In 2007-8 I had a beautiful year of teaching in which I presented myself to my students as an expert coach. I taught math, and I worked with each of them to find something in math that interested them. I helped them practice mathematical curiosity, creativity, and communication. Students in my classes that year learned more about math than any of my other classes ever had. It was glorious, and student reviews of the class showed an enthusiasm and verve I hadn’t seen before. I had helped them find new wonders.
And then… I betrayed them all. Students who had finally come to love math in my class found themselves suddenly right back where they’d been for TEN YEARS: getting a C.
I actually didn’t see it coming – I thought we were in some sort of renaissance where subject matter and investigation were the most important things, and the importance of the final grades would be trivial. After all, what’s an “A” in the face of epiphany and wonder? When I was preparing their final grades for the school, I forgot that these grades were so important to students, and their parents, and even their choices after high school. A ding on your GPA could be the difference between getting in to your school of choice and being locked out!
This was a big wakeup call. I realized it was unfair to run class without respect to the context of the school, and I think it’s unfair for a school to run outside of the context of the wider community.
But: I still want to run classes like the old “salons” from the renaissance! So?
4-Step Proposal for the Education Renaissance
Here’s my four-step plan for starting a renaissance without betraying anyone: full community participation, transparent communication, and a transition away from sorting and towards supporting.
STEP ONE: TEACHERS AND STANDARDS-BASED GRADING (SBG)
The first step can be done by teachers today – in isolation or in PLCs. In private – without even telling students, parents, or principals – teachers can keep separate, standards-based records. They can use common core standards or five standards they made up on a napkin, but here’s the important part: defining what you want students to learn, and then checking to see if they learned it.
This doesn’t require a change away from grades, GPAs, homework, participation points, or extra credit. The teacher can just pick a few target skills or topics, and pay special attention to whether the students are learning it.
Specific suggestion for teachers: Every month, pick one standard, like “My students use appropriate vocabulary.” Every week, for each student, write down your estimation of that student accordingly. You’ll find you have no idea for most students, and that’s ok: you’ll be forced to think of ways to improve what you know about what your students know. Maybe your standard is too general or too specific, and that’s ok, too: you’ll learn the right level for your standards. You’ll love the focus you get as a teacher from specific teaching and assessment goals. You’ll start to feel more empowered as you decide what’s important in your class and what’s not. Your assignments and feedback will become more purposeful. You’ll be able to form teams of students based on homogeneous or heterogeneous skill levels. All this, and you don’t even have to tell students you’re doing it – you don’t have to worry that this is going to freak anyone out. Identify a practice you want to cut – like grading homework, or preparing complex materials – to make time for this, and it will infuse the rest of your time with new vivacity.
STEP TWO: DEPARTMENTS, SCHOOLS, AND SBAR
(KEEP THE GPA)
This is where administrators can help.
Teachers are going to love step one so much that they’ll be eager to start reporting grades entirely in Standards-Based Grading (SBG) – transforming it to Standards-Based Assessment & Reporting (SBAR). Parents and students have to be ready for this, though, and that means the whole school, or at least the whole department, has to be on board. This is a big change, and parents and students must believe that it’s a good one… or it will be a bad one.
It has to be clear how SBG is going to work in terms of the old system. If you’re deciding something as drastic as “I’m not going to assign homework!” or “Lateness doesn’t count!” you’ll be causing a big stir, and it’s your responsibility to incorporate all relevant stakeholders (internal and external) in the decision. This means parents, the school board, and of course students and teachers.
Specific suggestion for teachers/administrators: if the whole English department wants to start reporting grades in terms of standards, get some resources together to send home with students. You can download some things we’ve created at ActiveGrade and make alterations to fit the department. Clearly say that you are CONSIDERING this and want input from parents and students.
Once the community is ready, you can move to actually sending home standards-based grade reports. Here are some parent frustrations we’ve heard about that you want to look out for:
“How can I tell what Johnny is missing or still needs to do?”
“I just want an overall impression of how Hikma is doing! What is all this?”
“What is his GPA??”
“Your 3, 2, 1 scale is incomprehensible! Bring back A, B, C!” (this happens even if your scale is binary and EXTREMELY, UNBELIEVABLY COMPREHENSIBLE).
This is a big change, and even people who said they wanted it will be uncomfortable. Your school or department should expect this discomfort and react by validating it: “Yes, it makes sense that you would want to know if Johnny is doing ok. I’m sorry to keep you in the dark – we’re trying to give you more information, not less! What if we sent home a summary every week, or tried <xyz>?”
GPA can still be calculated at this point. Schools can require a level of “proficient” in 75% of standards to get a C, 85% to get a B, etc. If you’re still doing grades, you should keep students and parents informed of those grades throughout the year – remember not to underestimate the importance of grades to parents and students, so they should be involved as much as possible in the transition to SBG/SBAR.
STEP THREE: EXTERNAL PARTIES, WHOLE-SCHOOL
SBAR… AND NO GPA
This is where you can start to involve colleges, employers, and other consumers of school data. Once your whole school is using SBAR, GPA becomes entirely for external parties. The GPA is for ranking students and exporting all of your hard work as a single number so that colleges and internships can understand it.
Your software should be able to export SBAR in more meaningful ways, though. A school engaged in SBG should be able to:
give detailed reports of student proficiencies, complete with a portfolio of that student’s demonstrations so admissions teams can explore them for niche fits or have them summarized for high-level impressions
provide recommendation letters as a part of these summaries
give students and parents full access to these reports, including some editing or customizing options for them to highlight different strengths and tailor it for specific purposes
Colleges want to admit students that will serve and be served well by admission. This kind of powerful description SIMULTANEOUSLY improves the colleges’ ability to pick the students they want AND REHUMANIZES EDUCATION. We can deal with the streamlining necessary to move students through a huge, national education system… without insulting the students by reducing them to a single average.
STEP FOUR: RENAISSANCE SALONS WITH COMPETENCY-BASED EDUCATION (CBE)
This is where every community member can get involved with education – the biologist who spends 4 hours available over Skype every Monday, the mechanic who has students come to his shop for an hour every afternoon, the parents who come to help with maintenance, the business who creates internships or apprenticeships.
GPAs eliminated, our schools can loosen up the schedule – eliminating “Algebra 1” and replacing it with a set of competencies. We get a chance to really think about whether every student needs to know every trig function. We give students a chance to soak up their interests and avoid topics they don’t like, but retain the power and responsibility of requiring them to achieve mastery of fundamentals like literacy and numeracy.
Software can not only generate schedules but generate schedule options the staff and community resources of our school can support and the students can choose. Schedules can be refreshed every month, and – voila! – no child will be in a class moving too slow or fast for more than 3 weeks. The stigma of being “held back” or “skipping grades” diminishes because working in your own best direction becomes the standard for everyone. Our teachers, parents, and businesses can be involved in refreshing, interesting, and USEFUL teaching opportunities with smaller and more focused time periods.
As a school, our mission could shift from “every student has had 300 hours of math” to “every student is prepared to welcome the challenges and opportunities of whatever community they land in.”
With my mission accomplished, I can go back to teaching. I can be a mentor, a resource, a coach, guiding students towards interests and helping them identify and celebrate their strengths. I can run my class according to where my students are and what they’re interested in. When my students exceed me they can find other resources.
SEE?
There are technical and sociological hurdles I skipped over with some clever text formatting. No system will be perfect for everyone. Some people will never be convinced. Students might not choose to study the topics that are good for the economy. We might forget to make them practice and then when the power goes out they won’t be able to add. Et cetera.
There’s a lot of work to be done. There’s science to do. Use this proposal as a starting point for concrete imaginings, if you like. I want to hear your proposals, too.
MY ROLE (WHERE I’M COMING FROM)
For me, ActiveGrade is a commitment to this idea on a deep, life-risking level. Michal, Dan and I have all risked our careers (and retirement savings) to make a tool that can enable our communities to make this transformation. Technology can take some of the bureaucratic overhead off of the shoulders of teachers and administrators and put it on computers. I would never want to take human relationships out of education – I want to free people from the HASSLE AND PAPERWORK of organizing community-scale education.
Right now we use GPAs and averages because they are the most complex communication we could do with pencil and paper. No one has time to make all the reports and schedules I’m talking about. But we have a new medium in the internet, iPads, and laptops. We have a LOT MORE BANDWIDTH for communication, but we’re still wasting it on our pen-and-paper averages.
ActiveGrade’s not perfect, but we’ve spent every day of two years on it, pursuing this vision. Check out our work and jump on our bandwagon, or help us refine our vision. Our blog is at activegrade.com/blog, we’ve made resources for you to read and share at activegrade.com/resources, we’re on twitter at @ActiveGrade (@AGMichal,@RileyLark, @floatingboxes), we do Google+ hangouts to talk with teachers, we present, learn, and create at conferences. You can join our mailing list from the homepage at activegrade.com.
We need help developing (now hiring!), we need help spreading the word, and we need help refining the software. If you like our vision, please help!
Sincerely,
Riley
This proposal was inspired by the first co-creator’s camp put on by Source Media, and is cross-posted on their blog with some alterations: http://iowatransformed.com/2012/04/co-creator-camper-proposes-a-set-of-next-steps-to-help-bring-vision-developed-at-camp-to-fruition/
It’s been a busy month! We’ve launched the first stages of our new interface, which makes it way, way easier to find and use the things you’re looking for. We’ve also added sorting to the gradebook (just click on a standard header!) and email alerts (so you’ll get emails when a student or parent leaves a comment). Parents and students will also receive email alerts about new assessments you enter. Everyone can control their email settings by logging in and going to “Account Settings,” so you don’t have to worry about annoying people who would rather just log in to review the feedback you leave.
We’re also in the process of hiring a fourth member for our team! We’re really excited about the extra quality we’ll be bringing to the codebase.
The feedback you’ve been leaving with the thumbs up and down within the app has been useful in prioritizing our development efforts. Thanks, and keep it up! On our end, we can make new reports after every time we release a new feature or change, so feel free to give us a thumbs up or down whenever you notice anything new – or even when the same old thing is still bugging you!
That’s it for now – stay tuned!
Riley
Oh, and PS: If you haven’t seen the resources Dan and Michal have created, check ‘em out: activegrade.com/resources. The “10 Ways to Engage Your Students” has been especially popular.
We can report behavior separately from academic achievement, but it shouldn’t disappear altogether from the portfolio of student learning.
I just heard from someone within the Standardized Testing business that a test aimed at assessing behavioral standards is just as good at predicting future success as a test focused on academic standards.
JUST. AS. GOOD.
So while we are spending time coming up with clear learning goals and methods of communicating effectively with students about their strengths and weaknesses; while we are finding ways of using technology to create the best, most engaging learning environment, let us not forget that they way students learn to interact in the world will have just as much impact on their adult lives as the knowledge they obtain.
Standards-Based Grading and Competency-Based Education have to be about more than tracking student mastery in isolated standards. At their core is the hope that through clear expectations we can engage students in thinking about their own learning process; that with clear goals students can mark their own path, take initiative, and work collaboratively. Without this underlying interpersonal framework, SBG still produces automatons.
Also, let’s not call them “Behavioral Standards.”
I really hate the use of the word behavior when talking about the social component of education. “We report academic and behavioral standards separately.” Of course I agree with the separation there, but behavior sounds so pejorative. I don’t want my kids to behave, to follow the party line, to do as they’re told. I want my kids to learn right from wrong, to be aware of how their actions impact others, to have self-knowledge, to learn how to work through conflicts with compassion. I don’t think of this as behaving. I think of this as learning how to be a positive and unselfish member of society. So let’s find a different word. Social? Community? Life? Human? I know Westside School in Seattle has Citizenship Standards. I’m open to suggestion.
I love Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory and I really love Gene Wilder in the role. So imagine my feeling of betrayal when he mocked my chosen form of meaningful student feedback TO MY FACE!
From High School Memes
Come on Wonka! I bet you don’t even know what SBG is! The only feedback you gave the kids was to trick them into eating your candy and then kick them out of your factory. No chance to learn from their mistakes.
But really, your method wasn’t so far off from the heart of SBG. You wanted to find a selfless, caring child who could take over your work. You had a standard and you stuck to it. You thought Charlie was greedy because he stole the fizzy lifting drink, but when he returned the everlasting gobstopper you allowed your perception of his understanding to change (much like a reassessment in standards-based grading).
But seriously
I think this poster goes to show that Standards-Based Grading, on its own, is not the answer and doesn’t necessarily mean we are doing anything particularly better or different than we did before.
The reasons to switch to standards-based grading are to:
have better data that helps you better teach your students – every. day.
give students ownership over their learning
have collaborative conversations so both teach and student get better at what they do
On Saturday, March 31st, starting at 7 PM CST, we will be rolling out an upgrade to ActiveGrade. This is awesome for one million reasons, but skip to the bottom for a summary:
One: It’s Big and Noticeable
It doesn’t take much to make me proud of myself. We recently realized that “Sort” was accidentally spelled “Sorty” and when I fixed it I called my mom to tell her about it. That’s the kind of self-aggrandizing I do around here. But this update is really taking ActiveGrade to another level. We’ve been working on it for about seven weeks and you’re going to notice that things are better.
Two: It’s About Being Intuitive
Our first round of feedback from you all had a lot of comments like “Great idea! It feels like it was designed by an engineer, though.” We also got “This has really shifted focus from teaching to learning in my class. ” and “who decided that login urls should be different for different students? I have a package of rotten tomatoes I’d like to send them.” The impression we got was that we were on the right track but needed to make it easier to use.
So we’ve done a lot to make ActiveGrade usable like you want to use it. Looking for a student? Type their name onto your gradebook instead of hunting through different folders. Don’t want to use folders? Click “All Items” to look at everything you’ve ever entered at once, and search through it easily. Think urls should be set in “account settings” instead of buried in folder details? Now they are.
Three: We’re Doing Up The Tags
This is a direct quote from our community forum: “What is the point of tags if we can’t use them anywhere?” Can you picture me, my nose raised, my index finger pointed upwards, taking in that breath to explain, and then choking the breath off as I realize I don’t have a good answer? In this update we’re expanding the notion of tags to apply to all kinds of items. You can tag standards, students, classes, grading policies, etc. You can use these tags to search for things later – tags have pretty much replaced folders, like in GMail or Google Docs. You can still use tags in grading policies, and in our NEXT update, slated for June, you’ll be able to use tags in even more ways!
Use the new “organize” button to tag anything you can see in admin mode.
Four: You Won’t Have To Explain Any Of This To Students
You won’t have to redistribute urls or anything. Students, parents, and advisors can log in the same way they have been all along. They’ll notice a visual upgrade, but everything will stay the same. Or, if you prefer, you can set a new url for your account and all students can log in at the same place.
Five: The URL Thing Will Be Simpler
Right now when students forget that they need a special URL, they get a sort of confusing screen. We’re replacing the language of the url with something we’re calling a “school code” – for example, if you’ve been logging in at https://activegrade.appspot.com/mbhs, your school code would be “mbhs.” We think we’re making this transition simple enough that students will understand without needing any more help, and when they FORGET that they need a special url, the school code will be a reminder. It can be entered either on the url bar OR in a text box in the login screen, which means their browsers can remember it for them. It’s also just a more common way of entering data – we’re not used to entering special characters in the url bar.
Six: It’s A Lot More Communicative. And Pretty.
Co-Founder Dan Sweeney started working on ActiveGrade full-time in January and this update will show it, big time. Dan has degrees and awards in design and, while I am proud of my own efforts at style, you’ll notice that Dan has considerably more of it.
Seven: It’s Real. Englebert Humperdinck is dead.
I realize that this post is saying “On April 1st all these improvements will magically appear.” But: it’s real, and it will actually work.
Or will it?
No, just kidding, it’s real. It’s not an April Fools joke.
Or is it?
Haha, no, it’s real. I promise.
Or do I?
Haha, yes, seriously this time.
Eight: …
Eight, eight, I forget what eight was for but
One Million: The Way Will Be Paved
You may have noticed that we’re hiring another developer, and we’re also planning on contracting some work. This update carries with it some infrastructure changes that will be invisible to you but enable us to do some new things in the background. They say the heights of ecstasy come between the moment you get a great idea and the moment you realize it won’t work, but we’ve got a great idea and we’re pretty sure it’s going to work. June. It’s happening. Tell your friends.
All You Really Need To Know
Starting at 7PM CST on the evening of Saturday, March 31st, ActiveGrade will be inaccessible for a few hours as we upgrade. Just take the night off, relax, and leave your grading for my personal favorite last minute: Sunday night! Or, you can get it done early. You won’t lose any data, you won’t have to reconfigure anything, etc. We’ll be displaying a user-friendly message that explains all of this, so you don’t even have to tell your students – although we are not emailing them directly, so you may want to let them know anyway. When you wake up on Sunday, ActiveGrade will look better, act better, sound better, and smell better. Let us know what you think!
So far this year we’ve been focusing on making ActiveGrade easier to use and more accessible. In the next couple of weeks we’ll be releasing an update that we hope will address a lot of the pain points you’ve been telling us about. For example, here’s how you assign editing permissions in ActiveGrade right now:
and here’s how this will work in after the update:
It’s not only a lot prettier, but the interaction is more natural. In the update, to add a person to this access list, you’ll just start typing their name or email address, and ActiveGrade will suggest users (from ANY folder!) you might mean. If you haven’t created the user yet, it’ll just create it for you, right here, on the spot. No more traipsing through dialog popups.
This kind of interaction is coming to many parts of ActiveGrade this month – you’ll just type new students or standards directly on to your gradebook, for example. We’ve also sped up some of these interactions. Starting today, you may already notice some speed improvements in loading times because of an infrastructure change we made.
This is all very exciting for us. We’ve had a successful year, which brings me to my next exciting announcement!
ActiveGrade is Now Hiring!
We want to keep making ActiveGrade easier to use, but we’re also bursting with other ideas for improving. Programming whiz that I am, I’m falling behind the development schedule we set out, so we’re looking to hire at least one more programmer. We’ll also be looking for support and design staff, but our first priority is development help – Michal and Dan are outpacing me in outreach and design already. If you are a programmer passionate about education, check out our new jobs page!
Thanks for staying tuned to our blog. We hope you like the articles we put out about education and feedback philosophy. Please leave comments, and, if you like us:
We’re trying to normalize feedback, so we can speak openly and frankly with students about their strengths and weaknesses. Giving feedback regularly and frequently is a big step towards making it normal. This is part two of a three part series.
An intentional, regular, and frequent schedule is one way to elevate feedback as a professionally developed skill. It’s easy to tell a student when you see them doing something wrong, or when you see them improving – those instances jump out at you. It’s easy to think of what to say, too – you can easily name the concept they’re misunderstanding, or name the skill they just mastered for the first time. On the other hand, it takes constant attention and concentration to keep to a schedule – whether or not something jumps out at you to remark about.
I tried different variations of “schedules:”
The I’m-Going-To-Give-Feedback-To-These-Five-People schedule
Pick five specific students per class, ahead of time, to give feedback to. Different days, different students. This also worked well for me with counselors when I ran a summer camp. Picking specific people makes it much easier to remember to give feedback, and to remember to seek them out. The class doesn’t know you have these specific goals, but they’ll see that you’re giving feedback in a deliberate, non-judgemental way, and it will seem like a matter-of-fact part of the course.
The I’m-Going-To-Give-Feedback-About-These-Two-Topics schedule
Pick one or two topics to be on the lookout for, and ALWAYS give feedback about them. On some days you might be looking for “the distributive property,” and on other days you might be looking for “debate etiquette,” or something more subtle like “self-directedness-in-a-group.” Any time you see any evidence of the topic, give feedback to everyone who’ll listen. “You distributed this binomial correctly – each term must be multiplied by every other term, and that’s what you did.” I was surprised by how many times a comment like this, to a student who obviously already knew that, led a different student to an ah-hah moment. Picking a specific thing to look out for made it much easier to remember to give this kind of feedback.
The I’m-Actually-Going-To-Schedule-Feedback schedule
Once a semester I actually scheduled five-minute meetings with each of my students. This usually took about a week per class, so I would prepare the students to work in groups without me, and then call them one at a time to my office. I always thought this was going to be more successful than it was, but there were a few highlights. Students got a chance to give ME feedback about the class, and I got a chance to say, in private, more general things like “you engage a lot in class discussions” or “I get the feeling you’re bored in class because I often see you looking out the window.” These meetings were almost never about academic material, since we only had five minutes, but were a good chance to connect to students and give them some ownership of our relationship. Again, the schedule just makes it normal. It’s school. We’re getting feedback. Of course.
The I’m-Going-To-Give-Feedback-About-This-Problem schedule
I gave written tests with 5-10 problems and occasionally gave homework with like 30 problems. I only had 10-20 students in my classes on average, but this still works out to 50-200 solutions to read, and I always tried to give these things back on the very next day. With 30-40 students in your classes… it’s not realistic to really analyze every solution to give the best feedback you could. So, pick a single problem, and give feedback about that one. Just give a “right” or “wrong” for the others. After all, when you give an assignment for which you won’t have time to give feedback, grading the assignment is really mostly for you/the-system, not them. Acknowledge the one solution you’re really analyzing, and give specific, objective feedback on it. This makes it clear to the students what you’re doing – if you happen to pick a solution that Tom got all wrong, he won’t think you’re picking on him. ”Right. I got feedback on a solution. Of course.”
So!
I think that any intentionality about normalizing feedback, giving it regularly and frequently, will show to your students. When you give feedback in public – say, in front of the whole class – you’re not just talking to one student. Everyone in the class gets more information about what you want or don’t want, and everyone in the class gets a message about the behavior and habits of mind you expect. For every piece of feedback you give to one student, other students may be thinking, “ohh!” Every piece of feedback might be inducing jealousy, or pride, or embarrassment.
The message you’re sending by giving feedback regularly and frequently is that all of this feedback is normal. It’s not embarrassing to misunderstand, and being right is not the same as being better. We’re learning, people. Right. Of course.
There’s one part left in my ultimate let’s-please-make-learning-comfortable plan: establishing a culture of questioning and open learning. Stay tuned – subscribe to the blog and follow us on twitter for the update next week!
Alone, our individual burdens are too narrow, but without them our universal patterns have no grounding
What I love about teaching history is helping students see the broad connections and patterns across time. I love it when they start seeing the links of cause and effect, how certain choices led to outcomes that have changed human society forever. These large and universal themes help us make sense of our world and give context to our era.
And yet, my students need an entry point; a grounding, personal story they can relate to. The story of Anne Frank is so powerful because it gives us insight through one girl’s eyes. We hear her every day thoughts and they are thoughts we recognize. We start with her individual story before pulling back and considering the bigger questions about how one group could gain such power over another and why.
If we stayed only with Anne’s story, our students would have a very limited perspective on the Holocaust and WWII. If we honored only the small stories of the individual and of our students, our view would become narrow, narcissistic. But, by only attending the large trends and big questions, we lose hold of the details that root the stories in reality.
Parker Palmer’s 4th Pedagogical Paradox says that “The space should honor the “little” stories of the individual and the “big” stories of the disciplines and tradition” (74).
(This post is the fourth in a series based on Parker Palmer’s 6 paradoxes of pedagogical design explained in Courage to Teach, 1998. The first three can be found in the links below).
We’re trying to normalize feedback, so we can talk honestly with students about their strengths and weaknesses without hurting their feelings. The biggest thing you can do is separate feedback from judgement. This is part one of a three-part series.
This is easy in some ways – giving evidence for your comment is an easy way to deflect attention away from you, the teacher, and towards the student’s work. It’s harder in other ways – it means not saying “good job on…” or “you need to work on…”, which are things I say all the time!
Give Feedback with Evidence
Instead of “Your paper was insightful,” say, “Your idea about Holden alienating himself on purpose was insightful. You went beyond the superficial things he was saying and thought about what he might be feeling.”
Instead of “You did well on this problem,” say, “You identified the independent variable first, and everything came together for you after that.”
Instead of “I liked your poem,” say, “The concrete nouns you used helped me picture what you were talking about, so your poem was that much more powerful.”
It’s easy to forget that, even if a student does something well, they might not know exactly what!
It’s easier to be specific with feedback when you’re giving criticism, because “I didn’t like your poem” jumps out as not-the-right-thing-to-say. More often you hear “I liked your poem, but <xyz>.” This pattern conditions kids to hear “but <xyz>” every time anyone says “I liked…” – even when you just want to praise their work, they’ll be waiting for the other shoe to drop.
When we’re always specific, even with positive feedback, it’s less weird to say “The second line in your poem is confusing because the ‘her’ could refer to either woman” and not have to dilute it with “I liked your poem, but who the heck are you talking about in line 2?”
The students come to expect feedback, and know that they are there to accept and use it. That’s when you say good job – “You worked hard on this poem but could still hear feedback and work more to improve it.” THAT’s really hard, and deserves praise.
Be Careful with “Good Job”
When you only praise “success“, it gives students the impression that you only care about “success.” In my first several years of teaching, this was a common pattern:
Me: “Can anyone tell me why this is important?”
Student 1: “Because now we know all the angles of the triangle?”
Me: “Well, that’s true, but we knew all of them before, right?”
Student 2: “Because now we can find the angles of a congruent triangle?”
Me: “Well, right, but they always the same, right?”
Student 3: “Because now we can use two angles to find all of the information about ANY triangle?”
Me: “Right! Good job!”
Three students have contributed but I only praised the one with the right answer. Later, they’ll take the SAT and ACT tests and only get credit for their right answers. They’ll leave school thinking right answers are the only thing that matters – but that will just set them up for failure in 20 years.
I think it’s ok to NEVER praise the right answer – they already know how to feel intrinsic pleasure at solving a problem. They need help knowing that hard work and interesting side-tracks are important too.
Give Feedback Frequently
Not just at the end of an assignment, or the end of class, or on the unit test. Stay tuned – next week I’ll give you my tips for giving feedback frequently – and for taking advantage of the benefits. Subscribe to stay updated!
When we report homework scores, we focus on homework scores.
When we report exam scores, we focus on exam scores.
We focus on homework scores and exam scores, but no one outside of school cares about them. Outside of school, we care about skills, and compassion, and creativity.
So…
How long will it be until we report skill levels? How long will it be until we report compassion, and creativity? How long will it be before we even take stock of what we want to focus on, and start focusing on it?
We can argue that this will never work. “We need uniformity so colleges will know how to pick the best students.” “We can’t report on creativity without stifling it.” The thing is, we have new needs and new technologies, and we don’t have to meet our old requirements. With so many new options, we can find a way to focus on our values.
ActiveGrade is a standards-based gradebook. We are focused on helping teachers provide their students with meaningful, effective feedback. We have extremely high standards and hope to make ActiveGrade easy to use and useful. If you have any suggestions or feedback, please don't hesitate to contact us - support@activegrade.com
Before we start: Is your classroom ready for standards or competency based assessment?
We ask because ActiveGrade relies heavily on "standards-based assessment and reporting" (SBAR). If you are unfamiliar with this concept we can provide additional resources to get started.
