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.

"Your gonna do what?"

I have been asked several times over the past few weeks if I was crazy for changing my grading system. The questions that follow are typically good and they have been constructive as I put all of this together but the level of doubt is surprising.
Most of the doubt centers on wether this type of system will lead to a large amount of "our" type of students failing. There are a few points that I would like to flush out and I apologize if I seem to ramble a bit.

1. If "our" students are defined as the ones who rely on participation grades, completion grading, and other types of padding and if we accept what I said about a grade earlier, then I would say we have been lying to these students, their parents, our peers and administrators about their successes or the degree of failure. Most importantly, and this has inspired my change, we have been lying to ourselves. We have been assigning grades, that are intended to inform all parties involved, that the students with a passing grade know the content. If we are including grades that aren't intended to reflect the degree of mastery, then sorry to use such strong language but where I grew up that is called a lie. I know that not all students fall into this category and I am speaking in general terms about our students but even the students who do well benefit from using this type of system because of it's accuracy.

2. Another point I would like to make to those with reservations is that if I only changed the way I assess the students, then yes, I would end up failing a lot of "our" students. Along with the reworked grading system, I have also changed the way I use the grade as feedback. Students will have the standards listed on a coversheet in their notebook with a list of the performance indicators. I will provide space for students to predict their level of understanding for each SP as they complete the assignments and plot the progress of their mastery over the content as they receive feedback through assessment. Students will be required to revisit material until they reach the target level for the standard. Our school has put in place times throughout the week to be used for targeted remediation. This is key to keeping those students who typically fall through the cracks.

3. Finally the hardest point to accept as a teacher; If I do have students who fail the course, then I have to say that I own that failure. The truth is that in the past I have let students make up work in the "eleventh hour", knowing full and well that the student wasn't seeking mastery, they were jumping through hoops. I have done this, in part, because I didn't want to "own" that failure. From now on, the student will know that in order to bring up a grade, they will have to demonstrate that they know the content. I am going to make a poster that says," If you were accused of knowing Biology, would there be enough evidence to convict you?" The challenge will be tracking, communicating and intervening in a timely and constructive manner. More on that to follow, for now students are coming soon and fina

Getting started

As an educator, I have always had a struggle with the grading policies pushed down to us from the district. I have also struggled with modeling my grades on the systems of most of my peers. The origin of my strife seems to tied up in trying to answer the question, "what is a grade?"
I think it is the scientist in me, but to me a grade is a measurement. And, like all measurements, we strive to make them both accurate and precise. The grade is a measurement of how much the students have learned. Historically, in my classes, the grade has been a measurement of more than that (or less depending on how you look at it.) Students could "earn" points for turning work in on time, organizing their work, participation Grades and so on. This system is partially based on data unrelated to the learning objective. The system is not precise!

Another problem that I have had in the past is that the assignments and activities were not necessarily designed to measure student learning as much as they are to facilitate it. However; we often assign point values based on completion of the assignments. The point values are typically averaged in and used to measure a students understanding of the content. The system is not accurate.

This year I am taking a big step and I am going switch to a Standards Based Grading System in an attempt to more accurately communicate my students level of understanding. I intend to use this blog to journal my thoughts, struggles, and accomplishments during the year. Hopefully, in the process, someone else may benefit from my journey.

First Opinions from Admin

I had a meeting with my administrator sometime mid-spring semester and asked her if she would support me through implementing standards-based grading in my classroom. She gave the approval for me to go forward with planning based on what she knew of it. The plan that I posted here was the first write up of what I informally presented to her. I added a few details but the bulk of what I wrote stayed the same. She did not require that I keep her updated, but I have found over my years that it makes life much easier if you keep your administrator in the loop.

Anyway, so I unveiled the plan and I got three questions in return:
1. How do you plan to communicate the plan and its benefits to parents and students?
2. What do you expect will happen to the distribution of grades? More As, Fs? Stay the same?
3. How can you make re-assessment more mandatory and less invitational?

I had a response for the first two, but the third one threw me for a loop. I don't have anything in place to make sure the students reassess. At this point, it is up to the student to reassess if they want to. They don't have to. Aside from staying after school (which isn't an option because I am coaching fall and springs sports) or coming in early (which very few students are willing to do)...I don't know what to do.

So that is where I am at with the process right now. I am thinking about how to make the process less-invitational. I hope to come up with a plan (or "acquire" a plan hehe) that doesn't require me to spend countless more hours at the school building. Maybe an in-class arrangement? I dunno...