Standards Based Grading: The Starting Line

I started wrestling with how to use Standards Based Grading a month ago, and although the time I spent researching its potential applications left me with my eyes crossed, it also gave me a lot of good ideas to consider. So when I returned to it this week and tried to foresee how I wanted to design my freshmen world history class, here is what I have discovered/created/need to consider further:

WHAT I'VE FIGURED OUT

• First, my overall grading scale.
• Unit Goals – 35%
• Essential/Transferable Skills – 35%
• Portfolio Upkeep – 10%
• Citizenship – 10%
• Final Exam – 10%

This grading scale allows for my standards to fall into four categories. My list of standards and their indicators are below.

Stephen Lazar's reflections on his own experience with SBG  have been incredibly helpful in  my own crafting of the above list and grading scale. I'd like to note that he has 'Citizenship' as a part of his SBG, and I agree with him that some students need feedback regarding certain aspects of their behavior, which is why I have included it for my freshmen. I'm not sure I would do this for my AP class.

• I have decided that I will set aside formal time for reassessments, but seeing as how this is the first year I'm doing SBG, I don't want to force myself into something weekly; I am thinking of something more bi-weekly...? I've decided this for two reasons: first, while Shawn Cornally has some good suggestions for reassessments that are not cookie-cutter retests, it would take me some time to consider how to reassess students for certain objectives in a way that forces them to apply the essentials without simply re-doing a different version of an original assignment. Since this essentially means coming up with an alternative activity for the student to do to show proficiency, until I am confident that I can do this easily enough, I want to make sure I have everything else figured out before assuming I can easily create reassessments. Second, I am considering reassessing students based more on their ability to reflect & articulate why they did not meet a standard. A colleague of mine used 'text corrections' (below) for his class last year, and he had  positive responses from it, so I may consider revamping his sheets for a reflection reassessment tailored to my class. But how can I 'objectively' raise a student's standard based on such a test correction?

• Furthermore, with regards to reassessment, I have included a 'Growth' strand in my 'Citizenship' standard to help those students who may not be as proactive about showing up for a formal reassessment. In other words, if students show improvement over the course of a term in assigned material, then they will have met a goal of working towards longer retention and mastery of skills. So the idea would be to consciously give students opportunities to reassess as the term goes on in other assignments. Example: if they do an assignment in my Roman unit that is well-written (meets standard E/T 2.1 of my list) but is factually wrong (fails in standards UG 1.1 and E/T 2.2), maybe in my Han China unit they can re-assess by making a logical connection/comparison between the empires in a given assignment. I could then increase their earlier poor scores in the other standards. Yet I would have to make continual reminders to my students that this is a possibility in order to ensure that they are conscious that answering a question can take many forms & should make connections to past material, as long as the answer is relevant, logical, and precise.

CHALLENGES STILL TO FACE

• My biggest worry with all of this, however, is what SBG will do to my gradebook. I use EasyGradePro for my grades, and while it is great in its ability to add standards, I am a bit confused as to what will be the best way to generate reports for my students. Here is a screen shot of a sample progress report I made-up - while it makes sense to me, I can imagine how ridiculous it would look to one of my students, let alone a parent who may not have the fortitude to try and figure it out. Now a progress report like this is not what my school sends home - this is what my students and their parents could access online just for my class - so it is nothing official, but I still wish it could be less complicated looking.

• I'm also concerned about how exactly I will grade assignments. In EasyGradePro I can very easily assign standards/indicators to an assignment, but how can I most effectively give my students feedback that they can easily grasp? As I wrote in an earlier post, I plan to introduce the interactive notebook (=portfolio) to my class, so here is a potential problem. If they do a simple 5-10 minute reflection on a topic we discussed, how can I grade according to the 6 or 7 indicators of my writing standard? I will have to discuss this with the teachers at my school who have used SBG to consider how they handle rubrics.

• As most teachers who use SBG realize, there is a problem if your school hands out grades as a percentage and final letter grade. How can you convert the results of your SBG to the traditional grading scale? I found this site which, I think, has a good justification for a mathematical formula used to calculate final grades. Would it make sense if I use this formula for my standards to calculate my final grade?

LAST THOUGHT

Shawn Cornally has a great analysis of the benefits of summative assessments, even in a class that uses the SBG. And in fact his justification for using summative assignments is, I think, the best way of explaining to my students why they have finals anyway. And fundamentally discussing the point of a final exam will also provide just one more opportunity to get them to think throughout the year how they learn.

As of right now I'll be honest and admit I am feeling like I may be taking on a lot of unknowns here for my freshmen class, with both the interactive notebook and this whole new way of doing my grades, but hopefully all of this pre-planning will help limit the problems as well as provide enough background for me to fix any pitfalls.

Professional Development

If you are considering summer professional development opportunities, I would highly recommend looking into the Taft Educational Center (TEC) workshops at the Taft School in Connecticut. [See http://www.taftschool.org/tec/default.aspx ] I just finished up my week-long course there, and it was a sublime experience.

Before I get into the heart of the matter -- which is the substance of the professional development I got -- let me first entice you with some logistical items. Although the Taft School is not an easy place to get to, the TEC did a nice job of providing transportation info for how to get there without having a car. The dorm room was comfortable and the food provided by TEC made me feel spoiled. Three meals a day plus two coffee/tea breaks in which even the snacks provided changed daily, plus a social hour right before dinner in which complimentary wine and non-alcoholic drinks were provided - let's just say I had all the more reason to use the splendid athletic facilities at TEC, as well as run in the multiple bucolic fields of campus!

If this description of the facilities has perked your interest, let me get into the real joy of being there: the workshop itself. I was first introduced to just how beneficial my week in Connecticut was going to be in the shuttle provided by TEC to get to campus. During that ride I had the most invigorating conversation with another teacher named Louise who had signed up for the AP Art History workshop. There is nothing quite like talking to teachers from other schools to gain some perspective on your own school -- regardless of whether they are in your discipline, or whether they are from public or private schools. 

As the week progressed I got to meet lots of other interesting teachers because the TEC purposely (but not forcefully) structures opportunities to interact with other educators both in and outside of your particular workshop. Through these interactions I got the chance not only to commiserate with other teachers about their experiences (particularly with regard to boarding school life), but also to appreciate certain aspects of my own school. My discussions with college counselors were also insightful, especially when comparing the challenges of American and international students. I also, of course, spoke to other history teachers about how they structure their curriculum and organize class material. For example, I already plan to stay in touch with one teacher about how to use music more interactively in my AP class. Furthermore, in talking to a variety of teachers, I came to realize how my teaching is different from American teachers because my audience (i.e. international students, but mostly Jordanian) is different. I can't make references to some things that American teachers can simply because my students wouldn't get it due to cultural or language barriers, and yet at the same time I was struck by just how much I can reference due to globalization! 

My particular workshop was on Latin American Civilization taught by Prof. Fernando Gonzalaz de Leon, and it was simply a productive and enjoyable experience. To keep it succinct, here's a list of what made it so positive and why my 5 days flew by:

• The professor ran the workshop more like a graduate seminar so that we had a lot of reading every night (about 100 pages) from The Penguin History of Latin America and then based our two 4-hour daily sessions (run more often than not as Socratic discussions) on the reading. This book is simply a great resource and I would highly recommend it if you are weak in Latin American history (like I was, which is why I took the course). While it is very dense with facts, it is also readable, effectively analytical, and up-to-date, so it was a great way to provide background information for class discussion, and it will be a great resource for me should I want to provide case studies on Latin American countries.

• In the workshop the professor asked short-essay questions for which we spent time writing answers in class and then shared our ideas. Here are the 8 questions we ended up discussing in full:
• What are the hurdles in teaching about Latin America?
• What were the differences between the Latin American and North American experience of conquest?
• What commonalities did indigenous peoples have before the arrival of the Europeans?
• What were the values of Latin American civilization? (i.e. What's 'Latin' about Latin America?)
• What were the global consequences of settling Latin America?
• How does the Freyle story reflect and modify the casta system as we illustrated on the board?
• Is there a parallel between the North American and Latin American revolutions?
• What were the challenges facing Latin America in the 19th century?

I ended up having over 7 pages of typed answers after fully digesting our discussions, and they will provide a good framework for putting Latin America in a world historical context as well as studying it on its own terms.

• My favorite part of the workshop were the assigned readings from The Oxford Book of Latin American Short Stories. It has been a while since I've taken a literature class, so after reading the first few short stories assigned before the workshop started, I was baffled as to how we were supposed to use them. Yet the professor proved to be very adept at unfolding the stories for us and revealing not only the allegories and metaphors involved in the writing, but also at helping us put the stories in historical context and using them to consider cultural studies. It was a phenomenal experience for me to be confused with a text at the start and then be so aware of the intricacies and nuances of the same text just thirty minutes later. It reminded me of how good analysis and close reading of short texts are critical in any humanities course, and how I must give my students that same intimate experience with texts as often as possible. This means I must work on my goal this summer of gathering meaningful but cropped primary sources for my classes to examine & dissect in-class. I want to give them a spread of sources to look at, like selections from literature (e.g. Epic of Gilgamesh) and artwork (our professor had us compare Baroque Latin American compositions with the more abstract music of late-18th century Latin America), or newspaper clippings (e.g. feminist activities in early 20th century) and political texts (e.g. The Communist Manifesto). Yet it is difficult to find the right selections as well as translations that are appropriate for my students, particularly for my freshmen, for whom English is a second language. (Any suggestions for resources online or otherwise to help in this endeavor would be appreciated!)

• Our group also got the chance to talk to our professor about the challenges that he faces with university students, and it was interesting (if also somewhat disheartening) to realize that many of them are the same ones we face with high school students. Plagiarism, for example, remains a big problem, and we talked about what seems to be a trend in which students are not held accountable for their work as much as educational institutions are the first to be blamed….an interesting discussion that I will ponder more about in a future blog post.

 When I left TEC it so happened that coincidentally I got a chance to sit with Louise again and she, like myself, had had quite an enlightening workshop. So if you should have any questions about TEC or my specific workshop or want to discuss other PD opportunities, please feel free to comment!

Interactive Notebook

I have the good fortune at the moment to be writing this post in Oxford, where I am chaperoning students for three weeks while they take a course here. A few times now different students have asked me what I do during the day while they are in class, and when I tell them that I am doing work, I inevitably receive a brief look of confusion and then the question, "What work do you have to do? Can't you just reuse what you did last year?" It never fails to amuse me when students reveal that they can't always conceptualize the amount of work teachers put into their classes (even when they complain about how much work it takes for them to prepare for a 15-minute presentation for a class, and thus forget that we subject ourselves to a much higher standard of engagement every day!).

So what exactly have I been working on? Well, three of the problems I face with my freshmen world history class is: 1. their inability to organize themselves; 2. their inability to succinctly and yet thoroughly take notes, particularly because English is a second language for most of them and so their processing time is a bit longer to be able to articulate concepts learned in class; and 3. the fact that they do not revisit their notes until they absolutely have to (i.e. an upcoming assessment).

In the three years I have taught at my school, I have gotten a lot better at anticipating the organization problem, and so it's become second-nature for me to do things like use visual and audio reminders so that students write down something important, or to remind them to use their planner etc. etc. As for the second problem, I have used a weekly assignment called a 'journal sheet' that allows students to reflect on what they learned for the week, and it also forces them to read the news. A sample journal sheet is below.

Journal Sheet (2011-12)

The problem with the journal sheet, however, is that every year it does not become as much of a routine as I would like. So one of my goals is to figure out how I will implement a more interactive way for my freshmen students to handle their notebook since this could attack all three problems at once. I first got this idea when my friend Bowman introduced me to this post: http://statteacher.blogspot.co.uk/2012/06/algebra-2-interactive-notebook.html .  The idea is simple: students maintain a physical notebook throughout the year which is solely devoted to your class and is a space for them not only in which to take notes, but also to reflect and build on what they have learned. The latter idea is my favorite thing about the interactive notebook. I know that a lot of teachers have tried digital solutions to my three problems (particularly by using OneNote and sharing notes/assignments via the school network), but instead of inviting the demons that come alongside relying on computers (other software distractions; low battery supplies; internet outages), I want to keep it simple for my students and use actual notebook paper. Plus I think it gives students the advantage of being creative with their own hands, as you'll see below. I can debate the advantages of forbidding computer use in my classroom in a future post, but for now here is how I have decided to implement the interactive notebook in my class:

• I will create my own interactive notebook along with the students. This way they will have a model notebook which to refer to throughout the year, and I will theoretically be able to use it as an example to show students at the start of the next year. But I will also call it a 'portfolio' rather than an interactive notebook, just so they recognize that the object is meant to be a place for everything to be collected, not just notes.

• At the start of the year students will design a cover for their portfolio in order to personalize it and give them a sort of 'ritual' in which to embrace its importance. This website had good instructions and a rubric: http://www.cyberlearning-world.com/lessons/ushistory/isn.cover.directions.htm 

• At the start of each unit I will give students a template like the one below to paste into their portfolio so that they have a sense of what the essential questions are for each unit and what sources we will be looking at (which will hopefully also reinforce the importance of source material for historians).

Students will paste such a table on a page but leave space (perhaps a whole left-hand page) for revisiting it at the end of the unit, with the goal of drawing a picture (or pictures) of the main elements of the unit near the table. We will also use the table to revisit the essential questions and reflect on the sources in class or as homework.

• I will not use the right side of the notebook as an 'input' side and the left side as an 'output' side. While I understand that is a critical part of the interactive notebook, I hesitate  to use this format for two reasons:
• Since this is the first time I am doing an interactive notebook, I am having a hard time conceptualizing what I want my students' 'input' side to look like when they are simply taking notes from a class discussion. This website: http://kalamitykat.com/2012/01/08/interactive-notebooks/  has wonderful photos of what an interactive notebook can look like, and she has a great suggestion that students NOT turn the page in their notebook unless explicitly asked by their teacher, so if they need more paper for notes, they just glue loose-leaf pages to the page and fold them. Yet I don't think this would be practical for my class, seeing as how throughout the year my students struggle to learn what is the best way for them to take notes. This means that normally their notes end up having different lengths (some write what appear to be transcripts of class, while others are better at being succinct), so it is hard for me to imagine the chaos that would ensue if class was stopped so some students could grab loose leaf paper for their notebook. So I would rather have students discover how they want to take notes and not be limited by having to leave the left side of their notebooks blank. 
• I am 99% sure that my students will NOT do anything on the output side unless it is made a formal assignment, so I will have to frequently give reflection/application assignments for the students to do in their notebook (both in and outside of class). Thus I do not think leaving the left side blank is necessary - they could do the reflection/application assignments in the space after their notes.
• Some ideas for what kind of reflection/application assignments I could give are here: http://mrsgannon.files.wordpress.com/2009/08/assignment-table.pdf  and here:  http://www.cyberlearning-world.com/lessons/ushistory/lpwhatishistory.htm and here: http://www.mrgreer.net/notebookleftside.html . The last website also has a wonderful explanation of the rationale for interactive notebooks, including the fact that "students need to revisit a newly learned concept at least 7 times to be able to have embedded it into their long-term memories".
• Note that the basic idea of Cornell notes is embedded in the interactive notebook, so I will just have students periodically go over their notes as an assignment (a wonderful site for using the Cornell note system is here: http://statteacher.blogspot.co.uk/2012/06/cornell-notes-in-math-class.html)

• http://kalamitykat.com/2012/01/08/interactive-notebooks/also has a great idea for creating a little pouch that students can use to insert vocab cards. I love this idea because I do not usually assign identifications on my quizzes and exams because my tests are weighed toward analytical short and long essay questions, but having students create their own vocabulary cards would be another great way for them to review the material. Here's another helpful site in that regard: http://www.cyberlearning-world.com/lessons/ushistory/ch1vocab.htm, so expect a future post once the year starts on what criteria I will use for students to create their own vocabulary cards.

• The downside to this whole system is that I will have to grade the portfolios fairly frequently in order to ensure that the students are serious about taking notes and reflecting on the material. Yet I do not think this has to take a lot of time, and will give me a better sense of just how students are taking notes in my class; I found a sample rubric here http://www.ljhs.sandi.net/faculty/MTeachworth/avid-summer-05-institute/oh12interactivenotebookrubr.htm which is good, and which I can use perhaps bi-weekly when I check their portfolios. But if I assign a reflection assignment as homework, then it would be easy to grade it simply for completion. Nonetheless here is where I will have to put in some further thought because I plan to use the Standards Based Grading system, so I need to consider how I will incorporate the interactive notebook.

Any feedback/suggestions about my thoughts here would be wonderful! And of course I plan to post about how this plan all works out in the fall…

P.S. Just so you don't think all I'm doing is work and chaperoning here in Oxford, I want to reassure you I have time for exploration and fun this summer as well! :)

Purpose

There is nothing quite like having a teaching colleague with whom you can have discussions that only fuel your passion for teaching. One of my closest friends at the school I work at is named Bowman, and he started a blog a long time ago that was originally a personal blog with anecdotes from his daily life. Yet since the school at which we work tends to be all-consuming, many of his anecdotes came to center around his classroom and/or boarding life experiences, and so after some thought about the possibilities of using his blog as a pedagogical resource, last year he transformed it simply into a blog about teaching math. Now his blog is a gold mine for teachers - it provides both practical and theoretical discussions, and he has used it very well as a place to bounce questions back and forth with other educators around the world.

I mention this story because it really convinced me of the benefits of technology when it is used with a purpose. Bowman would be particularly happy that this was the lesson I received from his experience because he is someone who prides himself, rightfully, on being efficient and effective, and his blog is just one more instance in which he has been successful in that regard. The conversations that he has been able to have with other teachers through his blog (including myself!), and the sort of grassroots professional development that has come out of it, made me curious as to what benefits I could derive for my own classroom using the blogosophere. So Bowman introduced me not only to Google Reader, where I can follow a selection of blogs incredibly easily, but also to a few wonderful history blogging sites, and he also shared with me ideas about how I could begin to change the way I teach, particularly through using student notebooks more effectively and the Standards Based Grading system. (Note: this story also illustrates why working with people beyond your own department is so compelling!)

So as this summer started I began following blogs and making plans for how to change what I do in my freshmen world history class in particular. Then I came across the following post: http://stephenlazar.com/blog/2012/07/my-complete-2011-2012-teaching-portfolio/. This was a wonderful read, and in particular its reflective quality was highly appealing to me. Maybe it is because I am in the middle of a summer in which I intend to reflect and change a lot about my classes, but the post was wonderful in articulating the purpose behind not only the blog but Stephen's intentions as a teacher. It also got me to thinking: I was having a hard time finding blogs about teaching history that were as good as the math history blogs that are all over the internet. Maybe this is because I am still a relative amateur at this blogging thing - or maybe it's because many history teachers are techno-phobic, but Stephen's blog was one of the few blogs that really combine practical advice with theoretical ideas, like Bowman's blog....

I began to wonder if I had the courage to start my own blog. I hesitate to use the word 'courage' - it's not like I'm going into a battle zone - but I am someone who thinks *a lot* before speaking, so a blog just seemed like a massive undertaking, especially in terms of time. And I find it somewhat strange to be so public in a space where I am not sure who (if anyone!) is reading what I write, and yet as Stephen Lazar's post so eloquently demonstrated, it is important for people in my profession to be reflective and be willing to share, so I have decided that if this blog can help me gain as well as share ideas with other history teachers, then it will be a worthy professional experience.

So as to the purpose of this blog? Over the summer I will work on changing my freshmen history course a lot, so this blog will be a place where I post many of the ideas I work on, particularly in terms of how I intend to apply the Standards Based Grading system and revamp the framing of my curriculum and its individual units. Then I hope when the school year starts I can start posting not only one how my summer planning worked and didn't work, but also on my daily experiences both in terms of lessons, classroom management, and all the other million things that go into working at a boarding school.

So that's my purpose...we'll see how this all turns out!