Summary and thoughts

I thought it might be helpful for me to quickly summarize what I am doing in my classroom, both for the reader’s benefit as well as for my own.

A typical day in my classroom begins with the students coming in to check their folders for graded papers to update their checklists.  Objectives and standards to be covered are listed on the board along with a bellringer assignment, activities for the day and homework.  Students immediately begin work on the bellringer, which usually serves as a review of the material studied the previous class period.  From this point, my classroom is like any other classroom.  Some days are purely practice of the concepts already learned, some are lab application activities, some are cooperative learning activities and some include new material to be mastered.  I try to vary activities as much as possible so students aren’t always sitting in their desks doing seatwork.  I also am very fond of giving “pop quizzes” that require students to complete requested tasks without the help of partners or their notes.  The only real difference in my classroom is the grading and reporting system.  Students have all their grades recorded in their folders and thus should always know where they stand in the course.  Homework proves progress but does not count towards the term grade.  Only tests and assessments count towards the semester grade.  Homework is inherently unreliable as an assessment piece because the work occurs outside of my supervision.  I do not know what distractions exist, how much help the student received or if the student simply copied the answers from another student.  This leads me to my love of pop quizzes.  The students are trained in an almost Pavlovian response to fear quizzes and tests.  I hope that by repeatedly forcing students to perform without the safety blanket of their notes, it will reduce their conditioning to fear tests.  The “pop quizzes”, while still formative in nature”, provide me with valuable information about the true ability of students.  Almost always, the quiz scores are lower than the performance seen on the homework assignments.  However, the difference is rarely drastic. 

My reporting system has taken some tweaking as the semester has progressed.  I created a list of standards, broken into smaller substandards, for the entire course.  In general, we progress from one standard to another.  There are a few standards where we will only cover a piece of a standard before moving on, returning at a later date to cover further concepts.  Originally, I was writing down assignments as I assigned them but I discovered that it made it very difficult to see any pattern in a student’s ability on a particular substandard.  Thus I reorganized my grade book by substandards.  Each overarching standard has its own two page spread with separated sections for each substandard and its assessment grade.  I am concerned that I will have more grades than I do space.  I am using a binder grade book that allows me to add and take out pages as I need and I highly recommend it to anyone who attempts any similar system.    Term grades have their own page where I copy over the summative grades to a singular page that contains only summative grades.  Copying them over to their own page facilitates the ease of calculating term grades.  Term grades to change over time as students complete retakes.  Since I have an entire page for them, I can recalculate the term grade for each term with all scores, creating a running tally of scores for the semester.  I have decided to make midterms and final exams fixed scores that cannot be corrected.  There has to be a “do or die” point somewhere in the process.  Exams will also be cumulative.

Concerns and possible changes

I think it may be beneficial to let homework by purely practice.  It would not be recorded at all.  Regular quizzes would be given to ascertain a student’s current level of progress.  I feel that I am recording too much data.  I have huge strings of numbers for each student and seem to be spending a ridiculous amount of time grading all of the practice that I assign.  It feels like a Catch 22 level scenario because the more data I have on a student, the better I know where their level of learning is currently.  However, again, the massive amounts of grading are becoming a bit overwhelming.  It does feel like more than last year but I think it is a testament to the ease of using the mastery levels that I am able to keep up with this high level of paper the comes through my hands. 

I have not decided yet if I will make all tests cumulative or not.  By making all tests cumulative, students are forced to retain knowledge for longer but I fear the tests will become longer and longer, not allowing enough space for assessments of the current standard.  It also reduces the amount of time that must be spent on reviewing en masse before exams because students have been focusing on the current standard.  Cumulative assessments would also mean more scores for me to keep track of in the paper grade book.  Again, I feel like I have an extraordinary amount of data on each student.  Cumulative assessments would mean that standard 1 is assessed 11 times, standard 2 is assessed 10 times and so on.  It might be a little much to keep track of in the paper grade book.   

Overall thoughts

I am still extraordinarily pleased with the system.  I am anxious to reach a level of comfort in physics that will allow me to adopt a similar method of assessment and reporting.  Mastery levels are faster than traditional point scores since you do have to tally points to determine a score but simply look at the overall picture to determine the grade.  It is also so much clearer than percents.  The score means something.  It is not a measure of a student’s level of responsibility in being able to turn in homework, nor is it a measure of their memory since both application and DOK 1/2 level questions are asked.  Instead, the score is a direct representation of the knowledge of each student.