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.

I’ve studied video as learning tool in science and physics for while, and I’m convinced that digital video can placed at the upper end of useful technologies used in education. I don’t necessarily mean for making screencasts, but using video as an analysis tool. Frank Noschese has shown several examples of using video on his blogs, including these hi-speed videos found on Action-Reaction and Frank’s Posterous post on colliding carts. As well, I wrote a paper on this topic and if you’re a glutten for punishment you can read it here on Scribd.

I’ve used whiteboards more and more this year and it’s been really interesting. The students automatically go for them, and enjoy working collaboratively. One thing we need to improve upon though is our whiteboard meetings or summary sessions. This is when we have completed some type of inquiry activity in small groups and now want to come together as a class to go over what happened. I try to have as many students as possible present their work, but it seems like this leaves a lot of idle time for students while they are not presenting.

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.

Inspired by a post by Keith Rispin, I’ve been thinking about BYOD and the more I think about it, the more frustrated I get. I can’t help think just how far off the mark the MoE is with their BC edplan and BYOD. Having studied technology in education for a couple of years, where we theorized on mobile devices and endeavoured to design learning environments and activities that could incorporate them, it is clear that the path forward with BYOD is severely limited.

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.

One of my biggest goals for this year (if I have a job) is to continue down the path of less notes and more inquiry. While I was pretty happy with how things went last year in my first full year of teaching, it was easy to identify areas for improvement. In particular, I thought that in Physics 12 we spent too much time doing notes. Physics 11 was more collaborative but perhaps too de-contextualized.