Students Choosing to Be Held Accountable

In the ideal Standards-Based Grading classroom, the students' grades are an accurate reflection of what they know and can do. As many teachers and researchers have pointed out, grading completion, or combining behavior related grades (such as homework completion, grading effort, and penalizing late work) with academic grades muddies the water and can distort the students' overall grade. I agree with this, but have come to a point where this has been problematic in practice.

The Backstory

In case you haven't read previous posts, we've been moving towards a flipped learning model in our chemistry classes. This required a strong "sell" at the beginning of the year to get students into the habit of watching videos and taking notes for homework, and to teach them to make good, efficient use of this new style. It became obvious over the last few weeks that students were not making good use of the videos (maybe my "sell" was not quite strong enough). 

Accountability, in More Ways Than One

We decided last year to use a website called EDpuzzle (www.edpuzzle.com). EDpuzzle is a video hosting and sharing site that allows you to embed questions into the videos to check for understanding. It also keeps track of what students are watching your videos and how many times. It's been really useful to have that transparency and accountability. We can easily see how many students are watching the videos, and we've shown this to our students to encourage them to watch the videos and take notes.

I also showed them this graph of average test grade for 4 different groups of students to encourage them to watch the videos and take the notes, trying to communicate the connection between doing so and learning enough to do well on the test.

With all this convincing, my completion rates only marginally improved, and only temporarily. They clearly needed more accountability. 

Carrots and Sticks

I had been resisting using grades as a way to motivate students and hold them accountable. Philosophically, this is the opposite direction I'm trying to go, but the carrots of "See, students that take the notes do better on the test" just wasn't working for many of my students. I needed a stick to go with it. We tried "Notes Quizzes" for a couple weeks, which didn't turn out well. I spent a good half-period one day talking with my students about this dilemma and how I was torn between keeping their grades accurate to what they know (i.e. not grading things for completion) and holding them accountable for doing the work. 

What came out of that conversation was that they wanted me to come around on a near-daily basis and check their notes in their packet for completion. They agreed that doing this is far more likely to increase their likelihood of doing the notes, especially over intrinsic motivation and notes quizzes. One class, in particular, had been very disengaged. Since that conversation where they, as a group, chose to be held accountable via their preferred method (one that worked for me, too), I've noticed they have almost immediately become more engaged in what we are doing and on board with the way we are doing it. Student choice led to student involvement and increased morale. Now that I think about it, that's not all that surprising. 

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Thank you for finding and reading my blog. One of my goals is to participate in the worldwide discussion of implementing Standards-Based Grading. If you have questions, thoughts, or insights, please leave a comment (click "Comments" below). If you want to receive new posts by email, enter your email address in the right sidebar near the top of this page.

Grading That Builds Hope

There have been times in the past when a student does so poorly on an assessment that I feel like I would be crushing him if I graded it true to how much the student wrote down that was actually of value.

Standing in Kids' Shoes

Imagine getting a paper or quiz back and seeing a huge 5/20 written on the top. Where do you start? You would feel so far behind it would seem to be hopeless. The truth is that there are likely a few concepts in there that you are actually handling at least moderately well, but they are buried in the overall score that comes out to 25% and sinks your grade in the class.

Finding the Silver Lining

In the roughly one month that I've been using learning targets to assess and give feedback to students, I have seen examples like this one multiple times. It is not uncommon to have a student with ratings like this:

Even if the ratings were 1, 1, 3, & 1, wouldn't you respond so much differently than seeing a "6/20" in total at the top of the page? I would. If the quiz in the picture was mine, I would be proud of my 5 and more inclined to focus in on the 1. 

I feel that I can be more accurate in my grading because I know that the grade is giving the student real feedback about what he or she knows well and doesn't know well. There's almost always something the student is doing right that the rating system points out, so I don't have to worry about crushing a student's spirit. Likewise, there's also almost always something the student needs more practice on, which grading-by-learning-target quickly points out. 

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Thank you for finding and reading my blog. One of my goals is to participate in the worldwide discussion of implementing Standards-Based Grading. If you have questions, thoughts, or insights, please leave a comment (click "Comments" below). If you want to receive new posts by email, enter your email address in the right sidebar near the top of this page.

Test Scores with SBG vs. Traditional

I recently graded the first unit test of the year. I was hesitant because of how we are changing things this year. We aren't doing anything so revolutionary or contrarian that I should think that students would do poorly in the new system, but I'm nonetheless cautious going into the first test.

The Changes

Last year was my first full year teaching and, of course, the first year going through the curriculum that we use at Wheaton North. I followed a pretty traditional method of scoring student work. Some completion with a lot of arbitrary points assigned to various problems, worksheets, quizzes, labs, and tests. 

This year, I'm starting a 2 Year Implementation of SBG, focusing more on the feedback component of it this year with the hopes that it'll be full-fledged next year. Because the emphasis is on the feedback, I'm not grading summative tests (unit tests) with an SBG model. However, what I have done, is add the learning targets to each of the student worksheets and labs and then actually used them to grade the students throughout the course of the unit. All of the learning experiences, for the most part, have remained the same - same notes, worksheets, labs, and activities. Most importantly (for this blog post), the tests are also largely the same.

The (Preliminary) Results

After grading my students' tests, I wanted to compare their results this year with what my last year's students got on the same test with the more traditional feedback system. Here they are:

• 2016 Unit 1 Test Average (SBG): 83.7%
• 2015 Unit 1 Test Average (Trad.): 74.4%

I could go on and on here about all the small differences and variables that are affecting the student's grades (there's a big difference between a first-year teacher and a second-year teacher). I'll go ahead and assume you don't want to hear about standard deviations, t-tests, and null hypotheses (and we'll also assume that those terms are about the extent of my statistical vocabulary). 

What the Results DON'T Mean

Some agenda-pushing, SBG-obsessed educators may take these numbers and declare from the rooftops that this is "proof'" that SBG is better than a more traditional grading system, that we all must immediately drop what we are doing and take the plunge into re-writing our assessments. I don't think this is necessarily strong evidence for such a conclusion, and certainly not "proof!" Test scores are helpful, but not the whole story.

  What the Results DO Mean

The test scores tell me a couple different things:

1. I'm not harming my kids. I've had thoughts that removing "points" from the lexicon of my classroom might cause my grading practices to become invalid, that is, not representative of what students know and can do. I arbitrarily assigned "B" as a grade to level 3 on my rating system. Would this skew student's grades up or down? Since the test is graded the same way it was last year, I think I can say that I'm not doing damage.
2. Detailed feedback is helpful. Seriously, who doesn't already know this? We've all heard feedback that is too vague to be helpful. "This doesn't seem to be a good "fit" for you." Thanks, I'll keep that in mind in the future. SBG gives students more detailed feedback. Instead of losing 2 points, you get a 3/5 in "drawing conclusions from a graph" and a 5/5 in "mathematically determining the density of an object."
3. My students learned more this year. For the myriad of explanations for why the scores are the way they are, and whether the difference is significant, let's remember that this is the important point: my students this year are doing better than my students last year. I'm not saying SBG is the whole reason for the difference from one year to the next, but I am pretty pleased that there is a 9.3% increase. Now that's something to write home (or a blog post) about!

Organized Chaos

One of my first blog posts was titled "Self-Paced Learning." At the time, it was just an idea, inspired by the book Flip Your Classroom. One of my colleagues, Rachelle Terada, could be described as a "go-getter." I admire her willingness to dive into an idea that she believes in. She will see something that another teacher is doing, or she'll get an idea in her head, mentally chew on it for a bit to decide if it's worthwhile. If it is, watch out! She's all in. She read Flip Your Classroom over the summer, where the authors describe how they moved to a flipped model in their chemistry classrooms, and within a few years, were encouraging students to work through the curriculum at their own pace. Rachelle has done all of that in a few months. She recently took a video of her classroom. We turned it into a GIF for the purposes of social media and this blog (unfortunately, the translation made it a bit blurry):

Well-Oiled Machine

At the beginning of the loop, you see a few students taking quizzes in the front of the room. As the camera pans to the right, there are four separate tables of students doing labs. Among the four groups, there are actually three different labs going at once. In the back corners of the room students are working on worksheets in small groups or watching lecture videos on Chromebooks.  Between the windows, you can see a group of three boys working on a worksheet together. Oh, and this is a general level chemistry class, not Honor's or AP.

Everyone's Learning

Of course, there are a few students that are already behind. They haven't planned out their work well and haven't gotten much done in class. Overall, though, students have signed up to take quizzes or do labs a day ahead of time so Rachelle knows what she needs to have ready. They've clustered into groups and are working together for the entire period. They are getting one-on-one feedback from Rachelle as she works her way around the room, pushing them toward higher levels of understanding and competency. 

Rachelle, too, is learning. She's learned about her students as she checks in with each student and as they've rated themselves in various skills or conceptual understanding. She's learned more about how to structure the system for efficiency. By no means would she say that she's already got the system to a truly "well-oiled machine" status, but it's impressive how quickly she was able to get the system to a point where it's working well. She mentioned the other day that the labs she's getting are some of the most high-quality she has ever received. 

Grade Comprehension, Not Compliance

In my most recent post, I was wrestling with how to assess student homework and what to include in their homework grade. I want to hold students accountable for doing their work, but I don't want to make their grade an indication of how compliant they are with completing homework. Completing the homework isn't the same thing as understanding the homework, especially when the homework, as it often is in our case, is taking notes from a video.

Connect the Dots

My students, in general, often don't see the connection between good study habits like completing homework and their performance in the class. As we drop the level of accountability with completing homework, I think it's important to talk about this with the students. Showing them the connection between homework (practice) and the test (game) in explicit ways is helpful. 

The language you choose here is important, too. I've often held the test over my students' heads as motivation for doing homework, almost as if the test is a threat. "If you don't do your homework, you'll get a bad grade on the test!" communicates that the test is where I'm going to catch you. I've started shifting more to an emphasis on learning and understanding the material, so it becomes an easier transition to show students the connection between the practice, or homework, and the summative assessment. Since we aren't going to hold them accountable to doing their notes directly, via gradebook credit for completion, it important to point out often and show them that that doesn't mean it's not important. 

Checking for Understanding

If you want the grade to represent what the student knows, you have to actually check what the student knows. This means that instead of checking for completion of homework, we have to check for specific answers or responses on homework, worksheets, or labs. As I mentioned in the previous post, we don't have the time to collect and check every assignment. So we have to take a "sample" from an assignment and check that. We still are walking around checking in with students each day or several times per week, but instead of checking for completion of homework, we're checking two or three specific answers for correctness on a lab or worksheet, circling it on the student's paper, marking it down on a sheet, and moving on to the next student. This gives the student a small amount of feedback and encourages him to check his work again and find his mistake. It also gives us a more accurate measurement of what each student knows and how they are doing than just simply checking for completion of notes. We enter the grade according to this rating scale.

This method does take a few extra minutes of time, so it's helpful if the students are working on something while your checking. However, a few extra minutes of time to check in with each student and ID the ones that are struggling early is well worth it. 

Standardize the Format

Doug Lemov, in his book, Teach Like a Champion 2.0 describes several techniques to increase rigor and efficiency. One of them, he calls, "Standardize the Format," which entails making worksheets and training students in a way that increases the speed at which you can check for understanding. An extra few seconds searching for an answer for each student x30 students x5 classes costs you several minutes of instructional time. Ideally, you get in, give the feedback, and get out quickly so you can move onto the rest of your lesson plan.

I want to be able to look quickly at a student's worksheet, knowing the answer to a few questions, and easily identify if the student knows what she's doing, so here's how we have "Standardized the Format:"

I can quickly scan down the page and tell the student to "circle and double check your answer to number 5, but 4 and 6 are good" as I go around the room. 

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Thank you for finding and reading my blog. One of my goals is to participate in the worldwide discussion of implementing Standards-Based Grading. If you have questions, thoughts, or insights, please leave a comment (click "Comments" below). If you want to receive new posts by email, enter your email address in the right sidebar near the top of this page.

Confusion on Homework

With the changes we are making to our curriculum and pedagogy, many get confused about homework. Homework is the most fundamental aspect about school, probably because it hasn't changed in over 100 years. Student's file into class, the teacher disseminates information, and students head home to do homework. New systems like flipping and SBG (among others) upend this decades-old pattern. This leads to a lot of confusion about homework. Students ask, "What if I don't do my homework?" or "How much credit is homework worth?" or "Are you going to check homework?" Students and parents become very confused because they are not used to seeing systems where the homework may not count for anything (or at least not as much as it used to).

My Confusion

However, I don't want to use this post to discuss my students' confusion over homework, but rather mine, though student (and parent) confusion is certainly worthy of a blog post! Homework, and what to do with it, is confusing for me, too. After all, I too went through the decades-old pattern as a student. 

A few days ago, I was going around my classroom checking students' notes. They had been assigned to watch a video the previous night, and I wanted to check to see how many students had their notes done. This is standard practice - assign homework; check it the next day. Teachers don't have enough time to really check it well, we're mostly just seeing if students completed it (i.e. have something, anything, written down). I carried around a sheet, marking down whether or not students had their homework done. 

SBG Grading Scale

Our goal is to use this rating system as much as possible this year, giving students ratings on different learning targets on worksheets, quizzes, labs, and anything else to which it applies. As a PLC, we agreed to use the following grading scale when putting these ratings into our gradebooks (our system doesn't allow grades that aren't converted to percentages).

What Am I Grading?

So I was about to enter grades into my gradebook for completion of notes, when I thought, "What am I grading?" The rating system is supposed to be a rating of student understanding, not compliance. Does the fact that a student had notes scribbled on a page indicate that she understood anything? Not at all! I didn't really want to record compliance as if it was understanding and therefore muddy the waters of the students' grades. However, on the other hand, do I really want there to be no accountability of students doing their notes? As I discussed here, it's essential that students "Buy-In" to watching and taking notes on the videos. This is the rub that many teachers feel with SBG. "If I don't grade homework, they won't do it!" they say. And they have a good point. There is a place for holding students accountable to do the work they need to do. 

Talk It Out

As I sat at my computer wondering what to do with homework grades, I decided I needed to talk it out. I presented this dilemma to some colleagues and we had some good discussions about how to hold students accountable without compromising our students' grades. I also included the students on this discussion, telling them my dilemma - that I want their grades to be accurate, but that I also want to hold them accountable. I want to push my students to take responsibility for learning the material, for thinking about how well they understand it, and identifying areas in which they excel and need improvement. Maybe this could be one piece to that puzzle. 

This post is already too long. Click here for a later post about how I ended up responding to this dilemma and what came out of the conversations I had with colleagues and students.

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Thank you for finding and reading my blog. One of my goals is to participate in the worldwide discussion of implementing Standards-Based Grading. If you have questions, thoughts, or insights, please leave a comment (click "Comments" below). If you want to receive new posts by email, enter your email address in the right sidebar near the top of this page.

Flipped Classroom: Day 1

I wrote in an earlier post about the "Flipped" classroom. Flipping classrooms is all the rage, and for good reason. It seems to be quite effective and can lead to increased time with students for the teacher, allowing for more activities, more practice, and deeper understanding of the content - all good things. I may be crazy, but I'm implementing flipping at the same time I'm implementing standards-based grading (maybe this blog should have a revised name). However, as flipping pioneers Aaron Sams and Jonathan Bergmann point out, flipped learning, and especially flipped-mastery classrooms, are highly compatible with SBG, so at least my two steps are in the same direction.

The Sell

One of the keys to the flipped classroom is the sales' pitch at the front end. Many students have never experienced this type of learning and may resist it. Since when is change comfortable, right? We wouldn't flip if we didn't think it was what is best for students, but they don't know that. Flipping allows students to go at their own pace, rewind their teacher, here a lecture more than once, access content if they are absent, have their teacher help them with homework, and bounce ideas off their peers in collaborating towards a common goal. I bring all this up in pitching this to my students, which I did today for some of my classes (I'm indebted to Mr. Helberg for showing me the light on all these points!). No longer will students become stuck and be unable to do their homework. And isn't that the point, that students don't get stuck?

It's All About the Learning

My cooperating teacher when I was student teaching always said, "It's about the learning, not the points." Students (and adults) gravitate toward the points (for us, salary). They do this in taking notes on videos as well. We must hold them accountable for taking high-quality notes, and even before that, teach them how to watch a video. Otherwise, they will go through the motions to get the points. Just as you read a fiction book differently from a non-fiction book, you should watch a flipped class lecture video differently from an entertaining YouTube clip. We watched a video in class today, using the pause button liberally and even rewinding to make sure we got it all. I also give students this guide, which includes a checklist of what it should look like if you're getting the most out of your video. 

Buy In

If my students don't buy in to both the methodology of a flipped classroom and the pursuit of learning over "credit," they won't succeed this year. Because the curriculum is flipped, they obviously have to buy in to watching and taking notes on videos. Otherwise, they'll get very limited exposure to key pieces of the content. However, I would argue that the bigger and more profound buy in is to learning over credit. This extends beyond my classroom and into their life-long flourishing. "Buy In" is critical, and the beginning of the year is the critical time to get it.