Hershey's Store by elisart

The checklist is in my hand. It’s the assessment menu for a unit on Greek mythology. Mrs. Labonte is explaining how we’ll be graded. I don’t remember anything but the dozens of choices on the handout. Draw a picture of a god. Write a letter to a god. Make a business using a god’s name or symbol as its logo. Dozens of choices. I don’t remember being offered this much freedom at any other time in my education. It’s the 6th grade.

The phaser is in my hand. It’s The Taming of the Shrew as performed by Kirk, Spock, McCoy, and Kate. I remember saving the most bawdy, sci-fi-Shakespearian jokes we could imagine and write in sloppy iambic pentameter for the parent-night performance, and that Mr. O’Neil didn’t bother to hide his smile while he shook his head. Where does the Enterprise wear its photon torpedos? It’s the 7th grade.

The mid-term is in my hand. It’s the first I remember taking, and it’s the first time I read “Ozymandias.” Mrs. Goldstein is expecting me to say something. I don’t remember what it was, but I remember she trusted me to figure it out. It’s the 8th grade.

The novel is in my hand. It’s As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner. Ms Fotino is drawing a wheel on the board. Addie is in the middle. Her husband and children are the spokes. The rim is plot of the story rolling on as each character moves further and further away from the central event of Addie’s death. It’s the Wheel of Fotino. It’s the first graphic organizer I remember valuing. Ms Fotino is also the first teacher I remember talking with me about books as a fellow reader instead of a as teacher. After The Sound and the Fury,  she points me towards Truman Capote and Tennesse Williams. She’s also the first teacher I remember setting up safe and effective peer-review for our writing. It’s the 10th grade.

The F paper is in my hand. It’s about The Good Soldier or The Return of the Soldier or maybe Pride or Prejudice (without zombies). It’s the first F I’ve ever gotten in English. I’m in the English department office talking with Mr. Grant, who is not the teacher who gave me the F, asking him for help. He doesn’t even talk about the paper. He talks about how I write when I have a story to tell and how I write when I want to be finished with something. He’s asking me how I would tell someone my ideas instead of writing them as quickly as I think them. He’s telling me to write the telling. He’s the first teacher to succeed in getting me to realize that while I can tell a good story, sometimes I make the choice to ignore my audience. It’s the 11th grade.

“A Very Old Man With Enormous Wings” is in my hand. It’s Spanish class, and we’re reading García Márquez in English. Dr. Joba is asking us questions and making us write about an author outside the English department canon, an author outside American and British lit. I realize I didn’t know anyone could write this way. I start learning about what’s going on in Colombia. It’s the 12th grade.

The coffee is in my hand. It’s burnt, like all the coffee in Athens, Ohio, in 1998. Professor Bartlett is somehow sitting there with me, this unknowable Welshman who has spent six months pointing out everything I still don’t know about the Restoration. He’s telling me that I’ll understand; he’s telling me that he’s always been the outsider. I understand, but I didn’t expect him to find me like that with some ingrained outcast echo-locator. Later he offers me my pick of the art in his office; he’s retiring. He was a coal miner in Wales before becoming a professor in America. I wonder if he feels like we didn’t learn enough about him when he tells us we don’t know enough about the Restoration. It’s the second year of college.

The poem is in my hand. It’s mine and it’s terrible. It’s about communists and Dan Rather and a coffee shop and completely inferior to the one in which I re-imagine the Monolith from 2001 as a giant Hershey Bar. Mary Ruefle is at the end of the table, looking at my watch, trying to find some words. “Mary,” she says, “there is no beginning, and there is no end.” It’s not really about my work, but it’s the only teacher comment near it that I can quote verbatim. It’s the third year of college.

The transcripts are in my hand. I’ve made them from pages of an American woman’s diary written after the death of her husband as she tries to maintain her hold over a hacienda in revolutionary Mexico. Pepo is listening as I read them. He seems really interested. He’s asking questions about what I’ll do with them and how I’ll edit them. I have no idea, but I know he’ll help. After a while we stop talking about work and talk about his son, his health, his plans in Ohio. I think he’s so cool and such a good father and I hope he will be okay. It’s still the third year of college, but since there is no beginning and there is no end….

The chalk is in my hand. I’m student teaching with Pat.  It’s all I can do to keep up with her pace of thinking, her interrogation and reinvention of what’s not working, and her ceaseless devotion to every student.  It’s absolutelty apparent that she’s never taught the same year twice and that her enthusiasm for teaching and learning grow exponentionally from year to year.  It’s the second year of grad school.

The data is in my hand. Lori is leading us to a common understanding and championing of what we have to do: Eliminate the Achievement Gap.  I’m finally figuring out that teaching is not about me being good at it; it’s about learning for all.  It’s the fourth year of my career.

These teachers and their dedicated, gifted colleagues shared with me many gifts that I try, fail, and try again to pass along in my teaching: freedom, humor, expectation, equality, generosity, awareness, empathy, idiosyncrasy, humanity, care, passion, and determination.

However, when I look back at the design of my education, what’s missing are two pieces that we still struggle with today: standardization and authenticity. The teachers who taught me the most about myself and the power of communication to share feeling, meaning, and memory either allowed me the most freedom or pushed me the most to do something more than settle.  They did not standardize me.  The teachers whom I let hurt me were the ones who tried to do that.  While it’s absolutely right, necessary, and human that we create circumstances to lift up one another through all kinds of teaching and learning, standardized testing cannot be the endpoint of public education.  We have to find a more fitting destination for the variety of human existence than standardized testing.

We also need to build more authentic schools. We need schools that are not schools.  I fell in love with reading and writing at an early age, and my schools were geared toward students like me.  While many teachers reached me me, I have no idea if or how they reached students with different gifts and needs. My education was authentic to me because reading and writing were personally meaningful to me, but that was not the case for many others.  Many students had profound gifts, but few outlets.  School was not an authentic or personally meaningful experience for them.   Who knows what else I might have been good at or learned to do from a teacher or classmate if I hadn’t been tracked in my own way? I spent my youth in books.  I’m certain now that there were other things going on outside.  Schools need to connect with all students’ lives, not only to engage kids with authentic work, but also to enable students to learn from one another.  We need to push learning into students lives by pushing it past classrooms’ physical boundaries.  We need to committ to choice in the classroom.  We need to provide choice within school systems.  The choices we offer need to be shaped by the needs and wants of our learners.

While I loved reading and writing, it’s my responsibility to help my students find what they love.

Tag, @msstewart, @englishcomp, @stevejmoore, @engltchrleo, @tweenteacher, @mctownsley: if you have the time and inclination, you’re it.  Be sure to link back to Shelly and Mary Beth’s posts.

Pulitzer Prize Winner Junot DIaz by somethingstartedcrazy

Embracing standards-based assessment and reporting (SBAR) is a difficult, but achievable, goal for classroom teachers who want to begin the journey now.  As long as you’re wiling to compromise at the end of each marking period and create a formula that cross-walks your feedback and students growth into a letter grade, it’s likely that the merits of SBAR will help you win over your administrator for a micro-pilot in your own classroom.

Essentially, SBAR is rigorous backwards design and the teaching, grading, and reporting practices that go with it. You unpack your assigned standards, decide which are most essential and umbrella-like, and then teach to those power standards and provide students with meaningful rubric-based feedback. The feedback has to provide concrete next steps and make use of a mangeable 3, 4, or 5-point rubric. Moving from not-proficient to proficient, with specific steps to follow, is a lot more motivating and attainable for a student than moving from, say, an F to a C with only a percentage to guide him or her.

Matt Townsley (@mctownsley) blogs on his SBAR journey in great detail and reflective depth. Robert Marzano, Rick Stiggins, and Rick Wormeli, et al., have all written extensively on setting up an SBAR program, including how to maintain and report out records of student achievement. To these experts’ work, I would only add a few pieces of advice for teachers hungry to make a difference in assessment as quickly as is reasonably possible.

1. Take at least year to learn and prepare. It’s too difficult to learn SBAR on the go.  Don’t implement an incomplete SBAR plan.  That’s’s not fair to students and other stakeholders who depend on you to be consistent and effective in your feedback. Be really good at backwards design and learn to offer timely narrative feedback before you begin with SBAR. Train for SBAR. My journey towards practice took 2+ years of synthesis. I worked for a longer time to accomplish more difficult goals with SBAR than for NBCT certification.
2. Find a critical friend who will at least listen and learn with you and observe your work or meet regularly with you to discuss and compare student work between classes. This will help make sure your implementation of SBAR doesn’t inflate or depress the “value” of grades in your classroom.
3. Approach your administrator with a concrete plan and explanation of how you will educate students, parents, other teachers, and the administration. Be prepared also to cross-walk your feedback and students’ achievement to your school’s grading scale so the principal’s political liability is limited. Have your gradebook and report card ready and explain why they’re better than traditional models.
4. Prepare yourself for mastery learning and the teaching that goes with it. You won’t end up with percents to average.  You will need to follow up on your feedback and help students join a culture of quality work and determination to master content and skills essential to them.
5. Practice your spiel. You will have to explain, defend, and champion SBAR to all kinds of audiences – students, parents, colleagues – with all kinds of attitudes – curiosity, skepticism, hostility. Always be willing to share, but never push. Teachers heavily invested in traditional models of scoring and reporting will be on the defensive around SBAR; they will rightly want proof of SBAR’s effectiveness. Share your data, but don’t use it as a wedge.
6. Always make class time to explain SBAR and enable students to master work. You are the teacher; the students are the learners. You are interdependent, and your classroom culture needs to reflect that. Don’t give students awesome feedback in class and then marginalize them to after- or before-school sessions. Show them that your feedback and their work really matters. Make time for mastery in class. W. James Popham’s Transformative Assessment can help here.
7. Stick with it. Don’t give up on SBAR. Stay the course for the year. For all your planing, there will be some learning and tweaking on the go. Remember that you are engaged in the right struggle for kids.
8. Grow out slowly. Only expand the work of SBAR to engage enthusiastic and willing participants who will learn and plan for another year before practicing SBAR in the classroom. You have to be sure that all teachers practicing SBAR have a core set of common beliefs and an common set of practices that ensure consistency and fairness in the program.

If that sounds daunting, it is; however, it’s possible to out together a great SBAR program. As self-doubting and forward-looking as I can be, I hold on to my students’ comments about SBAR. The students who said I never explained it well enough were right. The students who said that the only time they felt like they really learned was when we used SBAR were also right. SBAR is what you make of it.  Take the necessary time and care to craft a manageable and effective system.

Assessments, like any kind of data-based research, can be used by many people in many different ways.

One teacher might pump her fist in the air after seeing that 95% of her students passed this year’s reading test.  Another might perseverate on the 5% who failed, knowing that those students are the toughest to reach and no one’s reached them yet.  Another educator might take issue with the test’s validity and discount the results entirely, instead focusing on whether or not her students’ final portfolios demonstrated mastery of reading and writing for a variety of purposes and audiences.

The same can be said of assessment systems.  They, too, can be taken and manipulated in many ways by many people.

Look at traditional grading.  Take two English teachers working in the same grade at the same school.  Despite sharing a common, 100-point scale, two teachers’ students could earn the same scores but learn dramatically different things depending on the curriculum, assessment, and instruction used in the two classes.  Even if those teachers shared a common curriculum, a 90% in one class doesn’t have to mean the same thing in the other class.  What if both teachers gave book tests, but on different books?  What if both teachers gave book tests on the same book, but one teacher’s questions never broke the knowledge/comprehension ceiling?  Or what if both teachers gave the same test and it included analysis items, but only one of the teachers ever modeled or gave practice in answering analysis questions during the reading of the book?

Look at standards-based assessment and reporting (SBAR).  Take another two English teachers working together in the same grade at another school school.  Ask the same questions; you won’t get very different answers.

I ran a SBAR pilot in my classroom for a year and was then fortunate enough to work with a group of peers willing to try it department-wide for another year.  We learned a lot about assessment, grade-book design, and report-card design from struggling with the tension between SBAR and traditional grading.

While I believe standards-based assessment and reporting is better for learning than traditional grading, and while I believe that the two should not be mixed, I don’t worry so much about which system to use anymore.  I worry more about people issues.  How can you make sure that every student has a teacher who provides opportunities for authentic learning?  How can you make sure that every student has a teacher working with colleagues to transform rote content into fuel for life-long learning?  How can you make sure that every student has a teacher who cares more that students’ learning demonstrates mastery than that students’ behavior satisfies the teacher?

The SBAR process does a better job of pushing teachers to tackle those questions than traditional grading does.  However, there are multiple obstacles in the status quo to implementing an SBAR classroom or school-wide grading system, including grade-books and report-cards which are commonly adopted by a whole school or system and not often up for change.  Perhaps the biggest obstacle is our conditioned impulse to equate a 4- or 5-point scale with the 100-point scale used for traditional grading.  They do not match up.  The should never be cross-walked.  They are irreconcilably disparate.  Don’t do it.  When you tell a student that mastery equals 80%, or that approaching mastery equals 60%, you effectively squelch any intrinsic motivation the student has to move forward in learning by equating formative feedback with summative grades.  The 100-point scale and its letter grade equivalents exist to sort children by summative, lag indicators.  The 4-point scale exists to promote student learning by articulating the characteristics of different levels of mastery.  The 100-point scale suffers from inflation, discrepancy, subjectivity, and the confusion of student behavior with learning.  The 4-point scale, while adaptable, concentrates on learning and makes public the teacher’s commitment to providing clear benchmarks for students to reach.  There’s not a lot of wiggle room in the 4-point scale to fudge with decimals, to reward extra credit schoolwork less demanding then the learning, or to take points off of mastery for too much talking.  Ultimately, it’s better to take the assessment and feedback lessons learned from SBAR and to apply them in practice using a 100-point scale than it is to ever try to crosswalk the two.

It’s a reform-crippling irony that the public thinks number- and letter- grades provide more hard data about student learning than rubrics built on 4- and 5- point scales do. If your school or public is unwilling to publish or accept “grades” based on SBAR and its scales, make traditional grading mean more.

All criticisms of the 100-point scale aside, I still think it can be used to promote learning if teachers work together to make sure that the grades stand for real learning benchmarks, and to make sure that students can always improve their grades by demonstrating higher levels of mastery over time.  If teachers working together agree to tier assessments, for example, so that no one gets a B without applying knowledge, and no one gets an A without analyzing or evaluating  “new” information with “old” skills, then it becomes likely that both of those teachers will provide some instruction and practice on the kinds of thinking that make work personally meaningful for students.  I want teachers to design assessments and instruction that promote student meaning-making, regardless of the grading scale the teachers use.

Ultimately, any scale needs to be used to value, promote, and reward authentic learning.  The scale is a construct – it’s a communications technology; it’s not the learning itself.  Does your quarterly message to parents and students promote learning?  Even if your division requires you to use a scale with which you disagree, you can call home or re-purpose school postage or bandwidth with a newsletter or narrative report that more accurately describes students’ learning in your classroom.  You can pilot student-led conferences.  You don’t have to stop communicating at your grading scale.

In fact, it’s not this scale or that scale that’s the problem.  The problem lies in how we use the scales and how much care we take in making sure that the scales encourage learning and academic risk-taking instead of discouraging them.  Our problems with grading are people problems.  They come from grading in isolation for too long and from believing for too long that the 100-point scale is enough to unite us and our work.  We need to network with one another, as well as with experts in the outside world, to provide personally-meaningful, autnehtic learning and feedback for our students.  We need to expand our PLCs into PLNs.

What does a 90% or a 4 mean to you?  What do you think it means to your students?  How does it move forward their learning?  What do you think it means to world?  How can you be sure?  How authentic are the “grades” in your classroom?

Beware getting caught up in arguments with your peers about how to label learning; unite with your colleagues instead to align assessment, instruction, and feedback to ensure that learning is authentic and happening in the first place.  Make your standard authenticity and make sure to share out how it goes.