SBG comparisons

Matt Townsley is an administrator in a school district in Iowa who has 6 years of experience teaching high school math. During that time he began using Standards-Based Grading (or Reporting) and has some great insights on the differences between them. Several posts in the past have included examples of metacognitive student work where the students reflect on how much more useful SBG is to them than traditional grading.

Today’s post is a slick table comparing Standards-Based to Traditional grading. I’m a huge fan of slick graphic organizers, so I thought I’d share it.

Mr. Townsley’s post is: HERE.

Thanks for the awesome post, MeTA Musings!

On Enrichment

I am currently student teaching in a school with a relatively high percentage of low income families. There is a high percentage of minority students (for Iowa, at least), and many of the students come to us from pretty rough circumstances at home. One piece of rhetoric that is often kicked around to help teachers to help students from low income backgrounds is to give them “the enrichment they do not receive at home”. Now, There have been a number of studies done on the subject measuring the diversity of words spoken at home, access to resources, access to knowledgeable help for homework, and all manner of other yardsticks and I’m not here to argue with the numbers. What I’d like to talk about is how students are supposed to get this enrichment we want them to have.

“Rigorous” should never mean “more work”. It’s not fair or even helpful to assign a student extra homework or give them an extra worksheet to do in the name of an enriched background knowledge and a more rigorous curriculum. Extra work is usually perceived as unfair at best and “picking on” the student to single them out at worst. It makes them unhappy, it makes them shut down, and it increases their hatred of the establishment that seems solely created to torture them eight hours a day, five days a week. What we really want to do is open them up to the development of higher-level thinking processes so that their understanding is laid deeper and class time is more productive so we can get in that enrichment that they so desperately need.

One thing that I have noticed in my students is that they have been passed along and marginalized, their grades have been an arcane and illogical device that tends to punish them rather than provide any useful feedback, and they have been made to feel stupid so often that they create layers of prickly armor designed to keep anyone from believing they might care (even a tiny bit) about school. They’re “too cool” to care about school and they show nothing but teeth when you come close, because they’ve been hit before and they don’t want to get hit again.

Okay, so these are sweeping generalizations. I know that, but the point is that frustrating students are frustrating because they seem unreachable. We really want to help them, but they can sometimes be hard to even hold a conversation with. One thing that I have noticed about my students is that, aside from the adolescent need to test boundaries, they honestly don’t believe in themselves. They have no academic self-esteem.

Quite often I will have a student raise their hand, point to a question, and tell me they don’t “get it”. If I rephrase the question, or break it down into smaller parts, the student can usually give me the answer without too much of a problem. If I move on at that point, however, I might get the same question again later because the student “didn’t know what to write”. Sometimes after they tell me their answer I’ll say, “So write that.” Shocked expressions.

It seems to me like the students don’t have confidence in their own thoughts. In their minds, “their answer” and “the right answer” are two different things and never the twain shall meet. They have trouble articulating themselves on paper, as if they just don’t think their thoughts are worth the white space. They don’t seem to understand that even an incomplete answer is better than no answer and that we can see where their thoughts were headed even if they can’t.

One thing that I would like to do when I have my own classroom, if I have a group of kids like these again, is begin the year with exercises to develop their thinking and articulation.

Articulation on Paper:

When students can tell you the answer to a question, but ask what to write down, I think there is either a hangup about putting their thoughts down, or they don’t know how to put their stream of consciousness into sentences. One thing I’d like to try is to ask them a series of simple, silly questions that might prompt the sort of articulation problems that they sometimes have with science questions. For example, I might ask them to write an answer to  ”When you pour yourself a bowl of cereal with milk, how do you decide how much milk to pour in?”.

It’s a silly question that, odds are, they’ve never had to answer on paper before. They could probably tell me an answer having to do with seeing the milk, waiting for the cereal to float, or even counting off seconds, but they might not know how to make sentences out of it on paper.

Thinking Skills:

I’m not going to say too much about this, because there are many more comprehensive guides on how to teach skills like inferring and evaluating. What I’m going to say about these here is that there should be a good chunk of time up front devoted to smaller puzzles. Not “easy” puzzles, but smaller ones. The students need to know that they can think and that we believe in their ability to think.

If getting a make over and taking some glamour shots can show a person with body-image issues that they can be beautiful, then perhaps showing a perpetually-struggling student that they can be smart can help give them the academic confidence they need to try; even just a little, even just for you. I believe it can be hard to give students they enrichment they need because they are too jaded to open up to it. The student who refuses to work is probably the one who needs it most.

They’ve heard “There are no stupid questions” before. They’ve heard “There is no right or wrong answer”. They don’t believe it. Your job is to put your money where your mouth is and show them that you believe in them.

OMG Cookies Are So Nerdy!

http://www.sciencecookiecutters.com/

So there we are in “Learning and Instruction” covering a unit on how to teach creativity. Teach creativity? Right. Sure, there are lots of ways to go about it, but this is a lecture class so all we’re really talking about is poster projects for little kids and we few secondary majors aren’t really getting much usable material.

Soon we’re done with the lecture portion and moving to a discussion phase where we’re supposed to discuss a possible creative project “that we would teach”. Now, because we’re secondary and because there’s few of us and we’re in dramatically different disciplines we’ve got a table of one math teacher, one english teacher, and one blogging science teacher.

We’re discussing different ways that we could go about this within our subjects when the it hits us all at the same time…

Go go interdisciplinary powers ACTIVATE! Form of: cookies!

So we’re going to find cookie recipes. They’re going to be analyzed for similar elements and we’re going to learn how baking works. We’re also going to talk about measurements, volume, mass, and temperature. And maybe, if we wanted to be evil, we could make them use only one measuring cup, or only measure by weight. (Muahaha!)

For the math aspect, we’re going to make each group of students responsible for a certain number of cookies that isn’t the batch size of the recipe. This will work into multiplication and division of fractions. They can also double dip on measurement and conversions.

English will develop marketing materials and slogans, and write contrastive essays about the cookies they try.

Social studies… could look into the history of cookie making, cultural recipes, or world cookie markets. Hey, we don’t know what they’re studying right now!

In any case, I think I can see the appeal of project-based schools. Ohh yeah. This could be huge. This is amazing. You guys are so smart!

Standards-Based Grading in Five Easy Steps!

So I’ve been doing a lot of searching around for Standards-based grading lately and I just thought I’d jot down the shorthand framework for what I’ve found. This is simplistic. It’s meant to be simplistic, both in the content of the steps and the “lessons”. This is pretty much my notes from the IAS fall conference session on the topic and a way for me to easily refer people who ask me about my new fervor for the subject to a “process” written out in short form. Basically, to make my life easier.

The Breakdown:

1) Identify the State or National standards associated with your planned unit.

Example:

From the NSES, grade 5-8 Physical science: “Properties and changes of properties in matter”

2) Break each standard down into “Learning Goals”.

Example:

“Properties and changes of properties in matter” can be broken down into “Can name states of matter and phase changes, understands the differences between states of matter and phase changes, can apply states and changes in critical thinking problems.”

3) Create inquiry activities, lecture, homework, or whatever else floats your boat to handle each learning goal.

Example:

“Can name states of matter” and “understands the differences between states of matter” could be grouped together into an introductory activity where you figure out where your students are in their initial understanding and let them play with water, do demonstrations with dry ice, and let them come up with their own examples of states and state changes. This is teaching, just do what you do!

4) Set up a system where each learning goal is like an “assignment” under the standard as a “unit” for grading. Grade for comprehension on a 1-4, 1-5, 1-10, etc. scale.

Example:

5) Allow retests as comprehension increases.

Congratulations! You just graded by standards! Be patient. Just like all students don’t take to inquiry like ducks to water, not all of them like the idea of living without a safety net of homework grade fluff… But hey, we’re here to shake ‘em up and make ‘em think, right?

On the Authority of Age

My school was invaded today.

There I was in the student union getting set to have my usual college breakfast of PBJ and milk, trying to check out when the invaders started to pour through the doors in veritable hordes.

That’s right, high school had come to visit.

Okay, okay, all dramatics aside there were an awful lot of high school kids that came today and I realized a few minutes in that I was launching into a sort of haughty disdain for all of these “kids” who were coming to my place of relative adult interest and indulging in the usual sort of cafeteria antics. That was when I decided to stop and try to figure out why.

See, I was feeling “adult”. The problem is, “adult” is not something that is easily defined; and in fact, it tends to change based on who you happen to be with at the time. I feel adult around high school kids for sure, and even around many of my fellow college students (being at least a few years older than my peers at that “Non-traditional student” stage). I also fully anticipate feeling adult around people who are 25 when I’m 30, and I remember feeling adult around younger children when I was measurably more developed than them.

Think of it like this: when you’re born, you’re turned out into a nice shallow bowl of a playpen to enjoy while your parents have the dubious privilege of caring to your every need and teaching you how to live in your culture. As you develop more and more you start to get curious about what’s beyond the lip of the bowl you’re in and start to head out toward the edges to peer over it. This being a magical, metaphorical bowl however, it’s impossible to get to the edge. The bowl widens, the scenery becomes broader, but the steady incline remains.

Each scientifically measured and labeled stage of child development is like a ring of stairs, or even sheer walls with ladders set into the incline where the slope gets much, much steeper for a time and having recently gained the upper limit and returning to a gentler slope for a time you can turn and look down upon those younger children who are still struggling on the ladder or down in the bowl and you can know that what you’re seeing now is much vaster than they imagined when they started the climb. You, though, you’re at a better vantage point and you can see how much bigger it is.

The unique problem of the bowl, however, is that you can easily see how much ground you’ve covered and how much more space there is, but there will always be that dang hill in front of you that prevents you from seeing beyond a few steps in front of you, and therefore the climb must always continue.

I think teenagers in high school are in an even more interesting situation. When you begin that final climb through biological development, it’s almost as if the walls are now angling in. You can look up and see that spot of daylight overhead, but the only way to get there is a set of ladder rungs stuck into the wall. The world narrows around you and you know with even more certainty than before that all those children in the bowl below haven’t even considered how hard life could be now. Rather obviously, adulthood lies out that spot of light and every new rung under your feet is another lesson learned. You can see all the area of the bowl below you, and that grants you authority of knowledge and perspective on any subject in your purview… which is everything. Obviously. Like, duh.

But then, at some point after you leave the house, miss a bill payment and get one of the pink letters, or even just when you decide once to go to bed early you stop, dumbfounded, and realize that you’re a real adult now. Sometime or other you passed through the hole and didn’t even notice it because you’re still climbing. And while older adults may find occasions to feel superior to you, it matters less now because you’ve all realized together that the hill is never going to level out, and that’s okay- that’s life.

Now, this is only a working theory of a metaphor, and like all generalizations is subject to failure in certain areas of detail, but I think the point of all this rambling and the way that it can actually come back to the topic of teaching is that we should always keep in mind that not only were we once there where are students were… we are ourselves still climbing the bowl, and I think the realization of this is the tipping point out of adolescence. Furthermore, we should always keep in mind the point of the climb that each student is at and how it will alter their view of the world and also that, as teachers and parents, we are the ones who are putting in the stairs, and hammering in the ladder rungs. That we are providing the means for each student to make their way through the world, to continue development whether the realize we’re there or not.