I try to be an elegant, erudite and articulate professional, but sometimes I turn into a geeky fangirl, and I just can't help it.
It happened again at the recent AVID National Conference in San Diego. Super Hero Educator Pedro Noguera was the key note speaker Friday morning and then hosted a "continuing the conversation" session, where I was willing to stand for more than an hour to soak up his insights into all things education in our country. (Luckily, a seat in the front opened at the last minute, and I made a mad dash for it.)
And then, when he finished his Q & A and nobody approached him, I sprinted to the man to see what he had to say about my current nagging problem:
With a 50-point grading scale, students can do well with tons of missing work. So my whole goal of focusing on learning instead of racking up points seems to have resulted in possible learning with no regard for completing assignments. Not exactly the purposeful journey into student wisdom that I had in mind.
Here I am, trying to explain this while simultaneously shaking with nerves in the presence of Dr. Noguera:
His advice: If I want students to do the work, I have to be there while they do it.
Sure enough, the assignments kids blow off are the practice stuff I assign as homework. The rhetorical precis in my AP class, AR in my senior classes. The tasks we work on together, such as collaborative, multi-step exercises along the lines of Cornell notes and essays, my kids ARE turning in those assignments. So ... hmmm.
I will certainly change how students complete rhetorical precis next semester. Those are such an important key to developing analytical reading and writing skills that I will refocus and carve out class time for those assignments.
However, in the same way I cannot keep my cool around really awesome people, at some cellular level, I cannot devote a bunch of time to good old sustained silent reading in my class. Come at me, if you will. But SSR in my classroom has resulted in a huge waste of valuable face-to-face time. I only see those kids for two hours every other day. That's my only time to work with them, create a culture, simply be with those little folks. No way I'm spending that time watching them turn pages. But ... I'm thinking about book groups, book chats, something collaborative that ties out-of-class reading to meaningful in-class reflection.
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.
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. :)
