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SBG: One Quarter Down

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?

______

  1. "Learning is King"       [↩]
  2. There are at least 5 standards I could envision being semester long courses by themselves. [↩]
  3. 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.     [↩]
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C(R)APT testing

I truly believe that it is possible to have a standardized test that does at least a decent job of measuring student achievement. That being said, I have yet to see one that does.

Exhibit A

I snapped a quick pic of a CAPT (Connecticut's standardized test of choice) practice sheet that was left sitting by the copying machine on Friday.¹

Question 1

My favorite part of this? It includes the little bubble-it-in-grid. Not because this particular worksheet gets scanned, but it's just practice so students know how to fill in bubbles. As if there's nothing more important in our students lives than learning these valuable life skills (Objective A.12.34: Students will display proper usage of No. 2 pencils and bubbling technique).

These tests always seem to be trying to trick students. The questions asks for the answer given to the nearest gallon. Doing the math without rounding gives you an answer of 12,990.6542 gallons. The bubble grid includes space for decimals. How many students put in 12,990.65 and get it marked incorrect? What are they supposed to bubble in? 12,990? Would that get marked wrong because the last two decimals aren't filled in? 12,990.00? That's technically incorrect² but I can see how a 15 year old who is really trying to follow directions to a "T" would answer in that way.

Question 2

What knowledge is this question testing? At first it seems to be a question about proportions (40 gal. sap : 1 gal. syrup), but then it throws this whole gallons into quarts thing in at the end. Thus this question only tells us if students understand the conversion and the proportion concepts.The test can't determine if they understand one but not the other. Thus, the test doesn't determine what a student actually knows with any degree of accuracy.

Furthermore, how important is it for students to memorize conversion factors? Especially in Imperial Volume Units? I can barely keep those straight (and have little reason to). Anytime I really need to convert these units, I pull up Google and use their handy unit conversion tool.

What's the big deal?

This isn't a problem unique to Connecticut. It's a general problem that is pervasive throughout the high-stakes standardized testing world. How can these tests accurately determine what students know if they're poorly written? How can districts be told they're failing their students if the instrument used to determine that students aren't learning has serious validity problems? How can the entire education system in the United States buy into these tests as the best way to measure success?

Who are the people that write these tests? Do they read the questions they've written?

_________________________________________________

¹ Sorry for the poor quality images of the tests. They were taken with my camera phone.

² The reason 12,990.00 is incorrect because it implies that the measurement is accurate to the nearest one hundredth of a gallon which is a higher degree of accuracy than can be ascertained from the given information. In fact, the correct answer should be 13,000 gallons, due to the total dollar value being given as the entirely vague "about $556,000." This implies that the final answer can only be accurate to the nearest thousand. Thus ends the quick & dirty lesson on significant figures.

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Thoughts on Personal Learning Networks

In my few short days as an active member of the educational blogging network, I've been (somewhat) involved in some stimulating conversations regarding the idea of using Personal Learning Networks in the classroom.

I first encountered the idea from a post last week by Clay Burell on his blog, Beyond School. Essentially the idea is for educators to create and utilize their own Personal Learning Network (PLN) to enhance the learning experience by bringing in experts into the classroom (i.e. via Skype) for as he puts it "quick in, quick out" sessions. Ideally teachers would also model and help students create their own PLNs in their individual areas of interest.

Better than this, Clay has begun to actively implement his plan. Utilizing his twitterverse (people following him on Twitter), he has had a few international discussions via Skype (see here and here) with fellow educators on his ideas. He has also begun to work with his students to utilize Twitter and Skype to construct their own PLNs. I applaud him for blazing the trail. My hope is his work will be the first step in convincing school administrators and tech directors to allow student access to networking tools. Currently, students at my school do not have this access.

The idea of students building and utilizing a personal learning network greatly appeals to me. As a teacher, one of my goals is to help students become citizens that contribute positively to their communities. Setting up a PLN allows students to take their learning beyond school walls. It can help them to individualize and specialize their learning in a meaningful way that would be nearly impossible in a traditional classroom. As someone who is more interested in helping students become resilient life-long learners as opposed to regurgitators of irrelevant knowledge, I can't help but get excited about these new possibilities. Perhaps Ewan McIntosh said it best (via Intrepid Teacher, via The Economist):

"It’s more about helping learners become more world-aware, more communicative, learning from each other, understanding first hand what makes the world go around."

More and more questions seem to arise the more I think about this:

  • What would this learning format look like in a school?
  • Can this type of learning be measurable?
    • Should it be even be measured?
  • Will students "buy-in" to the idea?
  • How can I convince the district to unblock Twitter for a basically untested use of technology?
  • Is promoting the use of Twitter and Skype in the classroom essentially marketing these products to students? Is that ethical?

I am excited about the prospects. I am jealous of those in situations with access to these tools. I feel experimentation with these networking tools in the classroom is necessary, even if the outcomes aren't as expected.

A few other bloggers have added their thoughts on the same thread: