking about twice as long to grade as it would have last year under the old system. However, last year I only used multiple choice tests. I could easily go through and mark off a, b, c, d, etc... This first standards quiz was strictly free response and essay. Therefore, I am not basing my "time it takes to grade" on this one assessment.

Overall, I like this system a lot better so far. The usual points or percentage systems never really made me too happy. Even though I have only graded two classes, I am pleased with the results. The kids who are currently failing are the kids who don't know what they are doing and that is a small percentage. I have one in each class right now that is failing. The rest are spread out As through Ds. The quiz scores match up perfectly, I feel, to what the students actually know.

Tomorrow I will be handing the quizzes back. The students are going to chart their own progress. They all have a "standards" tab in their binder (go me!). I will work on giving some valuable feedback to each student. I want them to know exactly what they should work on in order to improve their score.

I'm excited to give the quizzes back. I'm interested to know how long it will take for the students to really catch on to the grading system. I am sure once they fully understand it, they will appreciate it.

I'll keep you updated! As always, feedback is welcome.

The Stick and the Carrot

Well I knew this question was out there and up until today I have largely ignored it. As I talked to a colleague, the conversation drifted to standards based grading and they asked how I intended to motivate students without assigning a grade value to their daily work. Well... it's a multi-pronged strategy.

Shhhhh, I don't intend to broadcast the fact that the work doesn't "count". The work does count. I need to get the students to understand where the value is to be found. The work will still be used to assess the students progress toward the target learning goal. If I handle the feedback right, students will use it to track their own progress, set goals for themselves, predict their performance on formal assessments, and design their own remediation in hopes to generate ownership over their work.

This replaces the grade value with value over the investment that they made in their own education. Lofty goals you say? I agree, it will be a challenge but I feel that I have a lot of support from systems already in place school wide and in our small learning community. Also, my administration is supportive and another colleague of mine is also utilizing this grading system. I have access to great technology, the Smart Response clicker sets we use are amazing for providing the quick, effortless, informative feedback needed to pull this off.

I certainly don't have all the answers and I have not put any of this into practice. I would like to have some concrete effective strategies for dealing with the apathy that we already struggle with. It's not like grades have been an effective motivation tool for many of my students in the past.

One thought that I had recently, I think it originated with a tweet, was to bring professionals in the science field in to teach, advise, mentor or just talk about the relevance of education. I would like to have professional motivational speakers come and speak to our students on a regular interval. I think that these are some small steps that we can take to beat back the apathy. But really, in order to defeat it, a larger investment needs to be made at the community level.

Students arrive soon, very soon. I will have some actual feedback instead of the eduspeak chatter, (necessary eduspeak chatter), I have provided so far. It's time to put my money where my mouth is.