Me: "Hey administrator husband! What if I tried <insert crazy teaching idea here> in my classroom? Wouldn't that be AWESOME?!? The kids would do a totally different KIND of learning--it would be, like, learning from ANOTHER DIMENSION. It would be FANTASTIC!"
Administrator husband: "Well, have you thought about <list of many obstacles, considerations, and realities that I hadn't thought about that he dumps on me like a bucket of cold water>?"
Me: "No." *sigh*
As upset as I may be that he always bursts my bubble, he rightly tempers my crazy flights of educational fancy, and really makes me think through my ideas first before I burst into my classroom in an educational frenzy and lay something new on my students. Which is why I am glad he and I sat down and hashed out my plans to fine-tune by standards-based grading system recently.
My current plan has a rating system that scores students on how well they understand a concept or skill from a 0 to a 5. While this system worked much better than my previous 0-4 system from the year before (mainly because it was translated into points in the online gradebook, which is something that caused less confusion than last year's "no points" system), I still felt as if it was missing something; that oh-so-special "something" that would make the scoring system powerful, like a something that would make children have learning epiphanies so bright I would have to buy safety glasses that doubled as sunglasses for everyone to wear during class.
When I shared this with my husband, he pointed out that a) I am nuts, and b) I should try and explain what I meant by a powerful "something."
The thing is, I don't really know if I can explain it; it's just something you feel when you know something's not quite right. But I do think it has something to do with the fact that my scale is just a touch too wide. While students generally liked being able to rate themselves from 0-5, they often had trouble distinguishing between a level 1, 2, and 3 understanding. While I loved to hear their metacognitive conversations about the finer distinctions between those levels, I had to admit that, at times, even I had a hard time deciding to score students at a 1 or a 2. When on my scale a 4 meant you knew and owned the knowledge, why did I have so many shades of "you don't know it, and here's how much you don't know it?"
It led me to question the need for so many ratings. In fact, my thoughts kept coming back to one nagging sentence: Either you know & own the concepts/skills/knowledge, or you don't.
At this point my husband agreed with me. I am stating this for documentation purposes in case he ever tries to deny the aforementioned agreement happened.
Anyway, this led me to the crazy idea I wanted to run by him--that I should only having three levels of understanding on the ol' rating scale:
5 = Know it, Own it, & Use it
4 = Know it & Own it
NY = Not Yet
I loved this idea; my students this year really got the difference between being able to state the concept in their own way (owning it) and using it (applying it to a new situation and creating new ideas from synthesizing old ones), so I left those two levels in. For everyone not at those two levels, they would get a "Not Yet" score, meaning they had more work to do towards knowing and owning the concept/skill. I was planning on having student-student and teacher-student discussions about anything at a Not Yet so some metacognition would take place and students could figure out for themselves what they needed to do to fix their knowledge.
How did the admin husband like it? Well, he was ready with his bucket of cold water. He asked me if I had thought about how that would translate to the online gradebook. I hadn't, obviously, but it's something I need to figure out. The issue is that "Not Yet" score; I can input that into the gradebook as something called a "Status Grade," which means it isn't factored into the total score. However, what does that translate into if a student still never masters that concept or skill? That's the sticking point in using this system now; it's something I shall have to ponder over the summer to see if I can come up with a rounded-enough square peg to fit into the round (black) hole of traditional grading.
But that led me to another idea that I laid on my admin husband--the concept of having a true standards-based system. What I have now is known as a standards-referenced system; I would really like to move towards having a true standards-based system. Below is a good summary of that, developed by Robert Marzano:
You see, in my dream-education-land-world, students would have to revisit any skill or concept they had not yet mastered, and would be required to master it in the time they needed. However, in the "we only have 9 months to cover (*cringe*) all this stuff; we just don't have enough time to go in depth" world within which we actually live, the time required for students to revisit their learning long enough to attain mastery would require much more time than the 45 or 50 or 90 minutes chunks of neatly subject-categorized learning time we give students now. As it is now, we allow students to move through school without learning what we said they should because of time restraints--how is that doing right by our students? Why are we letting some antiquated 9-month deadline straight-jacket us into letting some students not learn? Why can't students have the time they need to really learn?
In response to those questions, my infinitely calm and patient husband quietly nodded, and then said this: "What do you do with the students who still haven't mastered concepts by the end of the school year?"
Yeah. I don't quite have an answer for that (that I like) just yet. I mean, I could throw letter grades at them and move them along, but I'm not sure if that's what should be done. We've been doing that for years now, and look where it's gotten us.
Even though I can't change the 9-month time-frame, I can change the amount of stuff that students must master during that 9 months. That would give them more time for some deep learning of some serious (and fewer) "need to knows." I've already got some ideas about how to do this, and it will probably mean a redesign from the ground up for some of my courses. But most of them are long overdue for a makeover, needing the emphasis is taken off the science stuff and refocused on to what students do with the science stuff.
At this point my husband let me babble further, mainly about how I would love to have a classroom with no points, no letter grades...and just have a classroom focused on students learning how to learn. To these statements he imparted this little pearl of wisdom : "Until you change the system, the only thing you can do is work within in it."
I don't agree. I think, sometimes, you can change the system by working to change it from within.