MeTA musings

EDIT: This is a follow-up to a previous post.  

It's a pretty exciting time to work in my current school district.  About twenty years ago, the elementary school implemented a standards-based report card.  Over the past several years, we've seen a grassroots movement in the area of assessment and grading reform in our secondary buildings.  Dozens of teachers and building leadership teams have visited and/or inquired about what's going on in our high school and middle school, which is one of the reasons we'll soon be co-hosting a standards-based grading conference in eastern Iowa (before you ask, we've reached our registration capacity and the waiting list has been closed as well).

The purpose of this post is to create a "one-stop shop" illustrating various artifacts that document our district's standards-based grading journey and next steps.

What is standards-based grading (SBG)?

• The primary purpose of grading is to communicate achievement status to students, parents and others.
• Secondary purposes of grading include providing feedback to students for self-assessment and growth and encouraging student progress and self-monitoring of learning.

4 - Demonstrates thorough level of understanding of course or grade-level standard.
3.5 - Demonstrates understanding of course or grade-level standard.
3 - Demonstrates a developing understanding of course or grade-level standard.
2 - Demonstrates partial understanding of course or grade-level standard.
1 - Demonstrates minimal understanding of course or grade-level standard. 

This is a 3 post collaborative effort between Russ (classroom teacher), Eric (building principal) and myself (central office admin).  Full disclosure: Eric is also my brother and Russ is also my brother-in-law.

We are planning to lead a session at EdCamp Eastern Iowa in a few weeks.  The three of us spend countless hours on Twitter, on the phone and at family get-togethers talking about our differing perspectives on education based partly on our current roles as teacher, building administrator and district administrator.  We don't claim to have all of the answers, but I think we're pretty confident we have lots of questions about what school leadership can and should look like from the perspectives of our roles.  A few of my questions follow.

1. What is leadership?  
• a person with influence?  
• a person with a specific title? 
• a noun?  a verb?
2. What does a leadership structure really look like that values teachers as leaders?
3. Beyond 140 characters, what does "teacher leadership" look like in practice at the building level?  district level?
4. How might a building administrator's actions "in the name of giving teachers leadership experience" actually abdicate his/her responsibility as a leader?
5. What are examples of district and building administrators giving teachers a false sense of influence and voice?
6. As a teacher, in what ways can your principal realistically utilize you as a leader in the building that still allow you to focus on your day-to-day role with students?
7. As a building principal or teacher, what are you looking for in a central office administrator?

The school I work for has been on a standards-based grading journey for the past few years.  Interest from area schools in visiting our teachers' classroom seems to increase each month.  In addition, several neighboring schools have been making some significant progress in their grading reform practices.  We're teaming up to host a free conference (lunch included!) on April 24, 2013.  The target audience is secondary educators who are currently implementing standards-based grading that would like to learn from fellow practitioners who have worked through early implementation dips.

• What does standards-based grading look like in social studies?
• What does standards-based grading look like in a foreign language classroom?
• How do I convert standards to a letter grade?
• How does our school/district make this change systematically?
• How does SBG impact admission into higher education?
• I am a student experiencing SBG for the first time.  What does it look like?  [panel]
• How is standards-based grading a gateway to competency-based education?

I was at our high school this afternoon doing some administrative walk throughs when my day changed for the better.

Algebra teacher [half joking]: "Do you want to teach my next class?"
Me: "What is the lesson?"
Algebra teacher: "Factoring trinomials.  It's a challenging class of students."
Me: "I'm up for it."

• Some of these students had siblings who were my former students.
• The Algebra class I taught was comprised primarily of 9th and 10th grade students who are fulfilling a math graduation requirement.
• I taught factoring once in my student teaching experience, but never in my own classroom.

Ben asks,

Why did I spend four years in high school, and then several more in college learning math that I’ve long since forgotten? Think back on your high school and college courses. If you were to take the final exam today, how would you do? What does that tell us? What should it tell us?

Great questions, Ben. As a former high school math teacher, I’ve thought along the same lines for hours on end. It seems that folks in math education circles can’t all agree on the purpose of K-12 math. Perhaps this is the same in other content areas as well? 

Some math folks assume K-12 should prepare students for what I’ll call the “math careers” that require a working knowledge of advanced math in which symbolic manipulation (a la “Algebra”) is important. Engineers, physicists, mathematicians, and…well, the list is fairly short. We’ll call this the “math careers” rationale. 

Then there are those that trump the “higher education" card. These are the folks that acknowledge slope-intercept form and polynomial division aren’t really valuable tasks, but they’re needed to pass the typical credit bearing college algebra course. That credit bearing course is important for anyone who is pursuing a bachelors’ degree. Ask your local community college instructor and he/she can likely tell you about the remedial math course market. I often told my unmotivated students it was in their best interest to learn math in high school on the public’s dime than it would be to pay for the exact same classes for no credit at college, just so they could eventually take a credit-bearing math course that met graduation requirements. We’ll call this rationale ”delayed meaning.” 

The third camp of folks I encountered were those who thought symbolic manipulation was not needed at all for the masses. “If they want to become a mathematician, they can learn that stuff after high school.” Instead, the purpose of K-12 math should be overly practical. Financial literacy, career and technical measurements and math formulas form the foundation of this mindset. These people think every student should learn about loans, mortgages, how to balance a check book, converting various measurements needed in technical jobs, etc. We’ll call this the “application rationale.” 

A few other folks I knew claimed that math taught students how to think. Completing the square or using Pythagorean’s Theorem to “solve for x” were two ways students could stretch their brains. If a student can stretch his/her brain in math class, it could surely be used in other contexts, too. I call this the “math as a way of thinking” rationale. 

I do not have any solid sources to back up the categories I just described, but instead they come from my own experiences and discourse with other secondary math educators. From my perspective, the current educational system attempts to balance (perhaps not equally) all of these rationales. The state I live in requires financial literacy in its content standards as well as a fairly deep coverage of symbolic manipulation. The result appears to be your question/experience: “Why did I spend four years in high school, and then several more in college learning math that I’ve long since forgotten?” What should this tell us? I think it tells us that we are currently unable to agree on the purpose of math education. Any of this make sense?