In my science 9 classes, we’re about to finish off a unit on Space. As will all good unit planning, I had decided on an overall unit assessment months ago. The general plan was to do another Concept Map test, sort of like I mentioned in another post: http://physicsoflearning.com/blog/assessment/107-assessment-checkpoint
I’ve been working with the kids on concept mapping, and trying to follow a pattern of gradual release of responsibility. For example, the first few concept maps we did together.
Term 1 just ended here in British Columbia and as I’ve learned this year, it is a big deal for students in grade 12. It turns out that many (all?) US universities look for term1 marks for their applications. Some of the schools in eastern Canada do the same, such as U of T. What this means is that I had students running around like chickens with their heads cut off, trying to get as many marks as possible.
It had been about ten weeks since I started teaching fulltime and I thought I should reflect on how my classroom assessment is going. I am constantly thinking about assessment but sometimes I think it helps to write things down in order to get better clarity of whatever it is I’m thinking about.
My overall assessment plan is different for my senior physics classes and my grade 9 science classes. For physics I have implemented a standards based grading scheme, whereas for the grade 9 I am using a more standard model.
I’ve been incorporating “clicker” questions into my physics classes this year, and so far I would say it’s been a success. There are ups and downs while using them, but overall the process is working pretty good. However, yesterday’s class really got me thinking about how to optimize my process.
First of all, here is a brief on how I use clicker questions in class. We don’t have clickers. Instead, I’ve been using Poll Everywhere.
After spending months and hours of reading articles and blogs about Standards Based Grading (SBG), I will be embarking down this path myself starting next week. I’ve been planning on doing this since I first got my job at Prince of Wales, but I think I’ve finally sorted out in my head how I want to approach it. There are a lot of unknowns because there are a lot of different ways to do SBG.
During our last staff meeting at David Thompson we had some discussion on teacher collaboration time, what we liked about it, what we gained for it, and what some of the outputs of the collaboration are. Part of the discussion was at least partly instigated by curiosities from parents. In the Vancouver school district there is some head-stratching by parents around all of the days that their kids are missing. These days are a result of budget cuts (non-instructional days), professional development days, holidays and some time allocated for teacher allocation.
Just for kicks I check out some of the Fraser Institutes Secondary School Rankings yesterday. I was curious as to how of the slightly “alternative” schools rank. However, I noticed something else that really struck me as being important. A casual look at school rankings reveals that if a school has a Special Needs population of around 9% or higher, their school ranking is almost for sure going to be lower than 160 (out of total of 260).
