School Shouldn't Suck - Support #SBAR

You learned to read. To write. To speak. To stick up for yourself. But, when you entered high school you had to start waking up at 6:30 five days a week. Going to school after relentless studying, cramming, and assignments from the night before. Having to take standardized tests to prove that you are competent of basic skills.

Where did the learning end up at in this evolving school scene? Where did you end up?

Standards Based Grading is a compilation of “I can…” statements that give students a guide to the expectations of their teachers and their courses. Standards Based Grading should be incorporated throughout all of our education system because students know what they have learned, successful motivation does not come from a grade, and students are prepared for a life full of learning outside of their primary educational institute.

Students know where they stand on what they have learned and what’s ahead of them to learn. Each standard is a different skill that should be understood and, at a point in time, be able to be demonstrated. Students knowing the skills they are being taught by doing work in critical thinking problems, reading, and writing to get rid of the “I don’t do anything in that class” phrase students often use. Oh, and the infamous dinner question when your parents ask “What’d you learn today” and you reply “Nothing…” Standards Based Grading allows you to know exactly what you know, accurately, not just based off of one test score.

Along with enabling students to see their own learning, Standards Based Grading allows for more learning to occur. A teacher giving a student a zero on an assignment is not going to motivate that student to try harder. It’s going to show them that a number matters more than their learning does. It won’t make them try to re-do and relearn the content, it will make them give up. If the teacher doesn’t believe in the student, why should the student believe in themselves? It is not the numbers that matter but the people and ideas that associate them. Therefore, grades being used as an ineffective motivator would be eliminated in a Standards Based environment.

Chiefly, Standards Based Grading is the most opportune system in preparing students for life. A student will very rarely ever be given a grade with an A, B, C, D, F in the working world. They will be given a task, points, or standards, to cover in a project, presentation, or paper. Upon completion, they won’t be given a score. They will get all kinds of feedback: constructive, negative, positive all based upon whether it met the original outlined standards. The performance of that employee is not only clear to the teacher, but the employee and other supervisors.

Because Standards Based Grading enables students to know their position in what they have learned, motivation does not exist in letter grades, and it prepares students for a life enriched with constant learning it should be implemented throughout our entire education system. It is based on people, not in numbers. Don’t become a letter or a number. We are not a world of synonymous robots performing laborious tasks in uniform. Standards Based Grading is the future of our nation and workforce. The numbers don’t matter; it’s you that matters.

Consider...

Consider....

1. Teachers learn to teach the same way.
2. Students perform and learn in different ways naturally.
3. Where did these two get mixed and lost?

Dogs are individuals and different beings. We get it. Then why does our education system not treat our own students like this?! Our work and life are self-paced and "real" but our schools that lead us up to that point are not "real".

All the dogs and your students do have one thing in common: they all had guidance from their instructor. As a teacher, you have the power to change. I urge you to do so because we have a serious epidemic to solve here.

*This video is creative commons licensed, so please, use it to your needs in spreading the word!*

Top 10 Reasons that GPA's Suck

Though not endorsed by David Letterman, grade point averages do suck (really).

10. It shouldn't matter what number you or everyone else is. It's all a part of your own personal growth.

9. Someone who was not great at a required selective course is seen as a bad student even though they are excelling in every other class.

8. Assessments don't always know what I know.

7. Numbers are passionless. People aren't.

6.  Inaccurate until the semester ends. Feedback twice a year doesn't help continuous learning.

5. It should be considered a form of bullying by unfairly comparing students to one another.

4. It's completely irrelevant when left standing by itself. What does it represent: A sneaky cheater, a well behaved studier, or a 5 minute study crammer? It's an assessment taking score, not one of learning.

3. It takes the natural learning out of school. If it truly matters, you will know. A number won't.

2. Where is the data to even back up this number? Stored in more numbers ranging from 0-100%?

1. "It's not the number that matters, but what got you there" -Angela Maiers.

Cycles in Assessments

In speech we finished up the communication model of a message being sent, received, feedback given, cycle goes on and repeats. Everything is a cycle, right? A day does not go by that we don't communicate or do anything besides a cycle. Life in general is a cycle. Work is a cycle. School is a cycle, even though it shouldn't be. But we can bust out of cycles, right? We can break habits and routines and the society we have to conform into. After talking with Angela Maiers last week I started to question. I don't think on the spot, I need time to ponder most everything. Here's what I came up with:

Is a process and a product different than a cycle?

• I see a definitive difference between the two. A process and a product is thought of as a static unchanging occurrence  They are extremely similar in the fact that you have to put in work during the process to get a product and outcome you like. A cycle is viewed as taking it a step higher and taking that process and product and doing it again. Tweaking and changing it, but in essence doing the same thing again justifying it as a dynamic occurrence. 
• Example: A student taking notes, participating in activities, and studying to get the outcome they would like of passing the assessment. If they are satisfied, is it done and over? Move on. If they did not get what they wanted it could be retaken and reassessed making it a cycle.

Was the process different than the product? Which was more important?

• This is tough. In every instance there is a process and product as a result of it. Quality of the product is dependent on the process. But what if the process is more important? A student can demonstrate their critical thinking skills amazingly but the essay they wrote was not typed or well written. It had grammatical, spelling, and organizational issues. Is it still a good piece? What part matters most: the thought process or the end result? Too often I feel like the end result is being looked at too heavily. As the famous saying goes, it's the thought that counts.

Is there a point where you can stop and call it good enough?

• Even in a cycle there must be a product generated at some point. It may just be revised numerous times. But now the question comes back to the definition of a cycle? No where is it stated that a cycle can stop. If it is not done regularly it is not a cycle. It could be referring to the overarching idea of reassessing work until an end point is reached where all parties, teacher, student, parent, are satisfied. 
• Going back to my example of the student being assessed from question number one, how do you know when you reach this magic end point? Is it when they get an A+ on a multiple choice assessment? They most likely did not reach the highest level of understanding and certainly did not demonstrate it in that form. 

Angela stated plain and simple that "It's not about the number [product] that matters but what got you there [process]". Though this was referencing clout scores and online digital footprints it can be applied in every situation. That is where reflection comes in, to think about your thinking and the process behind where you are.

Summing up this debate with myself we can conclude that:

• cycles have a process and generate a product
• Often the thinking and skills used in the process can be poorly represented or poorly assessed in the product.
• Cycles are more of an overarching term of a repeating revision in the process and product.

Instead of leaving questions unanswered at the end of the post I am trying a new format of answering them during the post. Pretty smart, huh? ;) I would love to discuss and hear what parts of your thinking were pushed farther from my intense questioning whether it be in the comments or on Twitter. Game on.

Classroom of the Future or of Today?

Walking into the classroom door students would do a warm-up pre-assessment for the teacher to base stations and help for the day. The class period would be dynamic to the sense that stations would be chosen by the student on where they think they need help and a combination of where the teacher sees a fit. I picture a room with 3-4 stations happening either on different topics and students rotating between them, or where the stations are differentiated to different levels of the same topic, or a little of both. The teacher would float back and forth between stations while being ubiquitous and still monitoring the whole room. Having the station function gives students the freedom to move to a different leveled station if they need more than their current station is offering. It would be a mini version of a "vote with your feet" conference, if a session isn't working for you then find a better one. All of the stations would coincide with a theme for the day or relate to a project based learning activity later on. At the end of the class time students would do a formative assessment of what they learned that day to show what they retained and to let the teacher know where some clarification and instruction may be needed.

Does this look like your room? What do you do differently that works for you? I'm interested to hear how the style of your room works.

Wouldn't Everyone Have a D?

Some of you may remember the post from last February, #SBAR Thoughts. A post from last February just got a new comment today from Meg, nearly 9 months later. The post was in response to our district switching 6th grade to standards based reporting that they had been craving for a while.

I would argue that English is the best subject that it works in.  The reason that this works is because of the standards, if your standards are too general or too hard to accomplish then it will not work.  If a standard for Grammar Punctuation was "Places periods in appropriate spots after sentences" that would be a piece of cake for a normal 6th grader to do. If the standard was "Uses proper quotation and comma placement to structure a quote" that would be more leveled for 6th grade. 

I can't speak for other schools but middle school teachers in our district use standards behind the scenes for their own purposes of tracking student knowledge and understanding. But they have to then take those standards and form a rubric that converts them into points to put in the grade book. Not only does that take more time but the simile I like to use with it is that you have to measure in inches and report it centimeters, kind of pointless.

Language Arts is subjective at times. For example, last year we studied the holocaust for a month. It wasn't social studies so the standards weren't to understand and grasp what happened in the holocaust but to understand the social effects, and dive through writing from the time period. In the grammar example I gave above you could grade them on a worksheet and give 5/5 points for secure,4/5 for developing. The issue with that is they got an 80% because they slipped on one problem and in the grade book that's the only thing that is reflective of that. Where when you use standards you take into account that worksheet, group work, independent practice, formative and summative assessments to decide what they receive on that one concept.

Everyone puts their own little spin on standards based reporting but it still comes back to the standard. In a standard of "understand and use the 201 concepts of grammar" everyone would be developing. Standards are sorted and specific and that's what makes them work.

I hope I didn't throw you under the bus too far Meg. :)