Shifting to new grading

A colleague of mine showed me one of her old gradebooks from a decade or so ago, and I’m restructuring how I go about grading as a result.  My school already has four “metacategories” which inform our comment-writing process, by dividing student work along social-emotional development, cognitive growth, academic behaviors, and personal attitude toward learning.

My colleague showed me that by using these themes as my grading structure, I could more immediately evaluate students.  Rather than grade by percentages, I could structure my responses to individual assignments by examining whether they were learning from mistakes on earlier work; and I could build a gradebook that also included space for commentary about their work, and their reflection on what they were learning.

I’m not really sure how I’m going to go about assigning kids an A+ or a C- or an F based on this structure yet, but I really LIKE what I’m seeing as I add information to this paper database.  I’m ranking kids on what I see their growth pattern like, and I have my own notes in my own handwriting that present a different picture of kids.  And the boxes are giving way to flexible spaces, some for comments and some for numbers.  It’s looking good.

I also feel like these grades are going to spark much more discussion in class.  It’s harder for a kid to say, “Oh, I’m getting an A right now, so I don’t have to speak up.”  It’s not clear that many kids understand that I’m using their class participation as a way of judging their cognitive development — that I’m trying to assess an internal, private mental process using their public statements… but that I’m also trying to understand the difference between their enthusiasm, and over-sharing for the sake of overwhelming Mr. Watt’s processing capabilities.

How do you capture all of that in a tiny little box?

You don’t. Which is why this gradebook is in a sketchbook.  The box for each kid is about a half-inch tall, and the ‘boxes’ after their names range from an 1/8″ “lancet” for putting a 1-6 in, to two-inch long “picture windows” for substantive comments attached to a date.

Why 1-6?

Here’s my thinking there.  A

1. doesn’t contribute to my understanding of this child
2. work that’s off topic, vague or incomplete
3. “phoned in” — did the work to be done with it, not to make appreciable gains
4. Solid work, not genuinely bad, but not top of their game.
5. High quality work, top-notch effort, put it all right there.
6. This particular kid’s “I get this, and I get it so much I’m going to show off.” A serious advance from what this kid could do before.

It’s a lot more subjective than a formal “percentage average” system, I suppose, but now I’m looking for evidence of cognitive development, and social learning, and trying to encapsulate it both in quick comments, and in numerical spot-checks.  There’s a double-tap system now in place on paper.

Oh, yeah.  Did I mention I’m going back to paper? It turns out that paper is much more versatile than a typical grading program.  With a grade program, it’s hard to decide how to assess individual assignments. Is this one going to be 20 points, or 100? Is it a major grade in this category, or that one?  I feel like I suddenly have much more freedom and flexibility.  I can see a story emerging in my analysis of materials, and I like that.

More on this as it develops.

Taiji Day 204: Just get out of bed

I didn’t want to get up this morning. Peregrin had just posted an interesting set of short book reviews, and I got absorbed in them before I got up. But, eventually, I did get up… and it was like I was on autopilot. Into the office to do … ahem… morning prayer. I’m becoming more monk-like every passing day. Five Golden Coins, Eight Pieces of Silk, and the form. The kavad is on the worktable, just to the north of me, as I do these three tai chi forms. It’s there, reminding me to do the work, at all the levels that “doing the work” involves.

There’s a famous cartoon from the New Yorker, of two scientists (you can tell they’re scientists because they’re wearing white lab coats and there’s a model of some molecule on the workbench nearby, as I recall), standing in front of a blackboard covered with equations. In a circle of chalk on the board is one part of the equation, are the words “then a miracle occurs”. One of the scientists is pointing at this circle, and saying to his colleague, “I think you need to be a little more rigorous here in step two.” (Aha… Google helps. Here’s the Cartoon. No workbench, but clearer diagrams on the board than I remembered.)

Doing the work. What does that mean? Well, first of all, for me, it means getting out of bed. That’s become enough to set this little ritual in motion. I wonder if we give ourselves enough credit for getting out of bed and getting started on something. Probably not. I had this experience yesterday, of reading student work and grading it, and as a teacher the pressure is always on to grade this stuff harshly, to hand out C’s and D’s for misunderstandings or errors in grammar or stylistic issues in writing, and … you know, it’s hard. They are doing this work at the end of a long day, some with a lot of parental guidance, and some without guidance, and … wow.

Perhaps its enough to get up. The miracle is that more happens beyond that… All sorts of amazing things are going to happen today… but doing tai chi today was step two. It just happened, like a miracle, just by setting two feet on the floor.

A milestone: no millstone

Last year, a colleague found me laboring under a pile of grading that I didn’t know how to manage.  I was trying to correct every spelling and grammatical error in every paper, and I was lost. Adrift.  At sea.  It couldn’t be done, and I’d built up a massive backlog of grading that I didn’t know how to complete or work around.

She taught me a new way.  ”You’re not their editor,” she said. “Editors and proofreaders get paid to do that kind of detail work.  Your job is to get them to explain their thinking in detail, to mandate that they tackle hard questions, and that they include facts to support their arguments, whatever those arguments might be.”

Her process that she asked me to try out was to go through each set of assignments with an eye to making 1-2 positive comments, ask a question or two about comment, and demand clarification where it seemed to be necessary.  I’ve been trying this technique on and off for about a year, and something about it clicked tonight.  Today.

My papers are graded.  I’m leaving school today with all my grading done, and no papers in my school bag for the first time in a year.  Maybe for the first time in my teaching career, too, I’m leaving school with a feeling that I’ve graded student papers properly and accurately and suitably, and that I can really dig in to plan the next few days of school without worrying about the student papers piling up.

It’s a good feeling.  Thanks, K!

Latin Quiz – Assessment vs. Grading

Yesterday was the first Latin quiz that my students took for a grade in my grade book. They take such a quiz, on vocabulary or grammar, every week on Wednesday (I’ll admit, they take it on Wednesday so that I have a couple of days to grade them and think about what the results mean, because Latin doesn’t meet on Thursday, but does meet on Friday).

But this was the second such quiz I gave them. Why is this the first one going in my grade book?

Easy.  I wanted them to take a quiz last week.  I wanted them to have the experience of knowing what a Latin quiz could look like, and what kinds of things were on it.

Last week I was MEAN… I took off quarter-points and half-points, and I made everyone take it in pen, and they had only twenty-five minutes to do all kinds of things: define Latin words in English, translate Latin sentences to English, answer grammatical questions about Latin, and on top of all that, translate English sentences to Latin and identify parts of speech in Latin and translate a long passage…

Phew!

But the data I got.  Wow.  From one two-sided sheet of paper, I wrung all sorts of information, using Paul Bambrick-Santoyo’s strategies for assessment.  I was able to re-seat everyone in both of my Latin classes, so that each person who is good at vocabulary is sitting with someone good at grammar, and someone who is good at translation… and so on around the circle.  Everyone who is strong at one thing, complements someone who is strong at something else. And everyone can get better in all three areas together, by working as a team.

And that means, these next quizzes are substantially better in the ways that matter.  The vocabulary scores are way up.  The translation skills are way up.  The grammar… is not quite as good as you’d want, but! It’s the grammar.  It takes a while to adjust to that way of thinking about the world.

Anyway.  Grading them gave me a good feeling about both my classes.  I’m so excited for them about how much improvement they’ll make in written language in their English and Latin classes in the next weeks, just by focusing on Latin grammar for a little while.

Reputation Grade

Shelly Blake-Plock mentioned me in his blog at TeachPaperless earlier this week.

Almost instantly I doubled the number of daily visits my blog received. And unlike the usual event where I get a single boost to my site for a day to read a single post, I suddenly had a hundred visitors a day for three days.

If this were a student blog, how would I grade this?

I mean, it’s not like the student did anything differently.  He’s just writing, after all.  He’s just producing content.  It’s the link, the mention, in someone else’s blog that led to my student getting all the attention.  And schools have literary magazines for that, don’t they?

Don’t they?

Well, the truth is… our literary magazine has languished for a few years. We did not have the budget for it, it was hard to get kids to submit work to it, and it did not get much notice when it came out. For weeks after, the school would be littered with abandoned, torn, half-destroyed copies.  Alas.

But consider what a bunch of regular readers means — as I’ve said before, it makes me more likely to post regularly.  It makes me want to keep and hold the attention of the readers I’ve got, and make them want to pass my words on to others.  I want to write stickily, in the sense that I want what I write to stay with you and make you think about the nature of teaching and of learning.

But more than that… Shelly’s vote of confidence translated into an endorsement of my writing skils, and my thinking skills.  And about fifty people agreed with him, right away.  Three or five or ten years from now, hundreds of people thinking that sort of thing may translate into a book deal for me, or some magazine articles, or the chance to be a principal of a school, or … well, the possibilities are all just possibilities.

For a student, it’s no different.  Assume I was a student:  I wouldn’t have gotten Shelly to read anything by me if I hadn’t met him at NECC, if I didn’t comment on his blog, if I didn’t read his words regularly and let his thinking inflect and inform mine.  Shelly wouldn’t have endorsed me if he didn’t think I had something worth saying.  And I wouldn’t have a worldwide audience without the writing practice, without the reading practice, and without the connectivity practice.

Think about it: if I were grading this student, I’d have to acknowledge that this student did work beyond the core assignment; that he read outside the assigned reading; that he consulted with other experts; and that other experts endorsed his work as of sufficient quality to cite as a source for their own work.

That’s got to be worth more than “just a B+”.  Doesn’t it?

So then the questions become: what does a reputation grade look like? How do you assess it?  How do you note it in a gradebook? How much does it count for? What data is used to determine it?

We tend to think of digital technologies as clean, just all ones and zeroes. Of course, the tech itself IS clean.  But the effect that it has on our profession is such that it’s no wonder so many of our colleagues want to hide from it.   The world of digital learning is messy, and it doesn’t fit into orderly categories.

But none of it WILL fit into orderly categories until we experiment and play with it, and determine what’s useful and empowering data, and what isn’t.  But you can’t know until you try.

Frame for classes

Frame for classes
Originally uploaded by anselm23.

This is, in essence, what I want to teach my seventh and my ninth grade history classes this year: How to visualize a time period or a historical sequence of events, how to organize it into several kinds of graphical maps, how to convert those maps to an outline and then a first draft, how to edit that draft, and then how to present that information to an audience.

This is not an easy sell to the kids. I’m wondering how I’ll do it. It’s become clear to me that neither my seventh graders nor my ninth graders know how to do it, and so I’m more conscious than ever that this is what I have to do.

Turnitin.com

Turnitin.com is a website that enables teachers to turn in a student’s assignment and check it for plagiarism against 1) other student papers, 2) a body of reference works, and 3) some other stuff. It’s supposed to help nip source-lifting-without-credit in the bud. It’s also got a built-in grading program, and a whole raft of other tools.

I spent most of the day wrestling with it, trying to get all my classes set up. Now, admittedly, I only have around thirty-six students, which is not many, but I found the process both elaborate and confusing. Why, when I submit a list of kids and their e-mails in Microsoft Word, do they appear on-screen with their first and last names reversed, relative to the same list in .txt format? Is there any @(@*#$ing way to add an assignment simultaneously to the calendar, the gradebook and the assignment list? Is there any way to export all the calendar work I type in, so that I can robustly develop my offline curriculum planning?

Argh. Drives me nuts. And yet it’s still easier than trying to maintain a pen-and-paper gradebook. We’ll see.

Outdoor adventures today, not so good. We went to a nearby state park, where I can walk the Lake Trail in 45 minutes. Them, it takes an hour and a half. Beautiful walk, lots of wildlife, austerely beautiful, not too many people around… but we’ve only got an hour and a half total to be in sports. Add half an hour of transit time there (because we’re stuck behind a public school bus that comes to a full stop every sixty yards, and fifteen minutes of transit time back, and we’re an hour late getting back to campus, 5:30pm instead of 4:30. Argh. Not doing that trip again, at least not without some serious pre-planning. Keeping day student parents informed of such outings is going to be critical. Maybe the other state park? But then we miss out on the walk around the lake, and there’s not as much wildlife, and there’s lots more people around.

Study hall also ended early tonight. Not sure why, but around 8pm discovered kids wandering room to room on my hall. They were supposed to be in study hall for another half-hour. Have to go downstairs and keep an eye on things for a little while, and make sure no one is getting into trouble.

Still no word on White Wolf work from a month ago. The theoretical due-date for the final draft on that project is September 30, but I suspect it’s going to be late. Need to write to my editor and learn what’s what.