SBG 4: End of term

We had a professional development day at my school recently and I, along with my friend in the math department, was asked by the administration to share with the faculty how we have used Standards Based Grading in our classes. It can be nerve-wracking to speak to your colleagues about what you are doing in class, but I was happy that our presentation was well-received, and I honestly hope this will give me the chance to speak with other humanities teachers about how to refine and improve my system. Preparing for our presentation was a wonderful opportunity not only to reflect on how SBG has been going in my class, but also to talk to the other teachers who are using it this year, and thus I want to share some of the conclusions I've reached.

WHAT'S WORKING

(Some) Students are taking it seriously: Looking over my statistics, almost half of my entire freshmen class has come in at least once for reassessment on the unit goal standards, and I can think of two students in particular who've found the opportunity for improvement to be empowering.

I'm getting usable data: In calculating the final grades, I can see how my students are doing individually on standards and how they are doing as a whole with skills and content. So, for example, I have one student who is really struggling with the 'Using Evidence' standards, but not so much with the 'Writing' standards (i.e. they can articulate themselves, but often fail to answer questions). Another example is that I can see that over the course of the term students are getting better at trying to bring evidence into their writing, but they haven't improved much in terms of organizing their writing. I'm excited by this since previously I may have had some intuition that these were trends for my classes, but now I actually have some quantifiable data.

My own lesson planning is getting better: See my last post. Long story short, having these unit goal standards has really forced me to backwards plan smarter. I have also decided to give the questions at the end of the unit rather than at the start, because when I gave them at the start we never really referred to them again until I assigned them (granted, I could do better with that), and students would forget to leave room for answering them in their interactive notebook, which also made their notebooks less organized.

WHAT STILL NEEDS SOME WORK

Converting to percentage grades: Essentially I have converted my standards scale to the 4.0 scale, so that a '3' equates to 85%. Some of my other colleagues, however, have decided that a '3' is equivalent to 75%, which forces me to consider what it really means to 'master', 'succeed', 'develop', and 'begin' a standard. I've had some interesting conversations about this. First, one math teacher who has '3' equal a 'C' in her conversion argued that the area in which there should be more nuance is between students 'succeeding' and others 'mastering' a standard, and thus she has added a 3.5 to her standard scale. Furthermore, the best argument against my scale is that as it stands, it allows a student with mostly 1s and 2s to pass my course (as a beginning/developer) with a low 'C'. Nonetheless I think I will stick to my standard scale at the moment. I think that in assessing kids in their argumentative writing, there is a need to have more gradation between students who are really struggling with even understanding a concept (e.g. bringing in evidence) and thus get a 1, versus those who may get it conceptually but can't apply it - say a '2' performer. Thus there are fine gradations at the lower end of the spectrum. Which brings me to my next point...

Can I create a rubric for my standards?: What does it mean to support an argument with evidence? How can you quantify the difference between a student who brings in persuasive evidence well, versus one that does it weakly? In other words, I need to try to fine-tune the differences between a 4, 3, 2, 1. I think that would help me solidify my thoughts about my first point above; hopefully I can research this on the internet to see how some other schools set up their standards.

I need more modeling: The majority of my freshmen have never been asked to write critically, so for a while my standards really meant nothing to them because they had never really seen good writing in English. It was not until students who came to talk to me about their writing one-on-one began to write much better essays that I had models which to show the poorer performing students, and that has been a bit of a game-changer. We read the model essays together and discussed what made it strong: using transition words; having a logic and a flow to ideas; being selective about what they brought in as evidence. All of this became much more evident to all my students when they saw a peer could manage it. My goal next term, when we have more time in class compared to the wacky calendar we had this term, is to model more writing in class together. I have small white boards that I have used to have them draft paragraph summaries and arguments - hopefully we'll get a chance to do that more often together to see that writing is a process.

Reassessment ideas: For the students who have come in for reassessment, I have given them the opportunity to redo their unit goal questions using a creative writing format. In particular, I have asked them to write a dialogue for me. This has been successful because it forces them to think about how a conversation flows, and thus how that should even work when writing more formally. How do you anticipate a reader's thought? How do you connect ideas? It's also inherently Socratic, and so while I like this reassessment, I want more ideas. I have thought about students doing a multimedia project for me (a video/documentary) or writing me a letter or filming themselves teaching a friend, but I would love more ideas. I also know it would be best if students could come up with their reassessment projects, but frankly many of my freshmen are not at a point where they fully understand the full range of what it means to 'assess'...they were so used to being spoon-fed at their previous schools that at this point they need coaching to stimulate their creativity. But any ideas would be wonderful!

Surveying the students: I plan to give my freshmen a quick survey at the start of the next term to see how well they feel they understand SBG and to ask why they don't make reassessment or tracking their progress more of a priority. I think I can guess at their answers (e.g. lost gradebook password; struggling to organize all obligations) but I hope it'll just be one more way in which I can include reassessment as a part of my daily lesson plan.

Using it in AP: I had a couple of AP teachers ask how I would use SBG in my AP class, and my instinct was to reply that it should actually be easier since the College Board provides a lot of standards for us already. It also made me think using SBG would be ideal for my AP class because this year I found that many of my AP students are perfectionists, and they were incredibly panicked before our final exam this term. It was clear that the pressure they were putting on themselves came out of a fear of not doing well on this exam because it would hurt their grade, and it was draining for me to play the psychiatrist for a week to get them to calm down. Using SBG could really help alleviate the test anxiety because it teaches them that making mistakes is a part of the learning process - it's not something to be aggressively avoided. I want to turn that into a mantra! And I would hope that someday, if we can get a consistent SBG system in place, students at our school would find themselves understanding how they learn, and to target their weaknesses, so that when they go to college they won't have such test anxiety. And while I understand colleges won't have reassessments or SBG, I do believe it will foster habits (particularly in reflecting on objectives and weaknesses) that will help the student be an independent learner so they can feel better prepared for summative assessments.