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I teach high school math (currently mostly juniors and seniors but I have taught lower level classes as well). I am starting my second year grading by learning targets. I give tests every Wednesday , using a cyclic method. Tests are broken down by learning targets (you see a learning target and then 3/4/5 questions about that target. Every test is 25 questions, with approximately 17 or 18 of them being on "old targets" that have been assessed before, and the rest being assessed for the first time. I used to leave targets on the test for 4 weeks so students had multiple opportunities to demonstrate their mastery. However, this year, we have moved to the block schedule, so I leave targets on a minimum of 2 weeks, but if at least 80% of students have mastered the target, then that target will drop off the test. Students that do not have a target mastered before it drops off may come in during our academic support time to get additional help and then work some problems to show me their mastery. I will then change their grade to reflect their current knowledge. I grade on a 4 point rubric, which I have attached. Students earn a maximum of 3.5 on the test. In order to get a 4, they need to do application problems. These are problems that are more difficult but still test that specific target. Many times they will be word problems. I always tell students that application problems are DESIGNED to be more difficult.that is the whole point. To earn a 4/4 means you have gone above and beyond. This method of assessment has been very helpful to me and my students. They understand exactly what they need to study for each test. Parents conferences are very easy. It is no longer "Suzi needs to work on Chapter 9" but rather "Suzi needs to study how to solve systems of equations by elimination and graphing special functions". That makes much more sense to parents, and allows them to help their child improve faster because they don't have to study everything but only very specific things.
I no longer grade any homework. This was a huge turn around for me. I was a firm believer in grading every assignment every day. This caused lots of students to get poor grades simply because they were not compliant, rather than that they didn't understand what we were studying. I have had lots of my colleagues question this. How can you NOT grade homework? How do you know what the student knows how to do? Isn't that what assessment is about? That is what I do every week (and every day during class). I had no idea who did the homework when I graded it. When the student takes the test, I know exactly what they know, and if they don't do well, I get the opportunity to discuss the target with them one on one. I also hear that I am lucky I have upper classmen but not grading homework would never work for freshman. Why not? Is that really a motivator for them now? Are your students being motivated by the fact that you are grading homework? How many of them are being punished with zeros for not doing homework, even though they understand the content? I do give homework every night. Students have suggested problems to practice the days learning targets. Students are told to do enough homework so they understand the learning target. We go over questions every day. Even without grading it, I know who does and does not complete homework. We have the discussion in class about poor grades generally come from lack of practice (i.e. not doing enough homework). Not grading homework gives students a grade that is reflective of their knowledge rather than their compliance.
I have made changes as I went along, and I know I will continue to make changes as I learn more. The one thing I do know is that I will NEVER go back to traditional grading. It just doesn't make sense any more.
Lori McDowell
Mathematics Teacher
Waupun Area High School
Waupun, WI
Posted: 11/30/2008 6:42:22 PM by
Janie Pollock | with 0 comments
This is now my second year working with formative assessment and my first working with the standards-based scoring program,Webgrader. Over this past summer I was brought into a workshop with Jane E. Pollack to discuss various formative assessment strategies to improve our students’ performances academically. My school recently shuffled things up and made me the ELA teacher for 5th grade, so now I would be responsible for close to 100 students. On top of that, our school is now inclusion. During one of our summer meetings, our reading specialist and Jane E. Pollock introduced our group to the web-based gradebook which at the time made me even more overwhelmed. How was I going to be able to concentrate on formative assessment, inclusion, get used to having four times the amount of students, and be able to figure out an online grading system?
I was one of those who barked that there just wasn’t enough time for everything.
Let me be the first to say that I am not that computer savvy. I mean I can send an email, look up info on the net and compose a writing sample on word, but that is about it. When I went home that night, I jumped on webgrader and began to play around. Within a half hour I knew that this could be a very useful tool, but it still seemed like a lot of work ahead of me. I was lucky enough to have a killer reading specialist who guided me on how to put standard into the system, that took some time, but it wasn’t that hard to do. Once the standards were put in, it was smooth sailing.
To make a very long story short, I think that every teacher would benefit from using the electronic standards-based gradebook. It is so user-friendly that I was able to train some of my colleagues in hours. I have an inclusion teacher in my classroom for most of my day so that does make it slightly easier to do two things at once. It literally takes us about 5 minutes to come up with an assessment, and another 5 minutes to enter them into the computer. Webgrader gives us the ability to come up with quick assessments on any subject matter and quickly enter it into the computer and get instant feedback on that student and their progression. We can create specific assessments for certain students as well as not assess students if we choose. It is totally the opposite of what I originally thought (that there wasn’t enough time). I am still learning all of the tools webgrader offers and would like to eventually hope to use it as the report card generator at our building.
I love the fact that I can use it wherever I am because it is on the Internet. I welcome any questions or comments anyone has in dealing with webgrader. We are living in a fast-paced world with instant information at our finger tips. It is nice to be able to use that technology and information to better ourselves in providing quality instruction to ALL of our students.
Matt Gover, Huntington K-8 School, Syracuse City Schools, mgover@scsd.us
Posted: 11/24/2008 7:55:26 PM by
Janie Pollock | with 0 comments
Janie and Kellie-
I actually taught the lesson yesterday that we edited together and it went really well. I think feedback is definitely something that happens along the way naturally. Keeping the goal of the lesson in mind is the automaticity I am trying to make a habit. Eric Jensen calls this part of the lesson - feedback and error correction. He talks about the fact that students(learners) make a "rough draft" of information in their brains the first time they learn it. These rough drafts are rarely correct the first time. The brain will hold the information until there is a reason to drop or upgrade and save. Without clarification or feedback to the learner regarding their learning there might be a chance the info will be dropped or stored incorrectly.
I know you both know all this....but it helps my thinking to make the connections to brain based instruction. It is all so interrelated!
Susan L. Martin, 3rd Grade Teacher
Jacob Shapiro --Brain Based Instruction Laboratory School
Posted: 11/24/2008 8:30:58 AM by
Janie Pollock | with 0 comments
I read this comment the other day -- it may have been in Joseph J. Ellis', American Creation, that the guy who invented the wheel was not so creative, but instead, it was the person who put the other three wheels together with the first.
Reminds me a bit about how I think of state standards vs classroom-ready criteria in a curriculum that should be used for planning and scoring to improve student performances. The state standards are a nice idea, like the one wheel, but it is the other three wheels that the district level teachers have to add to make it transportation - to make it work.
It's all about the learning targets or the curriculum criteria; Ben Bloom was right.
Posted: 11/19/2008 5:44:55 PM by
Janie Pollock | with 0 comments
Here are some topics/questions my PLC group wants Jane E. Pollock to talk about...
- The benchmark way of grading is a great idea, but how do we approach parents who want a "letter" grade for their students, when we only have information on how the student is progressing through the objectives? Also, our grading system is still not set up to grade this way, how can we go about changing that? Chapter 5 in One Teacher at a Time is dedicated to a discussion about grading practices. The "benchmark way of grading" means that one is scoring to curriculum criteria and that is a separate issue from the scale that is used (NI-S-O, A-B-C-D-F, 4-3-2-1, or points and percentages). So one can still score to benchmarks or to curriculum criteria, but convert the scale to a letter grade if necessary to make the communications with the parents more effective. I always refer to this as the Celsius - Fahrenheit question. The temperature is the same, just convert for communication ease. If your grading system is not set up that way (I have to believe that you mean your electronic grading program), then you can either 1) change it by showing evidence to your administration that you need a more suitable system, 2) score in a different program and transfer data, or 3) track data on paper and transfer to your existing program.
- I would like to know more about homogeneous and heterogeneous grouping in cooperative learning and the different effects it has on ability levels. Read Chapter 7 in Classroom Instruction that Works, specifically pages 86-87. Then, read the studies identified on the charts and listed in the bibliography.
- How do other schools prepare middle school and high school students for standardized tests? How do you suggest we prepare for standardized tests at these levels? Good instruction with formative assessment is my first answer. Although, I don't think that is what you are asking and this is not an area of study for me, but there are various test-taking strategies that schools use that specify whether they are trying to 1) familiarize students with the kind of test or kinds of questions, 2) allow the students enough practice at prompts so they can start responding without hesitation, and 3) programs to deliberately help students perform better on the test material. For the latter, one should look at the Performance by Design strategies - contact person is Mike Hart at Syracuse University. They are very successful helping teachers improve scores. If you are asking about SAT, ACT, and others like that, their websites are full of examples and tactics for improvement.
- I am a middle school Language Arts/Reading and U.S. History teacher. My question concerns my perception of the need for a student to have a basic core knowledge base in a subject area as the basic criteria to be able to analyze, synthesize, and evaluate. As you can tell, Bloom is alive and well for some of us. With my level the need for that knowledge base exists, yet at the last two conferences I attended, use of the techniques in the lower levels of Bloom (knowledge, comprehension, application) were not only frowned upon by the distinguished presenters, but were made to seem harmful to the education of students. My question finally is: Is it truly not acceptable to use those traditional techniques to provide that knowledge base? How else can they acquire that base, and if the knowledge base is not significant for them, how can they perform higher level thinking in any subject area without those basic tenets being instantly available? Since we are in agreement, I'll just rephrase it the way Seinfeld might state it, "You cannot think about nothing, even though you can have a television show about nothing." It is, in fact, the factual information that students learn to retain, combine, and rewire as neural circuits that are part of the process they use for inference and other higher order thinking. Since I was not there to be able to know exactly the context of the conversations, I can only guess that the dialogue did not extend to the research about "retaining information for longer periods of time" as we indicated in the book, Classroom Instruction that Works.
- After all is said and done how can we reach those students that just do not seem to care or want to try? Do we continue forward and leave them in the dust or do we hold others back? My suggestion is criterion-based scoring so that you do know what the students knows. That is a start. Gary Nunnally in One Teacher at a Time found out about this in his high school class and shares his experiences. Among them was that he did not realize how much the students could do; he took responsibility differently and saw different and positive gains.
- What forms of alternative assessment can be done to help struggling students that are falling behind in the class? Example: a student that has scored poorly on a unit test and you know they didn't master the information but the rest of the class needs to move. What can be done for those students that need help from falling behind without holding up the entire class? It seems that one of the answers that you may hear from others is to "differentiate" your instruction. While this question begs for that answer, I will encourage that you use criterion-based scoring (ongoing formative assessment and communication of the scores), it is surprising to find out how much the students actually know and the patterns of the areas where they and others need more help. After that, there are the usual strategies of more time on task during other parts of the day, at least for the student.
Posted: 11/8/2008 2:45:23 PM by
Janie Pollock | with 0 comments
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