I am the product of Duepner and Mittler and if you were to apply all stereotypes and generalities about the descendants of such strong German lines, you wouldn’t be too far off base judging me. My colleagues have asked me to apply or restrain my “Inner German” in various circumstances and, with all things, it hinders or aides from time to time. My recent week of examining assessment with Dean Shareski, Andrew Churches and completing the book by Rick Wormeli, Fair Isn’t Always Equal, has challenged my “Inner German” more than the competition in the World Cup’s Group D.
Andrew Churches and Dean Shareski both mentioned in their sessions that grading is one of the most polarizing conversations you could have with a group of teachers. It seems that we all have a preconceived idea of what grading should be (Churches suggests that is almost solely based in how we were graded) and we rarely move too far away from our model. Well, my immersion in this topic may be just enough to get me to move away from some of my previously strongly held beliefs.
The first issue will seem completely obvious to folks and I boldly am professing my ignorance as an educator. It is the premise that grading and assessment need to reflect mastery. It seems that discussions of this sort always lend themselves to sports analogies, but while my teams are judged by their win and loss record, the final destination is the State tournament and we will be remembered for our performance there. If we lose a few games along the way, it is very clearly wiped cleaned by our exhibition of mastery in the final contest and a resulting championship. Wormeli says “ In differentiated classrooms we grade on a trend, emphasizing patterns of progress over time. We don’t hold a student’s past performances against him or her” (159). This is a challenge to my thinking because it removes the absolute of what the numbers declare. Wormeli suggests that the solution is trusting ourselves as educators and professionals to assess the progress of our students. My fear with this thinking is that it will take the rigor out of the classroom. But Wormeli and others argue that it will allow you to push your students further in the pursuit of mastery and that the use of well-constructed rubrics are a huge help as well. So now I examine grades not as a reflection of your behavior as a citizen of our classroom and your ability to produce certain results on a certain day, but as a reflection of each students trend toward mastery.
Here are a few other topics that came up:
· Don’t penalize for late work
· Don’t ever put in a zero
· Don’t offer extra credit
· Don’t penalize grades for absences or behavior issues
· Don’t grade homework
· Do tier assessments
· Do engage students’ creativity and problem solving skills: climb higher on Bloom’s Taxonomy
· Do allow students the freedom of choice
· Do create better assessment tools
· Do give lots of formative assessment opportunities followed by “Knowledge of Correct Results with Specific Actions to Reduce the Gap” (Churches)
· Do have students spend time reflecting on their own progress as learners
Each of these has a much longer explanation with plenty of research to support it and are not all as alarming as they may seem. But the bottom line for me is that it has forced me to be a “Reflective Practitioner,” as Dean Shareski mentioned, and truly ask myself why I grade, what I grade, how I grade and what is truly the best for judging mastery and helping students understand themselves as learners.
4 comments:
Interesting, Lynn. I have always found certain numbers suspect, but not numbers in general. What I mean is that there is often what strikes me as a false sense of precision in the 100 point system, the system that my students seem most accustomed to when they are trying to figure out the numbers I use. I recall one student remarking in a blog that he enjoyed prize speaking more this year because it was only worth 20 points and last year it was worth 100 points, and I slapped my forehead thinking that some circuits may be so deeply burned into people's brains that they are (nearly?) impossible to rewire. On rubrics: is your sense that in order to keep track of students progress that the rubrics in any one area--say, essay writing--ought to be a fairly standard set of skills for the entire year? Middle school used to have a set of folders that they kept student work in with just such a check list on the side so students and teachers could see areas of continuing challenge and progress. My problem in making such lists is that they become--it seems to me anyway--impossibly long and detailed, once you begin to enumerate all the things that could possibly go right or go wrong in an essay for a diverse array of students, I have a checklist of such length that I do not feel it is communicating effectively or being used by students in an effective way. I need to find a way to chunk it down and keep it manageable. Any ideas?
Lynn,
I appreciate your honesty and willingness to make changes. I know that much of this stuff isn't simply done and solutions can be challenging.
I'm still grabbling with many of these ideas myself so much of my workshop was literally, in "draft" form.
Thanks for sharing where your head is at, that's useful for me as I continue my own journey. This itself is a great example of formative assessment, both for you and me.
Lynn
I am reflecting on my own reading of Wormeli and thinking 1) he needs better taste in sweaters. I mean really! How John Denver can you get. 2) I found the chapter on assessment, pre-assessment and formative assessment VERY helpful in generating all sort of ideas for the coming year. I am not sure how I skipped forward to chapter 9, but I did somehow after that and i find all my marginal notes there are basically aggressive and notations of disgust and abuse of the author's reasoning. The discussion seems to have come loose from the few empirical moorings that ground the earlier chapters. One of the issues I am starting to have in reaction against some of the limitations of the UbD approach is the utter conceptualization of learning, by which I mean, the extent that these texts promote understandnding and learning as the encoding of distinct conceptual "nodes," which as much of a listmaker and node noodler as I am, necessarily and i think dangerously distorts a lot of what learning and knowing--understanding-- is. I myself love lists, boiling things down, and am very sympathetic to a key terms/concepts approach that encodes and references a larger frame of knowledge which discrete terms. I am also aware of some of the dangers of that encoding: it is idealized and does not always seem to take into account the EXPERIENCE itself as formative and somewhat beyond simplifications of lists and grids. Knowing the themes versus the EXPERIENCE of reading a text, knowing and being able to spot figurative language versus thinking and living through it--I dunno, they take place in different parts of the brain..anyway, the later chapter seems to rely too heavily on appeals to authority,(well, authors X and Y hold a similar opinion that they can't be bothered to root in empirical data either) and does not differentiate the types of homework and different goals it might have sufficiently. Sorry just working through my own reading at this point, and as I confessed above, it is oddly disjointed at this point by my weird reading habits.
Chris, thinking of our conversation and your comment here about the difference between mastering concepts and having an experience with the literature brings me to question the reason we want these students to master these concepts in the first place. It also brings to mind those of our students who really cannot grasp the literature we read on anything but the most basic level.
What is our hope for them in this experience? I do agree with you though, on your comments on Wormeli and add that the chapter on how to keep a differentiated gradebook was a complete buzzkill for me. Granted we are lucky that we have so few students we can know them as learners and keep their progress in mind, but all of the checks and systems was even too much for this German. As I attempt to go offline for a few weeks, I hope to think more of this challenge you brought up about concepts vs. experience. I don't want to get too high and mighty about English (like no other subject has what we have), but I don't want to deny the opportunities we have that perhaps others do not.
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