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.
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.
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.
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.
