Students Grading Themselves

When my principal came to me at the end of the year last year telling me about the ROLE classroom and how she would like me to attempt it (with some other teachers) one of the things that made me leery was the idea of students assessing their learning for the grading period and giving themselves a grade with my assistance.  I have now gone through this process with all the students in my class for the second grading period and I think that I have come to some decent conclusions.

First I think that students are more honest with you than you would think.  My first grading period I was shocked at how many students were well thought out in their evaluation of themselves without much guidance in how to do so from me.  Unfortunately for my students, since it was also my first time through the process I was still learning how to coach them up.  This second marking period I added a Google Form for them to fill out beforehand that allowed them to process how they did this grading period and set some ideas of what their goals for the upcoming weeks will be and what their grade should be.  The kids did even better with some prompting than they did when we began for the first time.  I would say that 90% of my kids had a grade that I would have given them myself.  The other 10% took a little bit of conversation to help them understand why their grade was either too high or too low.  In the end, I reminded them that the grade is not important to me at all, I just want them to have an accurate representation of their growth this grading period.

Be careful with your prompting of children.  I found that my kids had many of the same goals and usually they had to do with any prompting that I gave them to help them think through their growth.  We finished a PBL late in the grading period and with that came a ton of different ways that my students could grow themselves for next time.  When I reminded them to think through this on their Google Form, they all gravitated to one of a few basic skills for their goals.  My hope was for them was to use my suggestions as a way to brainstorm specific skills each student needed to work on, but what I got was the path of least resistance.

The only other thing that I’m noticing with this process is that it takes time.  For my classes, it’s taken me between two and three full class periods (of 50 minutes) to get a grade for every student.  I have been asked a few times if I thought this was worth it, and I can legitimately say that I think this classroom experience is growing my students in ways that I could not have even planned.  It was not evident in the first few weeks of trying, but the further in the school year we go the more convinced I am that this way of teaching is revolutionizing my classroom.  I’m excited by where my classroom is heading and look forward to see where it is going to head in the future.

Student Conferences – Round 1

This week was the end of our first marking period.  Most of the time this would mean that I was frantically uploading all the last minute grades for the students and ensuring that there were comments and citizenship grades.  This time, however, was marked by me sitting down with every student in all my classes and talking about their grades and setting goals for the second marking period.

The first thing I learned while I was meeting with students is that it takes a lot longer than I predicted.  I left room for the last three days of the marking period figuring that I would take two days to get it done, but giving myself some room just in case.  What I found was that it took me approximately 5 minutes per child for my sixth graders and between 5 and 10 minutes per seventh graders.  I think this has to do with the fact that I know my seventh graders better because they were in my class last year and we have more goals to set and things to discuss.  When you multiply that out, that is a lot of time being taken up conferencing with students, but I’m really looking forward to seeing the change in students this next marking period and the conversations that happen at the end of it.

The second thing I learned was that most students were pretty honest with their level of work and effort over the course of the marking period.  I would say that the students that did the best this marking period were often the hardest on themselves.  It was a great opportunity for me to remind them of all the awesome, creative things I’ve seen from them this marking period.  I only had one or two students that were way outside the range I would have given them as a grade.  For those students I reminded them of their effort and level of work and they revamped the score they gave themselves on their own.  I was shocked at how honest my sixth and seventh graders were.

My next iteration of student conferences will include some sort of google form or written assignment that has my kids think through the process of negotiating a grade and advocating for themselves.  I think my kids have the ability to think through their growth as a student and reflect on their output for a marking period.  If I can combine this while developing their ability to argue a position about their grade for a marking period I think it is time well spent.  I also would like to have a spreadsheet with all the feedback I’ve given to the student over the course of the marking period.  Our online grade book has some great features, but one that I still would like to see is the ability to print out the comments I’ve given the students over the course of the first few weeks of school.

These are minor inconveniences when compared to the potential revolution in the teacher/student relationship.  I’m so excited by the conversations I’ll be able to have with every one of my students in a few short weeks and I’ll continue to post my thoughts and reactions to this ROLE Reversal process.

Longitude/Latitude Differentiation

The first week of school is always a fun week.  I’d rather not have to act like a fool during the pep rally on the first day, but every teacher in the school is required to do that.  I’m terrible with new names and since I’m not coaching this year I have two more classes of kids to memorize, but that’s fun in an odd way.  This year is a little more challenging because our high school was introducing their one to one iPad program which means the tech integration specialists were swarming to handle any difficulties teachers or students might have.  This also meant that we at the middle schools didn’t get the opportunity to set up all the student login’s handled the first week, so I went the low-tech route on my introductory concept which is longitude and latitude.

Longitude and latitude is one of the few skills that I get to teach in my social studies classes.  Most of my kids have never used this to find absolute location, so it’s fun to teach a new concept and allow my kids to learn how to use it practically.  After having an introductory conversation about how their phones and most location based technology actually uses longitude/latitude to find your position, we go over the basic method of finding a spot on a map.  This includes finding the latitude on the side of the page and the longitude on the top or bottom of the page and tracing the lines to find the intersection.  The first day we spend most of the time practicing and me answering questions about the maps we use.  At the end of class, I give the students an exit ticket that has four basic questions:

  1. Give me the longitude and latitude of Ft. Worth, TX
  2. Latitude runs north/south or east/west
  3. On a scale of 1-10 how confident are you in your answers?
  4. Would you be willing to teach someone how to do long/lat?

Once the kids are done and the day is over I quickly sort the cards into piles:

  • Pile #1 – This pile is for all the cards that got #1 and #2 correct, were confident in the answers, and were willing to teach.
  • Pile #2 – This pile is for all the cards that got #1 and #2 correct, but were either not super confident or were not willing to teach.
  • Pile #3 – This pile is for kids that were wrong on either #1 or #2 or were not confident at all.
  • Pile #4 – This pile is for kids that were way off.

I match a person in Pile #1 and #3 for collaborative groups for the following day so that the kid who has grasped long/lat a little quicker can help his classmate that needs a little extra help.  I partner the Pile #2 kids together because they have the concept, but don’t necessarily want to teach the concept to someone who doesn’t understand.  I help the kids in Pile #4 since they do not grasp the material as well as they need to.  With this system I get to help the struggling learners while allowing the stronger students in class to help their classmates in learning.

The next day in class we have a few practice problems to work on.  when they have them checked to be correct they start creating one of three products to show their mastery of he concept:

  1. Create a song that reminds people how to keep the differences between longitude and latitude straight.
  2. Create a poster that visually reminds students how to find a location using longitude and latitude.
  3. Think of 5 careers that would frequently use longitude and latitude, tell me how you think they use it, and then predict what the modern world would be like if longitude and latitude hadn’t been invented.

This was also the first assignment I gave narrative feedback for in my ROLE classroom this year.  I found that my kids wanted to do their best and took the feedback well.  Some groups were still in process at the end of the day on Friday, so we’ll be finishing it up on Tuesday.  I think it was a great first lesson, especially since we didn’t have the opportunity to use technology at all for the week.

Constructivist Week

My week of inservice training is behind me and the kids come for the first time on Monday.  I feel like the week before school has flown by and all of a sudden I’m scrambling to finish off a few last minute things this weekend.  All things considered this was by far the best inservice week of my teaching career and the theme of it all would be ‘constructivist’.

Our district’s social studies theme for the year is constructivism and we spent some time looking at what that looks like in a classroom.  We worked in groups to define the term and come up with things we’d like to know more about so that our curriculum director can work on some trainings throughout the year to help us out more.  In the afternoon of this particular day, two of my co-workers and I got to lead a training on Project Based Learning which is our campus’ focus and has been for a year.  We each shared a project that we had run in our classrooms this year as well as provided some ideas and things to think about when planning a PBL unit.  We got some great feedback on our presentation and our curriculum director praised us at our campus later in the week.

Later in the week our principal brought in Mark Barnes to speak with the whole staff about his particular brand of constructivist learning.  After he presented to our teaching staff as well as a number of district administrators, six of us got the opportunity to spend the rest of the day learning from Mark in a small group in a more in depth way.  He shared with us about how he uses his website to be the hub of learning for his class, different technologies he uses, and ways to deal with the different problems we might encounter during our first year.  I walked away from this day with a head swimming with ideas and not enough time to adequately plan out how I might implement them.  On top of all that, my school issued a few of us an iPad mini to use in the classroom!

I’m really excited to push the envelope a bit this school year…in a good way.  I’m ready to take a massive step toward transforming my classroom into a place where my students drive their own learning and create more than intake.  I’m ready to think differently about education and I’m so glad that I have some co-workers who will be traveling this road with me.

Don’t Get Stagnant

When I was in little league, my coaches used to tell me that if you’re not getting better you’re getting worse.  I never really understood that growing up, but now that I’m on the wrong side of my sporting career it makes sense.  I try to remember that during the summer where it’s really easy to fall back into what we’ve always done before.

Luckily my principal has either intentionally or randomly chosen to change the course I’ll be teaching almost every year I’ve been teaching which keeps me on my toes.  It’s helpful, but as I’ve reflected on the beginning of the school year, I realize that they have always gone well but I’m beginning to wonder if I could do more or do things differently.  I want to front load the first week of school with information gathering about my students to help me in meeting their needs throughout the school year.

The first weeks of school for my school is relationship building and introducing the students to our school.  We have a project based learning initiative at our campus, so last year I put together a PBL for our 6th graders to introduce them to the process we go through for project based learning as a school.  We found in it’s first year last year that it helped the new 6th graders better understand project based learning and the expectations their teachers had for them.  It also helped the kids learn more about the school and our policies up front so they all knew what basic policies (library, technology, late work, etc.) were in the beginning which meant we didn’t need to cover them in our classes individually.  The 6th grade team though it went really well and with a few tweeks it will be done again this school year.  I’ll put up a post in the next few days where I outline this grade-wide project.

While refining the school-wide project, I want to do a better job of understanding all my students from the beginning.  I did some reading on My Beginning of the Year Student Questionnaire by Pernille Ripp and her other post on Parent Questionnaires I decided that I could easily collect a lot of information very easily.  I’m also going to try Curriculum Compacting with at least one student this year, so knowing more about each child’s interests will help me to create projects and products that they find interesting and engaging.

The other big change in my classroom is that I’ve been asked to be in a pilot group of teachers employing Results Only Learning Environment in my classroom as well as Standards Based Grading.  I’m really excited about the change in grading especially.  I know it will be a lot of work in the beginning especially while I’m getting used to it, but I realize that it’s better for my kids.  I need to reread parts of the book to make sure I’m on the same page with the rest of the people who are piloting this concept.

I’m trying to be intentional about changing up my routines as I go through my career teaching so that I don’t turn into a formulaic teacher.  That being said, I want to make sure I’m doing things that have real meaning and purpose for my classroom.  I don’t want to push the envelope just for the sake of pushing the envelope, I want to make sure that it adds to my classroom or is research based.  What are you doing to change your teaching this school year?  Are you getting better or getting worse?

Summer Plans

The end of the school year is here.  This was signaled by the 6th grade taking their annual field trip.  In previous years we’ve gone to a roller skating rink, but since the past few years we’ve had some fairly major injuries we decided to take them to a local water park.  My comment was that now we’re trading possibility of serious injury for the possibility of drowning a middle school kid, but everything went fine.  With the end of the school year, my brain automatically starts to plan for summer break and what I’m going to do with my time (outside of family time, which is a given).

  • Planning for our pilot project next year.  A few teachers on my campus are going to be trying standards based grading as well as some other parts in Mark Barnes’ book Role Reversal.  We’re going to be meeting soon after summer begins to try and plan for next year and see how we can support each other through this major transition in the way we teach.
  • Getting ready for Confratute.  I’m going to be heading to the University of Connecticut in July for some training in gifted education.  There are a number of things that need to be planned.  I need to read up on the course options for my time there as well as some sights to see on my days after.  I also need to figure out how I can help Haley to be successful since she’ll have a four month old and this will be the longest we have ever been apart from each other since we’ve been married.
  • Updating my reading list.  I’ve done my best to collect an overwhelming amount of books to be reading over the summer about a variety of topics.  At the beginning of putting this list together I was trying to borrow as many as I could, but I’m running into a few books that I had to order.  Some reviews to come (assuming I read as much as I plan on this summer)

I also have a number of projects that need to happen around my house this summer.  It should be a busy summer and hopefully a productive summer.  Any ideas for any other ways I can fill up my short summer break?

Ending Well

The end of the year is always a difficult combination of looking forward to next school year, trying to end this school year well, and being exhausted from the school year.  This year I have tried so hard to use the end of the year to try things out to see how they will go in future years.  

A few of the teachers in my school (myself included) are going to be going to standards based grading next school year.  Monday of this week we spent some time touring another school that has an iPad in every student’s hands and talked with the teachers and staff about how they incorporate technology into their school day at all times.  It was the second time I had visited this school and I was so impressed by the way their students acted with technology as well as the culture of the school.  After meeting with the principal of the school it became evident that they have some unique advantages such as working at approximately 60% capacity, but none the less it was an eye opening experience.  When we met after lunch our group began to talk about standards based grading and how we could best implement it in our classes next year.  We met with various technology related staff as well as an assistant superintendent, so we felt a lot of pressure as well as excitement.  In the end, we all left with some action items and we able to begin the process of moving forward.  We were also let know that we will be using Blackboard for the online content in our classroom next year.  The last time I used Blackboard was in college and it was not a well thought out piece of software, but I’m going to try and keep an open mind as we go through training next week on it.

In the second half of the week I really tried to incorporate some of the ideas in Mark Barnes’ book Role Reversal.  I tried to use mini lessons and allow the kids to have choice and opinions.  I’m realizing that one of my weaknesses is letting my level of exhaustion determine the amount of time and feedback I give my kids during each class period.  In the future I need to know that this is a weakness of mine and push through.  My kids are also not used to this method of teaching, so there was some confusion and misunderstanding of how class was going to operate.  I think by setting expectations from the beginning of the school year next year I’ll better be able to mold my classroom into a place where kids are motivated to learn on their own and I can give them constant feedback about how their learning is going.  I’m really looking forward to planning this summer on my own and coming back together with my colleagues and collaborating on transforming our classrooms.

I’m also working on increasing my work related reading at the end of the school year.  Right now I’m working on Daniel Pink’s book Drive.  I would say that at the halfway point of this book I can see exactly how Mark Barnes used this text to drive his classroom.  I’ve really enjoyed seeing motivation through the eyes of science. I’m fascinated by different perspectives on everyday events (which is why I love the show Mythbusters) and this book has opened my eyes.  I’m looking forward to finishing this book and then moving on to a few other books this summer.