Rethinking Grading: My Thoughts (Part 1)

My Dean of Faculty recently gave me a copy of Cathy Vatterott’s Rethinking Grading: Meaningful Assessment for Standards-Based Learning as I will be heading a group of faculty member examining whether our assessment practices actually support the style of teaching we are doing at my school.  Although I am only a few chapters into the book, I must say it is as if Ms. Vatterott reached into my head and pulled out exactly what I have been thinking for years.

As an English teacher, I have always had a particularly difficult time using the traditional grading system as a way to assess my students.  To me, putting a number grade on someone’s reading and writing ability is challenging and sometimes seems impossible.  Rubrics have helped, but I struggle with the idea of putting a final grade on a piece of writing.  Writing, I firmly, believe is a process.  How do you put a final grade on a process?  Even more difficult is evaluating creative and personal writing.  How do you put a grade on a piece of poetry?  On a personal narrative that a student poured her heart an soul into? How can I teach a love and passion for writing and reading through archaic evaluative systems?

More importantly, if we are out to foster a growth mindset in our students, traditional grading systems are not the way to do it.  As much as we can pretend that allowing the student to re-write the D paper doesn’t affect their attitude toward learning, we are kidding ourselves.  That D does nothing to tell the student how far he has come or what he has learned in the process – it is merely a reminder that they are not considered “good enough” no matter how much work and effort they placed.  And if we really sat and thought about it, how often does that D just go away?  Students are very quickly trapped into the grades they receive, or so it seems.  Vatterott writes:

The patterns of school failure in the traditional system tend to reinforce the fixed mindset as the same students fail over and over again.  As those students come to believe they’re just not smart, the mindset becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Struggling students begin to avoid learning. “Given all this, why persist?” they say. For the struggling learner, failure feels like fait accompli – a permanent caste system for C students and below.

– Cathy Vatterott, Rethinking Grading, 31

I am eager to learn more about Vatterott’s thoughts regarding how standard-based grading can help create a shift in a student’s motivation and lead to what most of us teachers are after: working with students who value and appreciate learning and are not just there to get their name on the honor roll.

More to come!

Vatterott, Cathy. Rethinking Grading: Meaningful Assessment for Standards-based Learning. Aleandria: ACSD, 2015. Print.

Summer Reading Blog = Writing Pre-Assessment

Photo Credit: Gibson Regester

Just Say No to Book Reports and Yes to Blogging!

I wish I could remember the name of the graduate school professor I had who facetiously made this statement about book reports – “Yes, the first thing I want to do when I finish a great book, is to make a diorama” – because that really struck a chord. Not that there’s anything wrong with dioramas per se, but like many, usually when I read a great book, I want to process it and talk about it.  I do not want to make a mobile of important characters and symbols (is it bazaar that I can still picture the mobile I made in third grade but have no idea what book said mobile was on) or run to find the nearest empty shoebox.  Thus, in my attempt to stop destroying reading for my students, I have tried to change up the dreaded summer reading project to hopefully! make it a bit more interesting.

In the past few years, I have asked students to write a book review of the various required readings that they have done, and although I don’t think this was a bad approach, it really only allowed me to view their writing once school had already started.  This was helpful but would have been more beneficial over the summer when I try to do a lot of planning.  So, in trying to work “smarter not harder,” I have dropped this activity and instead am asking my students to respond to some discussion boards via our classroom blog.

Although I firmly believe in having students create the content on the blog, for this summer blogging experience, I have asked students to respond to questions I have created, seeing as the majority of these students have not done any form of blogging before. Basically, I am using the blog as the means for threaded discussions.    Below, you will find my process for creating the posts regarding our summer reading book The Book Thief.  You can also check out our Summer Reading Page and feel free to add to our discussion if you have read The Book Thief!

Thoughts about Process:

• Why a blog and not Schoology or something similar: If this were done during the school year, Schoology discussion boards would be a great tool, but seeing as the summer is a time to create new classes and archive previous information on the site, I felt this activity would be easiest with something I could easily control and that was also very simple to use for new students.
• Optional “I’m confused” posts:  The Book Thief is a fairly long book that can sometimes be confusing due to the unique narration style.  I decided to create a few posts allowing students to ask questions regarding the book as I didn’t want them to continue reading not having any idea what was going on.  So far, these haven’t been used, and they may not, but at least the students (and parents) know they are there if need be.  I monitor all posts, so students can respond to their classroom’s questions but if there is an error in information, I can easily delete the post.
• Limited number of discussion boards:  I will be teaching a small class next year of about 48 students.  I did not want to have so many discussion boards that there ended up being little discussion.  I also wanted to make sure my students responses to said discussions were varied and not repetitive.
• Required number of sentences per posts: I’ll admit that this is something I hemmed and hawed about as I am not a firm believer in this approach.  However, I do not know these students all that well nor they me.  They do not know my expectations, and I do not want them to “mess up” because they didn’t understand what I was looking for.  Requiring a certain amount of sentences and providing models for what good responses look like makes sure that students are taking the easy out and also makes sure they provide enough information that I can use as pre-assessments.
• More  required responses to classmates than individual thoughts:  I want my students to read what their peers are writing.  This will allow them to see a book at a different level.  If they are only writing down their own thoughts, they will never stop and read what their classmates have written.  So, I can guarantee that they will read at least four of their classmates thoughts simply by making this requirement.
• Models, Models, Models:  It’s no surprise that I just finished Kelly Gallagher’s Write Like Us, a book that discusses the importance of modeling while teaching writing.  I have provided many models of both good and bad comments so that my students know exactly the type of writing I am looking for.