Learning, Mastery, Grades: One of These Things is Not Like the Other

By Anonymous -
Yesterday on my way home from school, I listened to a TED podcast from Sal Khan: Let's Teach for Mastery, Not Test Scores. Its a great way to spend 11 minutes, and I don't know about you but I love the cadence of his voice. Very Barack Obama-esque. Politics aside, I love hearing that man speak.


I was pumped after listening to this. It validated my recent cannonballs into flexible seating, and rubric based grading, and it lit my fire to the personalized learning schedule my team is currently launching. I will share those resources, and also give some perspective of how we got to this point in our classrooms. Its a step farther out on a continuum, not a switch that is flipped. 

I have been feeling more and more disillusioned by our grading system in my district. When a parent looks at an 89% in math on a report card, what does that tell them? What does it communicate?


I have asked about whether our district would consider standards based grading for a couple years, and there is a belief that the community would have a hard time accepting that. The argument of "colleges need GPA" comes out at every turn, whether you are talking to an educator, a parent, or a community member. 


More recently, as I've gone through an IMMOOC  and spent more time reflecting on so many innovative ideas, I started to play with the idea of using rubrics to measure my students' learning. It started with an idea to provide more student choice in how they show their learning. I felt that I wasn't being intentional enough about my process standards, so I could create a list of skills needed and allow the students to choose a process TEKS to show their mastery of the content TEKS. Turns out, I didn't know my process TEKS very well.

After spending some time studying those process TEKS, and after a few rounds of feedback from peers and supervisors, I ended up with this.


Feel free to use and tweak and make it your own. Feel free to share those tweaks, suggestions, or questions in the comments below. I am in the trial and error phase, and I've made several corrections as they come up.

Overall, I love what this communicates to parents and ultimately students. I love that it gives the power to the students to assess themselves and iterate as many times as they need to when approaching mastery. It builds opportunity for peer coaching, growth mindset, and still allows me to provide grades for the students and parents to place value on. 

Please leave questions, comments, ideas, suggestions, and critiques in the comments! Feedback is everything!

What do you do to innovate inside the box?






Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Laying a Foundation with Kagan Heterogeneous Seating Groups

By Anonymous -
Image
I'm all for small group instruction. Narrowing down that student-teacher ratio from 22 or 26:1 to 4 or 5:1 is ideal for my understanding where my kids are and for directed instruction that the students stay engaged in. A few questions arise when you dip your toe into a workshop model of instruction . Here are a few I had: 1. How do I group my kids? See Below. 2. What do the other kids do while I pull a small group? It depends. Coming soon. 3. How do I manage behavior in a station/center/rotation atmosphere? See #2. 4. What do I do once my kids are in small group? See #2. I can answer Question #1 today. Heterogeneous grouping a la Kagan. I recently attended a Kagan training that our school hosted. You can buy the book online, as I did prior to attending the training, but the training itself is very helpful in understanding the idiosyncrasies of using the cooperative learning strategies. This is NOT a curriculum. Its a great way to access curriculum in a team building, com
Read more

Be Flexible...Beyond the Workshop Model

By Anonymous -
Image
I don't know if I have mentioned the fact that I work with an amazing team of educators. I fancy myself an innovator, but these women push me daily to think deeper, go bigger, and break out of the box. I wouldn't be the educator I am today without them. So many times we sat and discussed how we wish we had more time for this or that (Response To Intervention, Spiral Review, Reflection, etc.) You name it, we wanted to be doing it. Always racing the clock. In most teacher training I have been in, that is the piece that always comes up in the challenges and roadblocks talk. How do I get time on my side? My brilliant fellow teacher, whom I am grateful to call my close friend, suggested we throw the daily schedule out the window...wait, what?! I've been participating in what we called "Flexible Scheduling" for about 3 weeks now. Just as the transition from whole group to a workshop model changed my practice, this has turned my classroom on its head. In the b
Read more

#IMMOOC Dive Under the Iceberg

By Anonymous -
Image
Sylvia Duckworth's visual representation of success is so revealing. It struck a nerve. I have to be visible not only in my success, but in the process along the way. Process over product, or at least with it. But its a two-way system. I need to share my whole iceberg and look at other's when learning from them. Often we look at people doing amazing things and think, "Wow! They make it look so easy !" I don't know about you, but EASY is a 4 letter word in my classroom. I discourage students to use it because it is undermining for some and unrepresentative for others. So why do I use it? Nothing starts easy for anyone.  The challenge is to follow up those thoughts with "How did she/he get there? What did it look like along the way?" We need to ask those questions when we are learning, and give those answers when we are sharing. Its a true representation that will add fuel to the Crowd Accelerated Innovation. When we can learn from each other&
Read more