The topic of Midyear exams has been raised at our secondary school with a lot of opposition to the school not conducting them. There at least three views pitted against each other: teachers that want midyear exams, the board administration which doesn’t want to make accommodations for midyear exams, and teachers which don’t want midyear exams.
History I can’t give a detailed history on midyear exams but I can give a brief overview.
It’s that time of year again where the courses start to wind down. Which leads to the most anticipated question of the year. “Will there be a final exam?” This can be a tricky question at the best of times. For my grade 9 science students, it’s beyond tricky.
There are lots of arguments to be made about final exams. I don’t want to do a complete analysis of these arguments but I would like to say what I think the various pros and cons are.
In my first three years of teaching I have done a gradual move towards giving better feedback and more active learning experiences. At the same time, I’m getting better at meeting student needs, and this is one area that I want to focus on in the coming year.
What’s Working I think that my grading scheme using SBG has been positive. The aspects that I like and that I get good feedback on include the following: kids get the feeling that they are not collecting marks, and know that they need to focus on learning; if a student has problems with a topic, they know they can still improve without punishment from previous attempts; the learning objectives are really clear; students for the most part appreciate the opportunity to try and figure out stuff on their own.
My Experience as a Teacher Something very interesting happened to me during our 2nd parent-teacher interviews this year. None of the parents I spoke with asked about grades.
Most of you don’t know the school that I taught at, but in many ways it is quite different from other public schools in BC. I don’t have the specific numbers, but about 80% of our graduates this year are moving onto university next fall.
Marking for the end of the year is finally done, and I thought I’d wrap up my posts on Inquiry. I’ve already talked a bit about my plan and what happened throughout the year, and in this post I’d like to briefly outline my plan for next year.
The biggest change I would like to implement is that every student will be required to have a lab notebook. This notebook will contain notes for all of their labs and inquiries, and possibly reflections on their learning.
I was reading this post by Carolyn Durley on formative feedback, and a sinking feeling came over me. I’ve read a lot about Assessment For Learning and Formative Assessment, I’ve tried to incorporate AFL in my classes, I pride myself on my SBG, and yet I’m starting to doubt whether I’m giving good feedback to my students.
What I do know is that I give my students multiple ways for them to reflect on what they are doing and how things are going.
Previously I’ve written about problem based learning (PBL), and I did just finished another round with the heat problem in Physics 11. A couple of issues have been revealed this year, and I’m not entirely sure what to do about them.
The first issue is one of differentiation. This year I’ve had three classes try out the problem. All three had 2 full periods to solve the problem, but very few groups actually finished the problem to the state where a solution was written up or sample calculations were done.
I’ve often wondered if all of the segmented learning objectives in Standards Based Grading results in too much reductionism and micro-managing of learning, where the forest gets lost in all of the trees. In response to this, I’ve been reading “Understanding By Design” by Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe, with hopes of clarifying the learning intentions with my students. Certainly my students should be aware of individual skills or required knowledge, but how these pieces fit into a bigger picture is more important.
L’histoire After Term I had ended last fall, I was exhausted and extremely disappointed with my students’ reaction to my re-assessment policy. Since I had used the same system the year before, I wasn’t anticipating a different reaction this year. Different year, different students and things didn’t turn out the way I had hoped.
The Experiment During Term II I was telling my students that I was no longer doing re-assessments.
Yesterday I had the pleasure of having two students pop by after school for a bit a help. I say “pleasure” because it’s pretty rare that students come by for help. To top things off, it was a Friday afternoon that leads into a long weekend! My students wanted just a bit of help with a problem we were working on in class, and they were accompanied by a couple of friends who patiently waited while we talked.
