The Task I recently sent out a survey to Twitter where 50 respondents were presented with series of scores for students. The scores were for individual learning objectives and all the scores are based on a 3 point or 4 point proficiency scale. Each score was indicated by one of four different colours. Users were asked to come up with an overall letter grade and percent for each student based on these learning objective scores.
While I’m working on some new post for my blog, I thought I’d share some other blog posts that may trigger some interesting educational explorations for you.
Having a Growth Mindset is a big topic these days, and with good reason. Every math teacher knows this, as we constantly hear the phrase “I’m not good at math.” Geoff Schmit’s recent post Introducing Growth Mindset is a good place to start reading up on mindset.
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.
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.
I was livid after hearing Peter Cowley in today’s broadcast of Grading Teachers on The Current. There are so many problems with his argument it is difficult to know where to begin. Standardized tests are universally panned in research, and in fact they are not “better than nothing.” Standardized tests, amongst other things, leads to “teaching to the test.” The UK had massive problems with this in the nineties, where up to a month or more of classtime was spent solely in prepping students for a standardized test.
