Hacking Assessment to Go Gradeless with Starr Stackstein
Growing Readers Remotely: Three Types of Questions for Personalizing Reading Assessment
Assessing Deeper Learning in Remote Education through Performance Tasks and Project-Based Learning
Doing What We Want Our Students to Do: Being Vulnerable and Willing to Fail to Improve the Quality of Learning
Hacking Assessment to Go Gradeless with Starr Stackstein
I’ve been an admirer of Starr Sackstein and her work for a long time. She’s been a beacon for years on moving away from grading and moving toward a focus on self-directed learning. She has made real movements in pedagogy and ownership of learning through her passion, practical advice, and the way she has grown a supportive educator community. I asked her to sit down for an interview with me in light of the recent publication…
Growing Readers Remotely: Three Types of Questions for Personalizing Reading Assessment
Personalizing the learning for students doesn’t mean an instructional free-for-all. On the contrary, personalized learning demands structure such as frameworks to ensure effective instruction while students have access to authentic, meaningful experiences. Conferring/conferencing can provide that structure when teaching and assessing. In her book So What Do They Really Know? Assessment That Informs Teaching and Learning, English teacher Cris Tovani defines conferring as "talking to my students one-on-one" in order to "figure out what they…
Assessing Deeper Learning in Remote Education through Performance Tasks and Project-Based Learning
In an unprecedented move, the president announced on March 20 that standardized testing requirements for states will not be enforced for the current academic year. This means teachers won’t have to spend instructional time on standardized test preparation. At countless schools, test prep involves drill-and-kill exercises and students taking numerous district tests that purportedly assess their likelihood of passing the state-mandated test. The suspension of standardized tests also means that many students will not experience…
Doing What We Want Our Students to Do: Being Vulnerable and Willing to Fail to Improve the Quality of Learning
English teacher Denise Earles from Madison Public Schools, CT is part of an innovation project to experiment with standards based grading in a traditional school system. Kevin Siedlecki is in his 8th year as an English teacher at Daniel Hand High School. He also coaches freshman boys football and varsity girls lacrosse. School is stressful, and once students have figured out the game of school, they can be understandably resistant to change. They have been…
Classrooms Full of Learners: The Culture Standards-Based Grading Has Cultivated
The first time I heard about Standards-Based Grading was when Rick Wormeli came to speak at our school at the start of the 2016-2017 school year. He convinced me that I had to change the way I was grading. I had recently done a lot of reading about motivation, specifically work by Daniel Pink (2010) and Daniel Siegel (2013), which led me to the conclusion that grades are counterproductive to real learning. Grades are the…
Getting Started in Standards-Based Grading: Creating Course Standards
English teacher Denise Earles from Madison Public Schools, CT is part of an innovation project to experiment with standards based grading in a traditional school system. Kevin Siedlecki is in his 8th year as an English teacher at Daniel Hand High School. He also coaches freshman boys football and varsity girls lacrosse. For the student, being graded on every little thing is overwhelming. Students respond either by becoming grade-grubbing balls of stress, constantly concerned…
My Journey to Standards Based Grading
When I began teaching 12 years ago, after two other careers, I did not have the typical mindset of a "new" teacher. First, because I had spent three years in a middle school special education classroom, and second, because I was the parent to five children, so for me high school teenagers did not evoke fear. I was as green as any other newbie as far as teaching strategies and managing curriculum though. I tried…
How Standards-Based Grading Helps Me Do My Best Work
Junior honors students have recently been provided with the opportunity to experience the standards-based grading system at Daniel Hand High School. Standards-based grading eliminates the fear of failure associated with grades. If a student unsuccessfully takes a risk, he or she is not penalized by a grade. The absence of apprehension stimulates a constructive learning environment. Four standards were emphasized during the first trimester: discourse sentence-level writing critical thinking continuous learning Due to the high…
Standards-Based Grading: It’s The Right Thing To Do
This post first appeared on PowerSchool and is reprinted with permission. Ken O’Connor, The Grade Doctor, expands on the question: What is standards-based grading? Let’s go back to basics and revisit what standards-based grading (SBG) is and how it delivers on the core elements needed for high-quality grades. First, I need to define standards-based grading. For me, SBG is grading that accurately portrays student proficiency/mastery. In SBG grades are based on: Standards, not assessment methods;…
Getting Rid of Grade Levels: A Personalized Learning Recipe for Public Schools
By Travis Lape and first published on EdSurge. Travis Lape (@travislape) is a Technology Integrationist at Harrisburg South Middle School in South Dakota, and worked with Harrisburg Freedom Elementary on this project. Public schools play a huge role in developing learners to be successful when they leave school. So why are charters and private schools considered the best places for "personalized learning?" The problem with the current public education model is that it was created…