MeTA musings

I enjoy waking up every day and skimming through my RSS feed to read what other educators are thinking out loud via their blogs.  Here are a few of the recent highlights.


"Should the Textbook Determine the Essential Skills We Teach?" By Rick DuFour

In short, the people who contend your textbooks should determine the curriculum are wrong. Those who are arguing about what books to read are wrong. Shift your focus to the knowledge and skills your students must acquire and determine how you will assess whether or not they are acquiring the skills. Then, most importantly, use the results to get better at teaching the skills and intervening for students who struggle.

Bottom line: When teams of teachers begin to answer the question, "What do we want our students to learn?" the answer should not solely come from the materials currently being used.  As a former high school math teacher, I taught for the first few years straight through the textbook.  While this approach isn't necessarily a poor one, believing that the "what" of teaching begins and ends with the textbook doesn't make sense.


"Is REAL Formative Assessment Even Possible?" by Bill Ferriter

Second, I’m completely exhausted and doubtful that I can keep up this work all year long. I haven’t seen my daughter or my wife much this month simply because responsible formative assessment is an incredibly time-consuming process.
Heck, just last night I spent 3 hours grading one set of graphs because I wanted to get them back to my students in a timely way—but that required working from 5:30-8:30 and missing dinner with my family and bedtime with my little girl.
The past two weekends in a row were similar stories as I spent 5-6 hours both weekends putting exemplars together, writing remediation activities and designing new lessons to review challenging content.

Bottom line:  Providing students timely feedback during the learning experience that informs new learning for students and new instruction for teachers is a time and resource consuming process.  Bill writes about a possible solution which involves more teacher-created common assessments.  One of my biggest regrets from leaving the classroom after six years is not experiencing the power of common assessments first hand.  As a district guy now, I can't wait to see us move forward this year and in the years to come.


"Give Us The Tools We Need" by Paul Cancellieri

The primary purpose of grades is to communicate information about content mastery to parents and students.

With this purpose in mind, it becomes clear that there is a clear distinction between the skills and knowledge dictated by our curriculum, and the habits and behaviors that lead to success in both life and school. Both are critically important. Over the past few decades, however, we have combined these two pieces of information into one grade that is displayed on report cards. Conflating content mastery with work habits causes a lot of confusion....

Kelly has a nice write-up about how her physics students are starting to see the benefits of standards-based grading through utilizing test corrections.  She really hits the nail on the head, re: preparing students for the "real world."

What about college? aka “They won’t be graded this way in college.”
I hear that objection occasionally, and it even came up again at our science department meeting this week. Honestly, it is a bit of a nonsense statement/question.
Moving beyond the idea that it does not make sense to do each year what people will eventually do one day in the future (should 8th grade look like college? How about 4rd grade? 1st?) and that the more important questions are about how a choice in teaching will benefit them this year, we can ask instead, “What are students taking with them from having this experience?”
So, in addition to learning physics better, increasing their confidence as a student, seeing themselves improve with a challenging skill over time, they are also rather specifically learning how to milk the benefits from making mistakes, what to do when they aren’t immediately successful, and how the best students have been succeeding in school all this time.

In workshops I've done in the past, I use an example that's a bit more over the top when someone asks about the implications of standards-based grading on higher education.  It goes something like this:

I attended a small private college here in Iowa during my undergraduate years.  The largest class I had was Intro. to Psychology.  We had 80 students in a lecture hall.  Take away that single lecture hall experience and all of my classes were a lot like high school (and graduate school!) with 35 students or less.  Class was fairly interactive and we all knew each other my first name.  I hear that down in Iowa City at the University of Iowa, lecture halls are the norm, at least in the introductory courses.  It's not uncommon for freshmen to sit in a room of 200-300 students and take notes.  (I usually then pause and ask someone in the room to confirm this to be true...which so far, has always happened)  Would we ever consider doing this in K-12?  "Okay, kindergartners...let's put all 100 of you in a room for 60 minutes and see if you can learn a few sight words" or "Hey 7th graders, let's see if we can all learn about the states in capitals in the gym where all of us can fit!  You know, this is what it's going to be like in college."  No way.  We know that some educational practices are better than others.  All of us try to do what's best for our students and that often involves providing them with an experience that we know will be contrary to what they might experience in higher education.  If we can all agree that standards-based grading is better for our students, let's not worry about what some universities are doing in lecture halls or with grading practices. 

Confession - I like Kelly's rationale better than my own.  Get over there and give her the pat on the back she deserves for taking on this difficult issue.  You'll read about how her new grading practices are catching on with her students, too.  You won't be disappointed.

August 2013 Update:  A complete list of scholarly articles related to standards-based grading is available here.
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Once a month or so, I get an email or a tweet from an educator asking for help locating standards-based grading conversation starters and resources.  The question usually sounds something like,

I want to help my principal/team/colleague learn more about standards-based grading.  Where should I start?

There are scores of resources available in the uncensored world known as Twitter and edublogging.  For example, a de-centralized SBG gala ran its course not too long ago.

• SBG Gala #1
• SBG Gala #2
• SBG Gala #3
• SBG Gala #4
• SBG Gala #5
• SBG Gala #6

Sometimes it's nice to have peer-reviewed literature available to provide more scholarly fuel to the standards-based grading conversation.  Here are a few of my favorite journal articles in no particular order.

• Scriffiny, Patricia L. "Seven Reasons for Standards-Based Grading." Educational Leadership 66.2 Oct. (2008): 70-74. 
• Colby, Susan A. "Grading in a Standards-Based System." Educational Leadership 56.6 Mar. (1999): 50-55.
• Guskey, Thomas R., and Lee Ann Jung. "Grading and Reporting in a Standards-Based Environment: Implications for Students With Special Needs." Theory Into Practice 48 Jan. (2009): 53-62. 
• Jung, Lee Ann, and Thomas Guskey. "Standards-Based Grading and Reporting: A Model for Special Education." Teaching Exceptional Children 40.2 Nov. (2007): 48-53. 
• Melograno, Vincent J. "Grading and Report Cards for Standards-Based Physical Education." The Journal of Physical Education, Recreation & Dance 78.6 Aug. (2007): 45-53. 
• Jung, Lee Ann, and Thomas R. Guskey. "Grading Exceptional Learners." Educational Leadership 67.5 Feb. (2010): 31-35.
• Guskey, Thomas R. "Helping Standards Make the Grade." Educational Leadership 59.1 Sept. (2001): 20-27.
• Scott, Shelia. "What's in a Grade?" General Music Today 14.3 Winter (2005): 17-24.
• Clymer, Jacqueline B., and Dylan Wiliam. "Improving the Way We Grade Science." Educational Leadership 64.4 Dec. (2006): 36-42.

Edit: 9/4/2011 - Thanks, Jason for the SBG Gala 5 and 6 corrections. 

In my district of ~1300 students, the administrative team consists of three building principals, the superintendent and myself. I oversee curriculum, staff development, special education, technology, new teacher mentoring, many state/federal reports, and countless other smaller projects. I'm in my second year in this role after teaching six years of math in the high school setting. Today, we finished our second day of school and I'm now reflecting on the diversity of activities and responsibilities that filled up these two ten hour days. The following brief narrative is more for my own personal reflection, but it also may answer a question that I used to ponder every once in a while,

"What does a district administrator do on the first day(s) of school?"

-Visited all three buildings to see the nervousness and excitement of the new and veteran teachers.
-Video taped an assembly featuring a cover band of high school teachers literally get kids on their feet to show their excitement to be back at school. (Did I mention the high school principal sang a solo?)
-Assisted one middle school student and one high school student find their way to their new classes.
-Sought out teachers during their prep times to ask them what they were most excited about for the upcoming year.
-Responded to several emails from staff members looking for quick responses to IT requests (Goal: alleviate the work load of our short-handed IT staff!)
-Discussed next steps for our district's staff development with teachers who played a role in designing our before school in-service day.
-Started recruiting new community members for our district's school improvement advisory committee.
-Brainstormed ways to continue supporting our second year teachers.
-Met with an extended learning program teacher to brainstorm new and improved ways to serve our brightest students.
-Sent an all-staff email communicating upcoming changes to our assessment schedule for the year.
-Assisted Kindergarten students in opening their milk cartons during their first snack time.
-Gave high fives to first grade students in the hallway.
-Consulted with a teacher and our IT specialist on modifications to our students use of Google Apps for Education
-Replied to emails from staff members inquiring about a setting that needed to be changed in our student information system.
-Encouraged elementary teachers who have put in a tremendous amount of extra time getting their classroom ready for the first day in the midst of an ongoing renovation project.

In total, my email program says I sent 87 email messages over the past two days. Not sure if that's a record, but WOW.

It's going to be another great year!

With so much talk about the upcoming education summit here in Iowa, the number of Iowa educators spending time on Twitter this summer seems to be growing exponentially.  I'm a big fan of connecting with educators from around the globe via social media tools, but there's something special about keeping up with what's going on at the state level.  How might a person interested in connecting with other Iowa educators keep up or get started?  Here are a few tips that have worked for me.

Follow one of the many Iowa education hashtags.

• #iowacore is used by scores of teachers, administrators and education agency consultants to talk about ideas, articles and outcomes related to this statewide initiative involving state standards, pedagogy, leadership and community connections.
• #iowa1to1 is popular with nearly 10% of the school districts in the state implementing a 1:1 student computer initiative.
• #IaCopi is relatively new and is a way for educators to track work in the Iowa Communities of Practice and Innovation program that started this summer. 
• #iowatl is a hashtag used by forward thinking teacher-librarians.  
• #iaedsummit will heat up in Iowa later in July once the summit kicks off in Des Moines.
• #iaedfuture tracks ideas related to the governor's world class schools proposed legislation