28 September 2007
15 September 2007
Questions
Some questions that keep coming up....
1. How do I receive scores like 5,4,3,2,1 and get into college?
2. Where is the F?
3. We need to punish not turning work in, how do we do this in this system?
4. What does this mean in terms of GPA?
5. What does this mean in terms of graduating?
6. What does this mean in terms of passing a course?
7. Why do we need a new system?
8. How do I compare myself to other kids so I can ensure that I am on top? I want to go to a good college.
1. How do I receive scores like 5,4,3,2,1 and get into college?
2. Where is the F?
3. We need to punish not turning work in, how do we do this in this system?
4. What does this mean in terms of GPA?
5. What does this mean in terms of graduating?
6. What does this mean in terms of passing a course?
7. Why do we need a new system?
8. How do I compare myself to other kids so I can ensure that I am on top? I want to go to a good college.
Achievement Categories
A colleague asked me the other day for my explanation of the grading levels that I used last year.
I used the following achievement categories:
5=Wow!
4=Great!
3=Got it! (met the standard)
2=Nearly there!
1=Oops!
INC=not handed in.
What I wrote for last year:
Look for these categories on all progress reports that are given to you (the student.) They are much more important than the single grade that you will receive on a report card. These are indicators of how you are doing in relation to specific things that you need to know. If you see a score of a 2 it means that you are close but you need to do a little more work to reach at least the 3 level. If you score a 4 or a 5 it means that you are really putting it all together. Not only do you know the material but you can transfer it to new situations.
The point about using levels instead of traditional grades is to you and I can work together for you to improve. If you score a 1 on something at the beginning of the unit --THAT IS OK! This is just a signal that you and I will need to work together to improve what you know about that subject.
If you see an incomplete (INC) this means that you have not handed something in. I can't give you a grade on something if I can't see what you can actually do so if you have an incomplete you will need to get your work in. Once you hand in the work then I will be able to give you your score on that piece.
I used the following achievement categories:
5=Wow!
4=Great!
3=Got it! (met the standard)
2=Nearly there!
1=Oops!
INC=not handed in.
What I wrote for last year:
Look for these categories on all progress reports that are given to you (the student.) They are much more important than the single grade that you will receive on a report card. These are indicators of how you are doing in relation to specific things that you need to know. If you see a score of a 2 it means that you are close but you need to do a little more work to reach at least the 3 level. If you score a 4 or a 5 it means that you are really putting it all together. Not only do you know the material but you can transfer it to new situations.
The point about using levels instead of traditional grades is to you and I can work together for you to improve. If you score a 1 on something at the beginning of the unit --THAT IS OK! This is just a signal that you and I will need to work together to improve what you know about that subject.
If you see an incomplete (INC) this means that you have not handed something in. I can't give you a grade on something if I can't see what you can actually do so if you have an incomplete you will need to get your work in. Once you hand in the work then I will be able to give you your score on that piece.
03 September 2007
What didn't work?
Following up the post on what did work here are some of the strategies that did not work or more likely need more time and more support to work.
Grade Recovery Days.
My plan was to have everyone who was not meeting the standards stay after on Monday afternoons. This is a great idea and supported by research. This is the idea of giving a behavioral penalty for a behavior rather than a grade penalty for a behavior. My students that needed the most help would not come to this afternoon day. I would try this in another year but I would make some changes. I would start from the very beginning of the year. If students did not come after school I would immediately call home on the first offense. After that I might start a line of email communication to keep parents updated on their student's progress.
Incompletes going on after the end of the quarter.
Students are so ingrained to think that the end of the quarter is the end that they would not do anything about incompletes on their report card. If they had previously received an incomplete in another class they knew from experience that eventually the incomplete would turn into a number grade. So all they had to do was wait and not think about it and it would go away. My fault with this was not being systematic enough about providing opportunities for them to fix the incomplete after the quarter had ended. If I had it to do over I would take the day right after the quarter ended and have students with incompletes work on finishing their work. With other students I would look back at the big areas where they might need help and tell them to focus on the cumulative semester exam. The next day we would move on to the next unit. Students who still had incompletes would have to come after school until their incomplete was taken care of. If they did not come or did poor work I would call home. This is not a great plan but it is what I would try next.
Integrade Pro (IGP).
IGP is a powerful grade-book program but it falls woefully short when one tries to use it with standards grading. The biggest downfall is that no matter how hard I tried to avoid it IGP is set up to, at the end, deliver one number for a student grade. What I wanted was many grades. Grades in relation to certain standards. Imagine a course on chemistry with 10 major standards for the year. Within each of those goals there might be 2 mini-standards. So at the end of the year a student report card would have 20-30 marks in relation to those standards. This report card would also contain a narrative section about the student. I imagine this to be one page front and back--growing the total report card from 1/2 a page for all classes to 1 page for each class. IGP cannot do this. Well it can do it but it can't do it easily and it can't do it in a way that is clear for students and parents to understand.
There are some other little ones but those were the big frustrations I had last year. Even with these I would absolutely continue down this road. A road to standards grading that tells me so much more about students than giving them just one number.
Grade Recovery Days.
My plan was to have everyone who was not meeting the standards stay after on Monday afternoons. This is a great idea and supported by research. This is the idea of giving a behavioral penalty for a behavior rather than a grade penalty for a behavior. My students that needed the most help would not come to this afternoon day. I would try this in another year but I would make some changes. I would start from the very beginning of the year. If students did not come after school I would immediately call home on the first offense. After that I might start a line of email communication to keep parents updated on their student's progress.
Incompletes going on after the end of the quarter.
Students are so ingrained to think that the end of the quarter is the end that they would not do anything about incompletes on their report card. If they had previously received an incomplete in another class they knew from experience that eventually the incomplete would turn into a number grade. So all they had to do was wait and not think about it and it would go away. My fault with this was not being systematic enough about providing opportunities for them to fix the incomplete after the quarter had ended. If I had it to do over I would take the day right after the quarter ended and have students with incompletes work on finishing their work. With other students I would look back at the big areas where they might need help and tell them to focus on the cumulative semester exam. The next day we would move on to the next unit. Students who still had incompletes would have to come after school until their incomplete was taken care of. If they did not come or did poor work I would call home. This is not a great plan but it is what I would try next.
Integrade Pro (IGP).
IGP is a powerful grade-book program but it falls woefully short when one tries to use it with standards grading. The biggest downfall is that no matter how hard I tried to avoid it IGP is set up to, at the end, deliver one number for a student grade. What I wanted was many grades. Grades in relation to certain standards. Imagine a course on chemistry with 10 major standards for the year. Within each of those goals there might be 2 mini-standards. So at the end of the year a student report card would have 20-30 marks in relation to those standards. This report card would also contain a narrative section about the student. I imagine this to be one page front and back--growing the total report card from 1/2 a page for all classes to 1 page for each class. IGP cannot do this. Well it can do it but it can't do it easily and it can't do it in a way that is clear for students and parents to understand.
There are some other little ones but those were the big frustrations I had last year. Even with these I would absolutely continue down this road. A road to standards grading that tells me so much more about students than giving them just one number.
02 September 2007
What Worked?
A few people have asked me what worked with the grading I tried last year. Here is an attempt at a summary.
Incomplete instead of zero.
As mentioned in earlier posts I decided at a point last year that I would give incompletes rather than zeroes. This made sense to me since in my experience a zero had never resulted in what I wanted. I was operating under the assumption that every student would do what I had done when I was a kid. If I had received a zero I would have done something about it--immediately. But I had found over the years that giving a zero was not the motivation that I thought it would be. Most of the time (and I mean 9 out of 10) kids would do nothing about a zero. They would especially do nothing if a zero had only made their grade an 83 rather than an 87. But I also had many students that would do nothing even if said zero made their grade a failing one.
I found that giving incompletes worked to give the result that I had always wanted zeroes to give. In the past I saw zeroes as a symbol that meant, "Look at me! This is bad! Get work in!" But kids did not see it that way. They saw the number as a done deal that they couldn't do anything about. Giving incompletes sent the right message and I saw results from it. It worked in two ways. First, when it came out on bi-weekly progress reports it made students come to me and ask what they had done wrong. I would tell them over and over that the piece of missing work was so important that I could not give them a grade without it. [As a teacher in the real world I had to make judgements on which assignments truly met this standard. What I did was simply think in my mind if I could truly say what a student knew and understood without a particular assignment.] Second, when an incomplete was given on a report card it sent a clear message that something needed to be done. Students would often come see me right after report cards were handed out. This is somewhat due to the novelty of the incomplete grade but it also shows that it works as a signal for--"You really need to finish this work."
Grading work by section.
Grading each section of a paper or test to the standard that it was created to measure is one of the more successful ideas that I tried. It seems so logical but I had never done it before. If I gave a test I would just lump all of the various questions together and give one grade. I never had much of an understanding of what the student knew about specific standards I only knew how they did on an overall basis. Grading by section I was able to see exactly what the student did or didn't know. I was able to see where they knew the work and where it may have come apart for them. This was an amazing insight. As I graded papers and tests I would see a progression leading to the point where their understanding faded away. I could look at individual students and truly know what they needed as a next step. I don't know why I never thought of doing this before--it just seems so obvious. This allowed me, after the test, to focus in on specific knowledge for each student. If Sueta knew how to graph but did not understand the parts of the atom I would have her work on understanding the atom--not on more graphing.
Comments.
Our electronic grade book (IGP) is not set up to lend itself to easy standards grading. It is a tool that seems amazing because it can crunch lots of numbers but it really is a tool that guides how we grade not a communication tool that allows us to explain what students do and do not know. (More on electronic grade books to come.)
Our grading program can be forced to do some of the things that I want it to. In a perfect world I would like to see a program that allows marks on levels of achievement versus certain standards and narrative sections to match. I was able to force a passable mimic of this using IGP last year. I relied heavily on the comments section to do this. I spent a great deal more time writing both group and individual comments and I spend much more time explaining to students how they should use them. Every 2 weeks I would print out a sheet for every student and bring it to their attention. Usually I would go around while they were doing a lab. I could keep an eye on what they were doing and give them a quick update on what they needed to do.
For group comments--comments that were the same for the whole class--I would make a spreadsheet note that explained what we were working on that unit or quarter and give a reminder of what the level scores meant. (5=Wow!, 3=Got it! met standard, 2=nearly there!, 1=oops!) I would also outline what the big goals for the unit were. I forced myself to keep saying these goals aloud and to keep pointing to them so that we tried to keep focused on them. For assignments I would give descriptions, page numbers, where the work was located online, etc. This allowed students to have the information on how to finish the work if they did have an incomplete.
For individual comments I would keep running lists of comments for individual students. I tried to keep a balance between positive and negative. These comments were short but they were truly individualized. I felt that the comments helped in a couple of situations. If I had a student that was a hard worker who was not meeting the standards I was able to write to them and say that their work ethic was good and that they should keep up that kind of work. I still gave them an honest assessment of where they were in regards to the standard but the written comment gave me a chance to also say something about how they were attempting to reach the standard. Used another way the comments gave me a record of student work ethic. Often I would check homework but instead of marking a grade for it I could record something about it in the comments section. When I looked back over these for a student who never did homework I could compare their performance versus the standard to the amount of work they had done. If they did not meet the standard and had not ever done the homework or classwork then I had the explanation for their mark.
These are the big 3 that really helped me become a better teacher last year. These were the ones that made me know my students well enough that at the end of the year I felt like I would have been able to write a page about each of them telling what they knew and what they needed to work on. In the next post...some of the things that did not work.
Incomplete instead of zero.
As mentioned in earlier posts I decided at a point last year that I would give incompletes rather than zeroes. This made sense to me since in my experience a zero had never resulted in what I wanted. I was operating under the assumption that every student would do what I had done when I was a kid. If I had received a zero I would have done something about it--immediately. But I had found over the years that giving a zero was not the motivation that I thought it would be. Most of the time (and I mean 9 out of 10) kids would do nothing about a zero. They would especially do nothing if a zero had only made their grade an 83 rather than an 87. But I also had many students that would do nothing even if said zero made their grade a failing one.
I found that giving incompletes worked to give the result that I had always wanted zeroes to give. In the past I saw zeroes as a symbol that meant, "Look at me! This is bad! Get work in!" But kids did not see it that way. They saw the number as a done deal that they couldn't do anything about. Giving incompletes sent the right message and I saw results from it. It worked in two ways. First, when it came out on bi-weekly progress reports it made students come to me and ask what they had done wrong. I would tell them over and over that the piece of missing work was so important that I could not give them a grade without it. [As a teacher in the real world I had to make judgements on which assignments truly met this standard. What I did was simply think in my mind if I could truly say what a student knew and understood without a particular assignment.] Second, when an incomplete was given on a report card it sent a clear message that something needed to be done. Students would often come see me right after report cards were handed out. This is somewhat due to the novelty of the incomplete grade but it also shows that it works as a signal for--"You really need to finish this work."
Grading work by section.
Grading each section of a paper or test to the standard that it was created to measure is one of the more successful ideas that I tried. It seems so logical but I had never done it before. If I gave a test I would just lump all of the various questions together and give one grade. I never had much of an understanding of what the student knew about specific standards I only knew how they did on an overall basis. Grading by section I was able to see exactly what the student did or didn't know. I was able to see where they knew the work and where it may have come apart for them. This was an amazing insight. As I graded papers and tests I would see a progression leading to the point where their understanding faded away. I could look at individual students and truly know what they needed as a next step. I don't know why I never thought of doing this before--it just seems so obvious. This allowed me, after the test, to focus in on specific knowledge for each student. If Sueta knew how to graph but did not understand the parts of the atom I would have her work on understanding the atom--not on more graphing.
Comments.
Our electronic grade book (IGP) is not set up to lend itself to easy standards grading. It is a tool that seems amazing because it can crunch lots of numbers but it really is a tool that guides how we grade not a communication tool that allows us to explain what students do and do not know. (More on electronic grade books to come.)
Our grading program can be forced to do some of the things that I want it to. In a perfect world I would like to see a program that allows marks on levels of achievement versus certain standards and narrative sections to match. I was able to force a passable mimic of this using IGP last year. I relied heavily on the comments section to do this. I spent a great deal more time writing both group and individual comments and I spend much more time explaining to students how they should use them. Every 2 weeks I would print out a sheet for every student and bring it to their attention. Usually I would go around while they were doing a lab. I could keep an eye on what they were doing and give them a quick update on what they needed to do.
For group comments--comments that were the same for the whole class--I would make a spreadsheet note that explained what we were working on that unit or quarter and give a reminder of what the level scores meant. (5=Wow!, 3=Got it! met standard, 2=nearly there!, 1=oops!) I would also outline what the big goals for the unit were. I forced myself to keep saying these goals aloud and to keep pointing to them so that we tried to keep focused on them. For assignments I would give descriptions, page numbers, where the work was located online, etc. This allowed students to have the information on how to finish the work if they did have an incomplete.
For individual comments I would keep running lists of comments for individual students. I tried to keep a balance between positive and negative. These comments were short but they were truly individualized. I felt that the comments helped in a couple of situations. If I had a student that was a hard worker who was not meeting the standards I was able to write to them and say that their work ethic was good and that they should keep up that kind of work. I still gave them an honest assessment of where they were in regards to the standard but the written comment gave me a chance to also say something about how they were attempting to reach the standard. Used another way the comments gave me a record of student work ethic. Often I would check homework but instead of marking a grade for it I could record something about it in the comments section. When I looked back over these for a student who never did homework I could compare their performance versus the standard to the amount of work they had done. If they did not meet the standard and had not ever done the homework or classwork then I had the explanation for their mark.
These are the big 3 that really helped me become a better teacher last year. These were the ones that made me know my students well enough that at the end of the year I felt like I would have been able to write a page about each of them telling what they knew and what they needed to work on. In the next post...some of the things that did not work.
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