Adventures in grading: The next chapter

It seems some people were born with a teacher's soul. They can teach naturally, the way a gifted athlete can be seen in the first steps of a toddler.

That's not me.

Some people always have known they would be teachers. They played school and dreamed of their own classrooms. I loved the idea of being a writer, of traveling across the globe and telling stories. If you asked 20-year-old me about my future, I would have quite passionately and confidently explained that I would soon be a writer for Rolling Stone and married to a rock star, penning my incisive prose backstage, sitting on an amp.

But before I was even good at it, I completely fell out of love with journalism and completely in love with teaching students.

I sacrificed this for you, children!

Appreciate me! (photo from @theselvedgeyard)

I had to grow my own teacher's soul from days and hours and years in front of kids.

One of my earliest meditations concerned whether I was teaching or whether I was assigning. That distinction is another part of what fueled this experiment with the grading scale.

So, as in my previous examination of grades in my AP class, the goal in my senior college-prep English class is to de-emphasize points and tasks in favor of an emphasis on learning and reflection.

I'm using the same truncated 50 to 100 scale with my seniors, but fewer of the assignments are formative. (My AP kids take many more tests and complete many more writing assignments, so I guess it stands to reason that they would have more formative assignments.)

With 14 weeks under my belt, here are my observations from senior English:

Nearly everybody will pass senior English:

When we return from Thanksgiving each year, I send my annual holiday "here's who might fail this class" email to counselors. I may not send it this year. Out of 65 students, only two or three students are at risk for failing.

Now, those kids, including one who is habitually absent, aren't passing like champs. With a floor of 50 percent for their grades, they are pulling less than 60 percent. They aren't meeting college admissions requirements, but they can, even at this point, dig themselves out of the hole they've created.

For me, it has always been important for kids to have this lifeline. But I want it to be an honest hope, not a fill-out-this-assignment-from-September hope. With three or fewer kids in this boat, I can pull them aside after they've gone back over what they missed and sit down with them, chat a bit about sonnets and Beowulf and ethos, pathos and logos and see for myself if they've learned the material.

Everybody else, the vast crowd who has been showing up, writing, reflecting, reading, etc. - they will pass.

Time, sweet time, to figure it out:

Long story short: I love Cornell notes. Sad ending: Kids hate Cornell notes.

No doubt in large part because my colleagues are using Cornell notes, my students have a much better attitude toward taking, keeping, reflecting on, reworking and summarizing their notes this year.

And because this grading scale is so forgiving, students have more time to figure out how to take Cornell notes productively, in a way that helps them instead of merely earning them a few points. We spent a respectable chunk of class time this semester going through the Cornell note process: sharing, inquiring, reflecting, etc.

I'm not finding student notes, with information they copied taking up two thirds of the page and an empty space on the other third, crumpled in the trash.

If students took a poor set of notes, no big deal. We talked about it, set a goal and moved on. There was no effect on students' grades when they received one or two low grades.

The problem that needs to be fixed:

We use Accelerated Reader, and in my class, AR counts for 20 percent of the overall grade. Many students (and some fellow teachers and counselors) believe that failure to complete AR is what leads to a student failing English,

Not so.

I use a VERY generous scale, elongated so that a student who earns merely eight points in a grading period earns 70 percent for AR. We don't use reading logs; kids don't have reading goals. I have a master's degree in Education, with an emphasis in Reading, and I have no faith in the AR test for reading levels. I teach seniors. They can help elect the next President of the most powerful nation on Earth. They can pick a book on their own and live with the consequences.

But this grading scale automatically puts them at 50 percent, which is enough to keep whole crowds of kids content with their AR grade.

I teach kids who desperately need to read more, and this truncated scale may unintentionally de-emphasize independent reading.

My bad.

I'm not quite sure what to do about this dilemma, but I will be lost in thought about it during upcoming long runs.

Grading scale adventures

I have just the thinnest grasp of number sense, just enough to calculate the cost of a sales item or my Black Jack hand. And as any teacher will attest, knowing something doesn't mean you can explain it.

So, bear with me as I explain how I altered my grading scale this year. I understand it - I really do. But I will probably suck at explaining it.

Here's a start: This blog was written by a Super Cool Guy - no doubt more about him in a future blog - and it appeared last Spring when I was spending many long runs reflecting on what my grades really meant. And what I really wanted them to mean.

Here's the blog: David Cohen gives me ideas to chew on while I run ...

Before school started, my Super Mathematician and Techy friend helped me set up a grade book that sets the floor at 50. (I would have liked to have a scale of 0-50, but the Aeries program balks at that.)

Every since computers made this miracle possible, I keep weighted categories of grades.

Add to this my change (for the most part) last year to formative and summative assignments. Kids get a few points but always full credit for a formative assignment, with the idea that this is practice and they earn credit for practicing, not for the quality of the product on which they practiced. Then, I have a few summative assessments, where they need to show me what they've learned, and their grade is (presumably) based on the quality of their learning.

I just posted 12-week grades - like a boss, considering everything else that's gone on this six weeks. I'm going to start with my AP class and save my senior English class for another blog post.

Here's what I've noticed so far:

The vibe in my AP class is quite different:

Students take frequent AP-like reading tests that count for 30 percent of their grade. These are short, usually 10 or fewer questions. All except one at the end of the grading period are formative.

I haven't even sort of had time to look back at last year's class to see how they performed on these reading tests compared to my current scholars. But there's a distinct difference in how worked up my kids are about these tests.

Sure, these kids get anxious when it's a summative reading test, but what always disturbed me before was the auction atmosphere of test review, where kids try to barter for more points. I think of one particular very bright, very determined and very articulate young lady and realize nearly every memory of interacting with her includes her dickering for more points. Gah.

Hasn't happened this year. Not once.

Missing assignments aplenty in my AP class:

But don't think I've created a lush, richly bold utopia in my AP class. Kids are blowing off assignments like they just won the lottery so take your education, and the horse it rode in on, and shove it. And here's the deal:

It doesn't really matter.

I can't help myself ...

If a student is doing decently on vocabulary tests and completing decent work on summative assignments, zeroes here and there on formative assignments do essentially nothing to their grade. And so we find this:

I worry that my kids see how a missing assignment affects their grade in my class - hardly at all - and consider how a missing grade may affect them in another difficult class - quite a bit - and ... triage. I worry that they aren't putting in the practice because they have so much other stuff to do, and it just doesn't matter.

Until it matters, and that may be too late.

The answer might be more summative assignments.

I asked my kids why they are missing assignments; 18 out of 35 students responded to a Google Form survey (another awesome tool of which I'll no doubt sing praises soon.) A little more than 40 percent said they didn't complete work because they "didn't have time". I'm chalking that up as support for my triage theory.

But then there's this:

I don't feel bad about giving a zero for really awful work:

Mrs. Wensrich, my junior English teacher, would issue edicts against certain words or sentence types and declare those crimes an automatic "F". Took me at least two failed assignments to figure out she was serious, and then I learned,  really really learned, to stop using "really" in academic writing.

In my own classroom, I rarely have the heart to give no credit for work turned in to me. There was such a large gulf between passing and a zero, it just seemed cruelly uninspiring.

But, with the floor at 50, I've grown to embrace the zero, especially for the kid who continues to make the same careless errors I've been correcting since August. As it turns out, I mark a zero, and the grade book gives them 50 percent.

And I give a little nod to Mrs. Wensrich each time.

In sum:

It appears these changes have taken some of the focus off of grades and points, which is a large part of what I was hoping would happen.

The next step is to ensure that my students' energy is now channeled into learning, and learning with joy, if I can help it.

I'd love to hear your comments about grading scales and such. :)