The first day of class: not too shabby

First confession: I was a little nervous today in anticipation of introducing the standards based grading system to my freshmen. I had written a concise but informative description of how I planned to implement the system in my syllabus, but I also decided I wasn't going to introduce it by just reading the syllabus together. That just would have been too wordy and boring. So instead I told them they could read all the details in the syllabus (indeed their first assignment is to sign a mutual agreement of expectations that I also signed and that their parents need to sign), but that I would explain the system using visuals and we'd have a discussion.

Second confession: I cribbed *a lot* from my friend Bowman to introduce the concept of standards based grading to my freshmen - in particular, he came up with a wonderful analogy between SBG and the game Angry Birds. So I will also give him all the credit for just how well they responded to the explanation. It was actually kind of thrill to see their positive reactions. 

First, it was obvious that they really welcomed the idea of having it be made very clear on every homework what they could work on and what skills they were required to master. I thought they'd be intimidated by it all, but instead they were really receptive. In fact, some of them almost anticipated some of my visuals with their questions. I think showing them a sample homework and explaining how it would work really helped (see sample homework image below).

Second, they clearly loved the idea that they could fix their knowledge of content with my unit goals component. I'll be interested to see which students end up actually pro-active about it, but at least today they made it clear that they understood they could be rewarded for improvement as well has penalized for not being pro-active about understanding the skills and content necessary for the course.

So we'll see how it goes, but third confession: I'm quite relieved that introducing my grading system was not as painful as I feared. In fact it only took about 15 minutes total with their questions and my visuals. 

I'll also say that while they didn't seem immediately sold on the concept of having a notebook solely devoted to my class, and the idea that we'd be gluing handouts in it, they clearly perked up at the idea of designing the cover of their portfolio. I had already decorated a cover for my portfolio and so I showed them mine and challenged them to make theirs look better because I'm a terrible artist. We'll see what they come up with next week!