by Terry Heick
Notation problems are one of the most urgent bugaboos of good teaching.
The classification can take an extraordinary time. He can also demoralize students, make them trouble at home or prevent them from entering a certain college.
It can also demoralize teachers. If half the class fails, any teacher was worth his salt, will look hard and their job.
So, over the years, as a teacher, I have tinkered with a kind of system which was, above all, centered on the students. He was centered on the student in the sense that he was designed to promote understanding, confidence, possession and protection of themselves when they needed it.
Part of this approach was covered in Why did this student failed? A diagnostic approach to teaching. See below for the system – really, just a few rules that I created which, although they are not perfect, have greatly contributed to eliminating the classification problems in my class.
This meant that the students were not paralyzed with fear when I asked them to perform more and more complex tasks that were worried were out of their reach. This also meant that parents did not breathe in my neck “about this C-” They saw on the infinite campus, and if the students and parents are happy, the teacher can also be happy.
How I eliminated (almost) all the classification problems in my class
1. I chose what carefully note.
When I started teaching, I thought in terms of “assignments” and “tests”. The quizs were also one thing.
But finally, I started to think about the place in terms of “practice” and “measurement”. The whole evaluation must be formative, and the idea of ”summative evaluation” has as much sense as “a last cleaning of the teeth”.
The big idea is what I often call an “climate of evaluation”, where snapshots of understanding and progress of students are made organically, seamless and non -threatening. The evaluation is omnipresent and always activated.
A “measure” is only a type of evaluation, and even the word implies “checking your growth” in the same way as you measure the vertical growth (height) of a child by marking the threshold in the kitchen. This type of evaluation offers both the student and the teacher a marker – data, if you insist – from the place where the pupil “is” at that time with clear understanding that another measure of this type will soon be taken, and dozens and dozens of opportunities to practice between the two.
Be very cautious with what you write down, because it takes time and mental energy – the two ended, crucial resources for the success of any teacher. If you do not have a plan for data before giving the evaluation, do not give it, and certainly do not call it a quiz or a test.
2. I designed a job to be “published”
I tried to make student products – writing, graphic organizers, podcasts, videos, projects, and even more – at least visible for parents of students. Ideally, this work would also be published on peers for comments and collaboration, then to the public as a whole to offer an authentic function in a community that cares about the student.
By making students to work public (insofar as he favored students learning while protecting confidentiality problems), the evaluation is largely carried out by the people for which work is intended. It is authentic, which makes the feedback loop faster and more diverse than a teacher could never hope to do so.
What this system loses in the comments of experts that the teacher could be able to give (although nothing says that he cannot be made public and benefit from teachers’ comments), this compensates by giving students substantial reasons to do their best, correct themselves and create higher stands for the quality that your section describes.
3. I made a rule: No FS and no zeros. A, B, C or “incomplete”
First of all, I created a kind of policy without zero. Easier to say than to do according to who you are and what you teach and the “policy” of the school and so on. The idea here, however, is to prevent zeros from mathematically ruin the “final note” of a student.
I try to explain to students that a note should reflect understanding, not their ability to successfully navigate in the rules and gamification pieces filled in most classrooms and rooms. If a student receives a note of letter D, it should be because he has shown an almost universal inability to master any content, not because he has obtained AS and BS on most work, but CS or lower on the work they did not have, and with a handful of zeros launched for work, they did not finish with a D or a F.
Another factor at work here is to mark the work with A, B, C or “incomplete”. In other words, if the student does not reach the average brand of C at least, which should reflect the average understanding of a given standard or subject, I would mark it “incomplete”, give them clear comments on how it could be improved, then obliges them to do so.
4. I reviewed the missing assignments frequently.
Quite simple. I had a twitter thread of all the “measures” (work they knew that counted for their note), so they did not have to ask “what they were missing” (although they did it anyway). I also wrote it on the board (I had a huge whiteboard that extended to the front of the class).
5. I created alternative assessments.
At the start of teaching, I noticed that the students said, in different ways, that they “ understood but do not get it. “Or that they believed that they were, in fact,” get it “but not the way in which the required assessment (Reminder: English lit / Ela is a highly conceptual content of the skills of literacy itself).
I would therefore create an alternative evaluation to check and see. Does the evaluation are more embarrassing than it revealed? Why beat my head against the wall explaining the logistics of an assignment or the subtleties of a question during their assignment and that the question was not at all the points? It was only “things” that I used as a carpenter uses tools.
Sometimes it is easier to just take another tool.
I would also ask students to create their own assessments sometimes. Show me that you understand. It did not always work as you expected, but I had one of the most insightful and creative expressions that I have ever seen students using this approach. As with most things, it depended on the student.
6. I taught through micro-assignments.
The exit shots were one of the greatest things that ever happened to my teaching. I rarely used them as “outing tickets” to be able to leave the classroom, but I used them almost daily. For what?
They gave me a constant flow of data for the said “evaluation climate”, and it was daily and fresh and disarming for the students because they knew it was fast and if they failed, another would happen soon.
It was a practice “centered on the student” because she protected them. They had so many opportunities and, in mathematics, so many scores that they fail every day, they would not fail at all. And if they were,
I could approach a single standard or a single subject under a variety of angles and complexities and levels of Bloom and so on, which often showed that the student who “ “ did not get it ” last week, more probably, did not “understand” my question.
In other words, they had not failed my evaluation; My assessment had failed them because she had not discovered what they actually knew.
7. I used diagnostic teaching
You can know more about diagnostic education, but the general idea is that I had a clear sequence that I used that I communicated very clearly to students and their families. It was generally necessary the first month or two for everyone to get comfortable with all this, but once I did it, the classification problems were * almost * completely eliminated. The problems are always surfaced, but with a system in place, it was much easier to identify exactly what did not work and why and to communicate all this to the stakeholders involved to help children help children.
