This Friday marks the end of the 1st Quarter of the school year. At this point I'm totally a SBG n00b. For the standard, "I can successfully implement standard-based grading into the 9th grade Integrated Science classroom," I'd rate myself at the "basic" level. I've got the basic idea, I've got the basic setup, it's going basically well, but it's a long way from where I hope it will be by the end of the year.
Reflections
Students don't get it
Students understand that their overall performance in class is based on their scores for the learning goals we've gone over in class. They understand that only their most recent score for each learning goal counts. Unfortunately they have at least 8 solid years of being conditioned point-grubbers. The whole concept seems totally foreign to their entire school experience. It saddens me that explaining to a student their grade is based on their actual understanding of the content draws a blank "I don't get it" look. I keep telling myself that by frequently explaining the basic tenets of SBG and sticking to my guns students will eventually reach the point where understanding smacks them upside the head and they spend the rest of the year walking around school demanding that all their teachers do it this way. However, I'd be willing to bet a big part of the problem is the fact that...
I don't get it
Well, I get it, but I'm not sure I get how to implement it. I'm not sure I get how to communicate it. I'm not sure what I'm doing day to day supports the "radical" mandate of SBG1. There have been several changes to my school life this year that have left me time-strapped and feeling I just don't have time to go through my curriculum with a fine-tooth comb and tweak it to fit the SBG mandate. Part of the issue is my understanding of...
Qualitative SBG
Many of the SBG Titans out there teach quantitative subjects such as Math or Physics. I'm teaching a much more qualitative 9th grade Integrated Science. Conceptually, I understand how SBG works within a qualitative course. On the implementation side I'm not as comfortable. Great inquiry-based activities focused on the life cycle of stars are a little trickier for me to design than those around the work-energy theorem. I'm not trying to cop out of providing a curiosity-rich learning environment here; some topics are just harder for me to design great stuff around. Which leads to the complication of the...
State curriculum
The Connecticut State Curriculum Standards for 9th grade Integrated Science aren't that bad. Sure, they're often poorly worded and overly expansive,2 but there are a lot of interesting and relevant topics in there. I'm not one to worry about skipping a standard or six, but there are people (generally the people that fill out my evaluations) who think it's best that I not miss any.
Yesterday I had a crazy daydream about a place where there weren't oh-so-specific standards for each class and I could really let students' questions and curiosity drive what we cover when. I get why we have state standards and think it's generally a positive thing, but I dislike their specificity. We keep forgetting to leave room for curiosity and the pursuit of interesting questions. I need to find a balance between keeping up with the other Integrated Science teachers and making sure I'm putting student learning at the forefront, which is much more difficult because I'm...
Going it alone
I'm the only teacher at my school using SBG. I've pitched it to my Integrated Science colleagues and explained its wonders to my principal, but they didn't seem too interested3. I'd like to work with them to puzzle through how we'll deal with the state standards while doing SBG, or share the effort of designing great activities and projects that keep curiosity and discovery at their center. Even trickier: we were given a mandate that our mid-term and final exams must be exactly the same. That wouldn't be a big deal if we were all on the SBG Express. Since I'm riding solo the common exams probably won't live up to my expectations of what an SBG exam should look like. It certainly won't be focused solely around the learning goals I've developed, which is a major bummer.
Some Questions
2nd Quarter
In the traditional points-driven system, the points simply reset to zero at the beginning of each quarter. Students start fresh. In my understanding, that doesn't really jive with the SBG system. At this point, I'm planning on bringing over all the learning goals and scores from the 1st Quarter into the 2nd and not reset student scores until the end of the semester. How do you SBG wizards out there handle this? I'm not sure if holding over grades from quarter to quarter is technically "allowed," which might make that decision for me.
Assessment routines
While there's no one right way to implement SBG, I'm always looking to make my implementation higher-impact while remaining easy to understand. Here's how things have gone down so far:
- I give frequent small quizzes over a learning goal or two that we've been talking about in class.
- If there is an obvious deficiency in student understanding, we take some time in class focused on the weaknesses and do an in-class reassessment later. If the vast majority of students understand the topic it becomes the responsibility of individual students to reassess before or after school.
- I do frequent projects or activities that cover a couple to several learning goals. Usually there are at least a couple content-based learning goals and a few skill-based learning goals.
- I've been pretty formal about letting students know when I'm assessing a learning goal. I'm not sure if this is the best method- especially for learning goals in the vein of, "I can effectively communicate and collaborate with others to complete a task." I'd like that to simply be an "always on" learning goal that can be assessed anytime they work in a group. However, I'm not quite sure how to communicate that assessment in the midst of group work, or whether it'll cause a problem to not assess every student on that learning goal for each group activity. For example, it's easy to pick out students who aren't doing well on that learning goal while it often isn't as attention grabbing when they're doing well. As a result I worry about assessing the negative instances more than the positive, thus artificially driving that score down.
How do you handle "on the fly" assessment?
____________________________________
- "Learning is King" (back)
- There are at least 5 standards I could envision being semester long courses by themselves. (back)
- On a positive note, my SBG implementation came up in a meeting where the Asst. Superintendent of Curriculum & Instruction was present and she seemed interested in hearing more. (back)
I've also started implementing #sbar for the first time in my career -- in the middle of the first semester, no less, so I must be even crazier than you. One question I have had so far, is, what if a reassessment is worse than a previous score for a standard? How do you handle that? I guess I'm a big softy -- I've told students that I won't lower their score if a later attempt is less than their current score. Part of me feels like I don't want to discourage them from doing work. Also, my students have asked me an interesting question: "If the test is going to replace all our scores in these boxes, then what is the point of doing homework for credit"? I had a hard time coming back with a good answer to that, so that also influenced me to score things the way that I do.
I haven't read any literature on the subject though... I have Marzano's book waiting for me in the mailroom and maybe that will give me some clues on how to really to #sbar right in my classroom.
I'm also an #sbar n00b, so thanks for sharing your struggles. I totally agree with you about the difficulty of being the only one trying this at my school and having to be the one to retrain students away from point mania: its not easy.
As for the quarter deadline, I rolled my standards-based grades from first quarter right over into second quarter. My final semester grade calculations are: 1st Q 0%, 2nd Q 85%, Midterm and Final 15% (probably based on Cornally). That was something that I had to include in my sbar system after I realized last year how I was messing up student grades by not allowing reassessments across the quarter deadline. Some kids just need a little extra time to get rolling at the beginning of a school year and if they are a week or two late getting going they can really be nailed by a strict deadline at the quarter. Several students have been pleasantly surprised that they could still work on blog posts that they missed in the first quarter, so I'm glad I made that choice.
About the difficulties of assessment/reassessment in a qualitative science (I do mostly biology and anatomy) I think it helps to have very broad content knowledge standards rather than picky state standards, although the latter might be imposed on us. That gives teachers some flexibility in what students can do to demonstrate the standards. As for 'keeping up with' the other teachers, don't worry about it. You know your students best and if they need more reassessment chances, so be it. "Coverage" of content is overrated, in my opinion. I think giving choices to students is more important than keeping on a timeline, but it does tend to slow down the pace of the class. That's not necessarily a bad thing, just different.
Regarding 2nd Quarter Grades:
At my school we are lucky to have the freedom to assign quarter grades and final grades using any formula/method we see fit.
When I first started with an SBG-like system 4 years ago (a la Dan Meyer's concept checklist, two 4's make a 5, etc.) each quarter started new. I used the "reset" system because I was still using a points to tally up the concept quizzes to arrive at the quarter grade. All concepts had the same weight. If concepts carried over, then by 4th quarter students could brush off concepts without a large impact on their quarter grade. Definitely a no-no when teaching seniors.
But then how did I handle reassessments? Students could still make reassessments on 1st quarter stuff later in the year. I didn't go back and change their quarter grade, but the reassessments were reflected in the final year grade. So it was possible for a kid to have a 90 each quarter and end the year with a final grade of 95 due to post-quarter deadline reassessments. And the final grade is all that appears on our transcripts anyway. And BTW, I counted the 2 highest scores for each concept, not the most recent 2.
This year, the quarter grades are cumulative (standards carry over) because:
(1) I am counting only the most recent score on each standard.
(2) It allows me to more easily tie together related concepts from across the year into a single problem (like on an AP exam).
(3)I am using a conjunctive grading system. Each standard is given a difficulty level: Core, Intermediate, Advanced. Grades are assigned based on first achieving proficiency on the core standards, then the intermediate, and then the advanced. If a student is not at least "developing" (a "2" under a 4 point system) on all core standards, then they do not pass the class. They must be proficient on all core standards to get 70 or higher. So it's possible a kid has a 100% 1st quarter, but then after the first quiz of 2nd quarter he's back down to 65 because he's developing in a core standard. This is good for 3 reasons: it keeps them on their toes, it lights a fire for them to reassess, it gives them a road map for reassessment (focus on core goals first, then intermediate, etc.)
I have a visual of the conjunctive system here:
http://fnoschese.files.wordpress.com/2010/11/sbg-scale.png
Stick with it!
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