Grading Reflections

I attended a superb Solution Tree workshop week focusing on Professional Learning Communities (PLCs), Grading practices, Intervention Tiers, and how to help every student succeed by Raising the Bar and Closing the gap... yes that is a book title too.

One topic that I learned about was the argument yet again about not putting in zeros for missing work. That has always stuck in my craw so to speak because I would not want to give a child 50% of the points for an assignment they never did, when a child who did poorly on it, but tried and did turn it in, but never tried to redo it also got 50%. But I started to see that the scale of 0 to 59% being a F while all the others are only 10 points on the 100 point scale made more sense. Especially when they talked about grading differences between teachers being a much as the same paper could get an A or an F depending on who your teacher is! Really made me think about how many zeros I have given out and was that really a fair and reasonable way to grade. Especially if the number of points possible on the assignment was over 10. The more points an assignment is worth, the worse it hurts those students who can't keep up with the workload for whatever reason.

So I am looking at using rubric scales of 4 to 0 for next year on most items, and I decided that while I wasn't sure about the 50% rule, the 25% rule I could handle. So any student who still had any missing items at the end of last quarter, was given 25% of the points possible for those assignments.*  I almost never have a child turn in work and still only earn 25% of the grade.


Plus I will continue my policy of MAKING those students do their missing work in the next class periodinstead of moving forward with the rest of peers to the next assignment. That I was reassured is the best policy, even though it is a lot of work to have students working on multiple assignments in one 55 minutes class period, trying to supervise and juggle it all.....

Another reason I love my student teachers!

*None of my students failed Science this quarter with this policy in place! 

Quarter 4 Week One Review

As before, having a student teacher in my class to assist and slowly take over the teaching while I supervise is such an opportunity to share my teaching skills and to re-evaluate what I do and try to improve even more. So this week, my student teacher is taking over all the classes now, with me simply assisting and guiding, or sometimes co-teaching. I love it!

We have only 9 weeks left now, and two of those will be doozies as we have both our AZmerit testing this quarter, and our Sex Ed guest speakers coming in for a week in our science classes. Not a fan of this, but our principal is trying to make sure every student gets this and more students take science than P.E. so "C'est la vie!"

So we really are going to need to find the absolute BEST lessons to teach our Ecology standards to our students with to help them understand and succeed in this unit. I vote for the best hands on labs and activities I can find, and then make sure the students can analyze the data and results they gain, and make strong conclusions that match that data.

One lab I know I want to repeat is the Transfer of Energy lab using water teams to carry water leaky bucket by bucket down a chain of students!