A cool and somewhat funny thing happened in one of my physics classes yesterday. I had asked the class why we/they do quizzes. The answer I was hoping to get to was “so we can demonstrate what we’ve learned.” However, the most popular answer that was shouted out was, “they’re for practice!” I thought that was pretty cool. On the other hand, it was also funny and a bit confusing because I don’t know what ultimate goal they think they are practicing for.
Through the VSB I’m invovled in a series of workshops on Assessment For Learning, hosted by Linda and Judy. We’ve had two sessions so far, and both times the importance of having a Growth Mindset has been highlighted. The ideas and thoughts behind a growth mindset are compelling, and have motivated me to sharing this concept with my students. Joined with the concept of mindset is the idea that we need to foster grit and perseverance within our students.
This past week or two I’ve felt really bogged down about the progress in my classes. There are many things that I think I’m doing OK with, but it seems that for every idea or accomplishment in my practice I come across two questions or mysteries. It sort of makes sense - the more that we learn, the more we realize how much we don’t actually know. However, if life is like a game of snakes and ladders, it would be nice to feel like I’m spending more time on tall ladders as opposed to slippery snakes.
The Problem This past week has been extremely disappointing for my SBG grading scheme, and is forcing me to evaluate different aspects of standards based grading in general. Two things that I’ve done have seem to flopped quite badly. First, I have tried to move to a mastery/conjunctive grading system, in hopes of raising some minimum standards that students should meet. Secondly, I tried to implement some gradual Student Initiated Assessment (SIA) rules to have the students take a more mature approach to assessment.
One of my goals for this year was to encourage the use of whiteboards in my class, and to get the students move involved with them. As experienced by many teachers, I found whiteboards to be a great way for students to work together on a problem, hash out ideas, and then share what they’ve found. However, lately my classes have been having problems. A possible solution to this is to build whiteboard ePortfolios.
One of my goals for using standards based grading is that I wanted to get away from the “get a mark” or “take a mark off” mentality. By using a three point scale tied to a learning objective and not a single question, my numerical feedback directly relates a holistic realization of progress. As a result I now get the truly enjoyable treat of having new students approach me and asking why they lost a mark.
A couple of days ago after dinner I asked my son how he did on his current events project. Everyone in his Grade 4 class takes a turn at presenting a current event. Grady took this project very seriously. He initially researched some artifact from Nazi Germany that was in the news, but decided that the topic wasn’t appropriate for the younger Grade 3s in his class. He then researched some news about a sasquatch and wrote a few pages on it.
This week we had our final exams, and I have all of my Physics 11 and 12 marks in. Overall the exam marks were extremely disappointing. The Physics 11 exam was 50 questions and my class average was 61%. For Physics 12, the multiple choice section was even worse with 51% average, while the written portion was much higher at around 85%.
It is difficult for me to understand exactly what happened with the exams.
I’m going to be hosting a short presentation on Standards Based Grading (SBG) at my school today. I’m not sure how many people will show up, but hopefully it kicks off some good discussion for future collaboration meetings.
Standards Based Grading
While going through some of my favorite education blogs I came across this post on pseudoteaching. It seems that pseudoteaching was spawned from pseudocontext, which talks about how contrived and non-realistic scenarios are presented to students as being real-life examples. For example, a math question where some convoluted set of circumstances between Joey, Joey’s cash and Joey’s shopping list means that the student has to solve a word problem. I think the idea of pseudoteaching takes this concept a bit further.
