Category: Grading

Vacation, all I ever wanted(?)

4/20/2019

This morning's blog is a Pastichio Medley of some thoughts bopping around my head. I might expand some of these ideas into a separate post later, but for now I just need them outta my head:

There are no bad days on vacation, right? Haha, of course that is false, but it's one of the lies we tell ourselves on a rough Tuesday at work. I've been fairly productive in terms of home chores like landscaping, and made some progress on FlipTech conference planning, but very little schoolwork. I'll find out soon whether that's a mistake, or the brain refresh that I needed....
Gerry Marchand has a piece about countdowns to summer that clicked with me. I have been troubled before by those very public displays of "Look How Long Until We Get To Be Apart Forever." I've been thinking about a countUP on the whiteboard of all the days we have been learning, interacting, making mistakes, etc. As the number gets bigger, we're all smarter and better and closer than before.
As I look ahead to the last few weeks of school, I feel like I need to focus on gamifying those units OR raising my flipped game. I don't think I have the energy/resources/ability to do both of them well, so I need to make a choice. Like, today is when I need to decide! I need to write a pros/cons list after I finish this post.

We couldn't find any "6" candles, so my children improvised....

My oldest child turned 16 yesterday! I remember that was a really rough year for me (all of 11th grade because I have an August birthday), so the milestone makes me extra-conscious of doing what I need to help him through this teenager time.
Back to my first bullet item: Is vacation a good time or bad time to get sick?? My daughter's got the flu and I'm feeling some symptoms but could be psychosomatic. On the one hand I don't need sub plans, but on the other it feels like wasted 'fun days'

[2nd #flipblogs of the week: done]

My flipping mastery grade rubric system

8/9/2018

Recently two different people have requested more information about my mastery-grading system, so I figured I should blog about it for efficiency's sake.

Below is my generic grading rubric. I usually use it for written assignments like reflections or unit test open-response items, but it's easily modifiable for posters, presentations, and other products. The wording of each general description has been carefully crafted to make them as objective as possible. Of course they still require judgment (more about that below), but every student submission can fit into each category. I don't introduce the whole thing at once to students, and I save the letter/number grades for last.
Sometimes I assess different segments of a task separately. For a 2-part question that asks for information and analysis, you can score each part separately: "Fine" job with the information, but "Incomplete" analysis. For mastery, the student only needs to re-attempt the analysis portion.
An earlier version had only four columns; I added the "Unclear" level for those in-between pieces that are "fine" in some ways, but not quite good enough to show solid understanding. Without it I wasted some time agonizing between the "B" and "D" levels for student work. After using this rubric for a full year, I see no need to add an additional level.

You can click the table below to open a GoogleDoc link.

Last year I made a GoogleForm exercise for students to practice applying the rubric themselves. Old Sturbridge Village is a living museum (like Colonial Williamsburg) where I have brought students for a field trip the past several years. After the trip, students had to reflect on their experience for their first formal writing piece of the year. For the practice task, I took screenshots of 4 written reflections from previous years, and assigned students to read and judge the pieces for themselves. Click the box below to access a copy of the GoogleForm that you can steal/borrow.

Here are the other 3 examples. You can try scoring them for yourself if you like!
[answers farther down the page]

This was a useful exercise and I strongly recommend doing something similar, even just with paper copies in the classroom instead of a digital survey. However, from the GoogleForm I got wonderful summary graphs of the responses for each example:

These graphs gave us much to discuss for a full class period, especially the divergence of opinion on Student Example #1. Actually, opinion is not the right word: this is not really a subjective exercise! The majority was wrong. The writer did not directly address part 2 of the task ("How did this field trip help you learn about life in Sturbridge Village?") so this piece cannot possibly earn an A or B. From the content of the last few sentences, we can infer that this student did learn some things about barrels and the specific work of a blacksmith. D seems overly harsh (okay, this task is slightly subjective!) so I would judge this as an Unclear C, because the writer "almost gets it" but needs to make clearer connections.

More briefly on the other examples:

#2 is "Not Ready" and yes this was an actual submission. We could debate a little bit about whether the details about cows, flies, and small doorways show "Incomplete" understanding, but the utter lack of reference to part 2 is the clincher. At least he got to be with his friends!
#3 is "Advanced" although of course it is not perfectly written. This helps students to understand the emphasis on content over style. The thoughtful connections put this paragraph over the top like the comparison between a general store and Target, and the contrast of workers and farmers.
#4 is "Fine" even though it is longer and more clearly organized into separate paragraphs. Clearly this student absorbed a lot, remembered tiny details, and got grossed out by the flies in the kitchen. We just don't see the deeper reflection that appears in #3.

Hmmmmmm...What else can or should I describe about this system? This is a pretty long post so I should wrap it up here.

If they Need2Know it, then I'm gonna quiz it!

1/19/2018

Recently I realized that I'm probably the only teacher who does flipping quizzes like I do. Many colleagues use EdPuzzle or some similar online application to check students' understanding of the video lessons. I will address my feelings on that in a later blog post.
My current system has evolved over 5 years, but its DNA traces back to Bergmann & Sams' first book's chapter on accountability. You need to know what students know before they get to the high-order stuff. In a chemistry class, that means they need proficiency on lab safety before they can appropriately perform a science lab experiment; in a history class, they need proficient knowledge before they have the historical context/skill to successfully research, engage in simulation activities, read primary sources, etc.
Anyway, here is what I do:

First, I assign the video lesson

It's due 2 or 3 school days from now.
Students get a handout [below] that is basically identical to what I post in our LMS (Schoology) where the video link can be found. All the learning objectives are listed there along with note-taking advice, because that is our year-long academic skill.
They are called "Need2Know" tasks because these are the essential bits of historical information I want students to retain for future objectives, activities, and learning.
I expect them to take notes before the quiz, but I will not formally grade the notes because those could just be copied from a friend....

In the days before the quiz, I field students' questions by email, during study hall, before school, etc. At some point I also print copies of the quiz and place them inside each students' tabbed manila folder. If students need a modified version, then that's what I insert instead.... They will never see each other's quiz sheets, so my students don't even know their assessment was different!]

2-3 days later: They take the quiz

If students brought notes (95% of them do!), they immediately put them inside their desk and clear off the desktop.
When everyone has arrived, I let them retrieve the notes and 'get in the zone' for 30-45 seconds. Yes they are kind of cramming, but this rewards everybody for producing and bringing notes. (If I had let them do this immediately after arriving, then students would get a different amount of time with their notes, and I don't think that is fair.) Meanwhile, I insert the quiz folders into each student's desk -- they are always turned around 'backwards' so the desk opening faces the front of the classroom. :)
Within less than a minute, everybody has swapped their notes into the desk, removed the quiz sheet from the folder, and stood the folder upright as a Fortress of Solitude to hide their work from their neighbors. They are filling the boxes as well as they are able with 1 or 2-sentence responses. I believe the process of writing this information helps to cement the facts into their memory for future retrieval and understanding.
They already know the quiz questions because I listed them next to the video link and on the printed assignment sheet. The quiz sheet might be formatted with boxes and lines to organize their output, but there are no tricks & no mysteries in Mr. Swan's class.
I guess-timate the amount of time needed, and peek over the shoulders of the last 3 or 4 kids. You can tell who legitimately needs a bit more time to finish writing, and who just plain forgot. Within about 15 minutes we are done.

Same day: I check everybody's quiz while the students....

This is a new development in the 2017-18 school year. I used to be proud of myself for taking the quizzes home, scoring them, and returning those grades the next day. That's still too late!! Immediate feedback has huge benefits. If any students need to review & retake, they need to know before leaving my classroom today.
I do not pass back the quiz response sheets, for several reasons. 1) I don't feel the need to write comments on each student's quiz, so I can read through them more quickly! 2) It's one less sheet of paper to get lost, improperly filed, etc. [I keep them for my own records until the end of the grading term.] 3) Students might notice the multiple versions, which can lead to uncomfortable & unfair conversations / disclosures. 4) On a similar theme, I can differentiate for the length/depth of responses, without students seeing two different sheets and asking "Why didn't I get credit for the same answer this kid wrote?" The fact is that his 3-sentence answer might be the best he ever wrote, but for her it would be an underachievement. I teach a wide range of students, so the bar for proficiency must be adjusted sometimes. This assessment system lets me do so!
So, I'm at my desk for about 20 minutes*, skimming through all the quiz sheets and occasionally calling up a student to decipher their own handwriting....
MEANWHILE, students spend class time to engage in the new material in some independent way: make a short comic strip to summarize a sub-topic, or produce a propaganda poster that might have appeared at the time, etc. These are low-stakes assignments that will not grade. If there were 1 or 2 students who weren't ready for today's quiz, then instead they will work on the video lesson during class time -- in the library, with one of the two wifi-enabled tablets in my room, or perhaps on their own cell phone.

* If you feel that this makes me evil, disengaged, lazy, or whatever, then I am sorry but we can still be friends, right?.

How I handle retakes:

They only need to re-try the objective(s) they missed on the first attempt.
On this example quiz, let's say that a student wrote only two items for question #1, wrote rock-solid answers about Bunker Hill and the Olive Branch Petition, but had an unclear response about Common Sense: "It was published by Thomas Paine in 1776" is accurate but does not show the understanding I'm looking for....
After I read his quiz sheet, I turned to his assignment sheet and notes (which he'd placed into the folder after the quiz) and I circled those learning objectives: #1 and #5.
He leaves my classroom with a clear assignment: review the video and/or your notes about Loyalists and Common Sense.
At the next possible opportunity (a student-centered activity tomorrow, a study hall period, a few minutes before homeroom....), he will retry those answers without access to notes. Usually I give a new copy of the quiz sheet, for him to write in a corner of the room; sometimes for convenience I will quiz the student orally.
RARELY, a student is still unprepared with incomplete or inaccurate responses. Now it's time for a one-to-one conversation about study skills and/or the academic topic.
USUALLY the retake ends with a successful result, and verbal encouragement from me.

How does the grading work for these assessments?

You can see the headlines below. I am not playing a numbers game. This is a mastery assessment so I expect 100% proficiency. I'm not going to count some questions more than others, or calculate partial credit for getting 1 out of 2 results of Bunker Hill.
Also, I need a super-quick scoring system to return everyone's quiz within 20 minutes!
These Need2Know quizzes are the smallest element of the term grade: 3% or 4% per quiz (a total of ~25-30%).
A few students complain about the 50% score for just 1 question wrong .... I respond "Yes, you only have 1 item to fix and then it's a B grade"
Any student who bombed the quiz at first can also get an 85%, but he must work a lot harder to get there than the child with only 1 misunderstanding. That seems fair to me.
On the "Rising Tensions Part 4" quiz example I used earlier:

65 students aced it on quiz day [100%]
14 students had to fix at least 1 question [85%]
3 students needed a second retake attempt [85%]
2 (out of 84) never did that retake, so their 50% score was stuck in the gradebook.

I don't feel good about those 50% scores, but since that quiz (November 6th) I have worked more closely with both students and they are significantly improving.

Sooooooo whaddya think? You made it this far in the blog post, so you must still be interested. Like I said at the start, this system has evolved over time and probably will again... maybe with your input!

Vacation, all I ever wanted(?)

My flipping mastery grade rubric system

If they Need2Know it, then I'm gonna quiz it!

Who is this flipping guy?!

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