How do you start the conversation about reassessment?

Reassessment is an interesting topic with educators.  On one hand, you have educators that say there is nothing wrong with reassessment.  On the other, you have educators that say reassessment is not fair and should not be allowed.  You have probably heard both sides of this argument at your school at some point.  And you have probably seen or been in a debate that gets a little heated about the topic.  Why?  I have several opinions about this pondering but they will have to wait for another day.  This post is about my process of reassessment and how I get the conversation started with my students...yes, if you didn't realize it by now I am on Team Reassessment.

I was in a Twitter chat last night (#COLchat) with some great educators discussing grades, grading practices, reporting, etc. and guess what topic came up.  You guessed it, reassessment.  When I hinted at the process I use with my high school mathematics students, I was asked if I would write a blog post about my process to share with other educators.  It is not that my process is special or secret or even a process that I thought of completely on my own.  My process is something that I have adapted from things I have heard at conferences, from my colleagues, and from my personal experiences.  Exactly what all educators do every day.  A few years ago, while attending the Pearson Summer Assessment Training Institute I attended a session by Myron Dueck discussing his new book Grading Smarter Not Harder.  In his session, Myron talked about many things that resonated with me and one of them was an assessment tracking sheet for students to track their progress throughout the year on assessments.  I began thinking about this and wondering how I could make that work in my classroom.  Challenge accepted!

Step #1 - Set up your assessment
I had already been writing my Learning Targets that I was assessing on the cover sheet of my assessment as well as identifying which LT each problem was assessing throughout my assessment. At the end of each problem, my students would see something like this:  [LT 5, 2 marks].  This tells my students that I am assessing Learning Target 5 and that there is a method mark and an accuracy mark to be earned within the problem.  No surprises for my students, they know exactly what I am looking for on every assessment item they see.  (Side note, the marks are for my students more so than for me.  My grades are based off how well my students can show they know each LT, not how many points/marks they accumulate.)

Here is an example of a cover sheet for my assessments.

Step #2 - Fill out the Self-Assessment & Reflection Form = The Conversation BEGINS!
All of us have given an assessment, marked it, written feedback all throughout the assessment, handed it back to the students and all they look at was the grade.  They never even read the first word of the feedback you wrote.  My solution to this speed bump, when I hand back my assessments, there is not a grade on it anywhere.  Only my feedback.  The conversation has started!  Now my students read what I have written.  Using this approach, after I distribute my marked assessments to my students I post a Self-Assessment & Reflection form to my students via Google Forms.  The main points of this reflection are to have my students "vocalize" where they are in their understanding of each of the assessed learning targets.  I do not give them a middle of the road option.  They have to choose "I completely get this LT", "I kind of get this LT", "This LT gives me troubles." or "I have no clue how to do this LT."  The students also have to tell me what their Self-Assessed grade is and what their Desired Grade is for the assessment.  In addition to this and a few questions about what they did outside of class to prepare for the assessment, I have my students reflect on their performance on the assessment.  In this reflection, my students that wish to reassess determine which LTs they want to reassess as well as devise a plan for their reassessment that I hold them to following.  The conversation continues.  I give my students around 15 minutes of class time to fill out the form.

Below is a screenshot of a section of my Google Form.

Step 3 - Merge the files using Autocrat

Once all of my students have filled out the form, I go into the sheet and insert a column for the grade I feel fits what my student has shown in the assessment.  Now it is time to merge the information from Sheets into a Google Doc.  I like Sheets, but the information gathered is cumbersome to share with students and keep the privacy of information at the same time.  This is where autocrat comes in to play.  Autocrat is a document merging extension for Sheets.  In short, it allows me to take the information provided on the Google Sheets side of the Google Form and send it to an individual Google Doc that is easily shareable with anyone I choose.  In this case, my students.  This has become a huge timesaver for me.  I am able to send my students a Google Doc with their responses to my Form in a few clicks.  Continuing the conversation and making it easier for my students to recall their performance on the assessment.  What is better, I can share their responses not only with them but with their parents if necessary.  All without me doing much more than a few clicks on the keyboard.  I will admit, setting up autocrat the first time took a little time, but now I use it all the time whenever I can.  (I will talk more about that in a different post.)  In the setup of my merge, I have autocrat automatically send each of my students an email with a Google Doc of their responses.  The only addition that my students now see is the grade I have given.  Surprisingly, my grade does not usually vary too much from their self-assessed grade.  When it does, this just deepens the conversation between me and my students.

Step 4 - What now?

Now, I use these documents to continue the conversation with my students.  For those students that wish to reassess, the Form and Doc are just the beginning.  Usually, my conversations begin with a student replying to the automatically generated response from Autocrat.  They tell me which LTs they want to reassess and they provide some dates/times they are available for reassessment.  My response usually begins by referring to their plan, or sometimes the lack of a plan, and additional feedback or comments about the assessment and/or their recent performance in class.  The conversations have already become much deeper and more meaningful than the simple "I want to reassess these LTs, when is the reassessment?"   

I will admit, this seems like it takes a long time to happen.  The front-loading of this is where the time is taken.  Setting up a template for the Google Form takes about 10 minutes, longer if you are not familiar with Forms.  For each additional form, I use the same template and only change the LTs, taking less than the original time to set up the first template.  It also takes about 10 minutes to set up a Google Doc template.  It only takes this long if you like jazz it up a bit, give the form some color, add the school header at the top, give it a personal touch, etc.  Here is an example of what my Google Doc template looks like.

So far, on my end, it takes about 20 minutes of initial set up, about 5 minutes now that my templates are done.  Most of the time building the conversation is done in my comments on the assessment and by my students, which is who the learning is focused around anyway.  My time can now be devoted to the needs of my students, not meaningless conversations about getting work done or coming to a reassessment.  The conversation is now a two-way street with my students in control and not me dictating to them what they need to do and when they need to do it.  The conversations that I have with my students are now meaningful and specific to each of my students.  Each of my students knows exactly where they are in their understanding of the LTs covered in class so there are no surprises on report cards or during parent conferences.  Speaking of conferences, it is very powerful to show a parent these self-assessment & reflection forms that are written by their child in their child's own words.  Because of this process, even these conversations have changed tremendously. 

Here is what the merged document looks like that gets sent to my students.

What's in a grade?

This question comes up countless times in a school year.  It comes up in faculty meetings, in classrooms, at PTA meetings, on the school bus, in the faculty room, at parent conferences, and so on.  Almost every conversation that concerns school, concerns grades or grading.  Why?  What is in a grade that makes it so important?

Let's start with the latter, grading.  What is grading?  It is the practice of placing a value on the ability of a student to relay to their teacher how much they know at a given point in time.  In short, grading is the practice of assigning a grade.  So, what is a grade?  In it's most basic sense, a grade is a symbol that a teacher uses to represent a students' understanding of what has been taught.  A grade is a teacher's way of showing the student how much the student has shown what they know to the teacher.

So why do students, parents, and some educators put such a high value on a grade?  Great question.  In my opinion, it comes down to competition.  Grades are a way for students to rank themselves against each other and for parents to determine how their child(ren) rank against other children.  Having two boys myself, I can see where parents could try to measure their children against others...not that I would ever do such a thing.  It's how we were raised and what we know of our own experiences in school.  However, teachers measuring students against other students is just not right.  Herein lies the problem.

Education is not a race or a competition, yet we treat it like one.  Many schools still select a valedictorian based on GPA, rigor of courses taken and/or class rank placing an even higher emphasis on grades and breeding deep competition among students (and parents for that matter) to "out-do" each other.  Within schools, students are encouraged, pressured in many cases, to take AP or Higher Level IBDP courses even if they are not ready or are not interested in the subject being offered simply "because it looks good" on their transcript.  WHAT??!!  We constantly tell students learning is what is important, but then in the next breath, we compare student work to student work to determine where the benchmark lies.  In his post Beware Normative Tendencies In The Classroom, Tom Schimmer talked about how Olympic judges leave room for higher scores when judging the first competitions because they want to see how the latter athletes perform.  As crazy as this sounds, there are teachers that do this with student work.  Again, deepening the competitive idea associated with grades, and flawing the grading practice.  Instead of using this inaccurate way to measure student learning, we should measure student work against learning targets and standards.  When the symbol on the report card is more representative of how many boxes a student has checked off or how many hoops the student has jumped through during that marking period, the symbol is meaningless.  When a student knows where they are in their learning of the presented Learning Targets and/or Standards, the learning is the focus and the final symbol is not only meaningful but more often than not more accurate as well.

New year, similar challenges.

We are finishing our first month here and school is in full swing.  Committees are starting, weekly meetings have initiated, homework is being dished out like candy and the assessments are already being printed and ready for distribution in many classes.

Just the other day I heard a group of five or six of my students talking after class about an assignment that was given to them by a colleague of mine.  Apparently, it was not to their liking.  From what I also gathered, the expectation of what was wanted in the short time allowed was a little too high.  According to this group, there was not one of them, or any of their classmates, that were anywhere near meeting the completion point of this assignment.  I know I should take this sort of talk with a grain of salt...BUT...with each comment like this, there lies a little truth.  This conversation got me thinking.  Are we, as teachers, being clear and honest about our expectations with our students?

Sometimes I think we as educators get wrapped up in "The Curriculum" as if there is some sort of secret agency that is going to come arrest us for not being on Day 8 when the pacing guide (that was probably made up by someone that has never stepped foot on your campus) says we should be.  We talk about wanting to make connections with our students and their families.  We talk about looking out for the social/emotional well-being of our students.  We talk about working with students to help them self-regulate.  The problem is that most of the time, it is just talk.  There is very little follow through.

This year, I am committed to getting to know my students.  Not just their names, faces, likes & dislikes, but the real them.  We all make these connections, at least at some superficial level.  I want to go deeper.  I want to improve my effectiveness as a teacher and getting to know my students better is the first step.  Why?  What will this accomplish in the above situation?  Quite a bit to be honest.  Teaching, and education in general, is a two way street.  Or at least it should be.  If we really want our students to learn what we are trying to teach them, then we need to make sure we are learning from our students when they are trying to teach us as well.  Keeping an open mind about where our students actually are in their learning and where we think they should be is important.  Not only for us in planning future lessons and assessments, but for our students as well.  Yes, set the expectations high, but make them attainable.  An unattainable high expectation is just as harmful to students as setting the expectation too low.

Let your students find success and then build on that success.  I have had this mindset in my math classes for a very long time but I have only in the past few years started thinking outside of my classroom.  In the traditional grading systems (and yes, I have to confess I am guilty on occasion), these expectations get hidden in percentages, the occasional curving of grades, extra credit or giving points where points were not earned.  Now that I have been in SBG schools for the past four years, I have realized that focusing on the Learning Targets and not all of the other extras that sometimes get put in the gradebook help me to focus my assessments...and therefore my expectations.  I still hold high expectations of my students and push them just as hard as before, but now we both are clear about the path we are traveling on together.  It is not just me leading the way and hoping my students follow like little sheep.

So, this year I have set a challenge to myself. I will completely re-write each of my LTs into "I can" statements for all of my classes (including my IBDP courses), change my gradebook to be based more around these LTs and have each of my students fully aware of where they are in their learning with each of the LTs we cover this year.  I have made small steps toward each of these challenges in the past year, but I am ready to take it all to the next level.

Will this bring more ponderings?  Of course.  So, I guess I will have more material to write about soon.  Until then, I challenge you to review your expectations you set for your students, align your assessments to your LTs, and help your students to find success by reaching each of the new expectations you set for them.

It's that time of year again...

It is coming to that time of the school year again for many of us.  That time when goodbyes are being said, friends are moving on, graduates are taking the next step in their lives, people are making travel plans, and for the most part schools are buzzing with excitement.

Students are rushing around finalizing projects, finding their textbooks that they shoved in their lockers back in August and have forgotten about, filling out checkout forms, and worrying about whether all of their hard work they have put in all year will be negated by the final exam.  Questions about what is going to happen over the next several days loom in their heads.  What will be on the final exam?  What if I have two, or maybe three exams, in one day?  What do I do if my family wants to leave to go on vacation early? 

While the students are getting close to hitting their panic button, many teachers are scrambling like crazy to get those last tests in before grades are due.  Did I get all my content covered?  How can I get this covered before the exam?  Are my students going to read, do math, work on their Group 4 projects, write their Extended Essay, or are they going to take an SAT prep class?  What do I put on the exam?  When are grades due?  How many comments are "enough"?

Why do we do this to ourselves?  What is the point?  Why are we stressing out over these minuscule irritations and not focusing on what is really important...How have I made an impact on my students' learning this year?  How far have my students progressed in their learning?  Have my students truly benefited from our time together this year?  How have I grown as an educator this year?  

These are the important questions we should be asking.  These are the end of year assessment targets we should all be focusing on, not how well do our students remember the information we deem important for them to remember.  I am not against end of course assessments.  I am against end of course stress and chaos.  For nothing.  Make the assessment meaningful.  Make it useful.  Don't make it the ultimate measure of what your students have learned in their time with you.  An end of course assessment should be just that, an assessment at the end of the course.  It should be no different than any of the other assessments throughout your course.  It should measure what your students know at that point in time.  It should not "weigh" any more than any other assessment you have given already.  It should be included with all of the other assessments the student has already taken so that you can articulate an accurate measure of their learning for the course/year.  Not what the student was able to remember or regurgitate back to you on the day of the exam. 

  

So, why do we do this?  Why do we concentrate on these assessment tasks and not on our students?  Why do we stress our students and not celebrate their learning?  Why do we put so much emphasis on a single test at the end of a course and not on ones done throughout the course?  If you have an answer, I would love to hear it.

Porch Chats

It was a chilly, winter evening in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia sitting around a fire on our back patio with my wife, Billie Jo, and our dear friends James and Susan, another teaching couple .  Some deep conversations and many problems of the world got solved by the four of us during what we refer to as Porch Chats. You know these chats.  When good friends get together around a fire on a porch, on a beach, in your kitchen, or even in a booth at a favorite pub with scribbles on a beverage napkin, these conversations are the best.  This one, however, has stuck with me and has now become a philosophy of sorts for me.  Why?  Because I cannot find the answer to the question.  Or at least an answer that is not superficial.

James, my wife and myself were all working in the same high school at the time of the conversation.  It was because of this that sometimes the conversations were a little heavy on the high school side.  This Porch Chat in particular was one of these times.  The three of us were talking pretty deeply about the content of courses, credit counts, preparing for university, or some other extremely important and very interesting things high school teachers talk about.  Whatever it was, I honestly do not even remember so that is how important it truly was at the time, it was consuming the three of us...until Susan, an elementary teacher and the voice of reality of this evening, spoke up and said "Since when did high school become harder than college?"  It was at this point that Billie Jo, James and I stopped talking and all stared at Susan.  The three of us couldn't speak for a moment so we just looked at her.  In the most perfect Susan way, she then went on to tell us that she was listening to everything we were saying and that she just couldn't believe that it was high school we were talking about.  We all just looked at each other and began to laugh because what Susan was saying was absolutely true.

I continually go back to this conversation, not just because I absolutely love our Porch Chats but because after five years, I still do not have an answer to Susan's question.  Why does high school have to be harder than college?  What are we doing in schools?  Are we pushing so far ahead and becoming that competitive that all of the pressures that were once associated with colleges & universities are now living in the high school world?  It used to be that the horror stories we would hear about education involved the incredibly long thesis papers, vastly complicated Calculus problems that spanned three or more chalkboards, interpretations of literary works that went so deep that entire courses were designated to a single author, or sometimes even a single piece of literature.  Several thousand word essays were due before each class.  Timeless experiments with accompanying, countless page, lab reports were done on a regular basis.  Sitting at a desk for 60, 90, 120 or even 180 minutes during a lecture and having to regurgitate everything the professor said for the exam. These portrayals about university academics, the depth and breadth of knowledge that university students were undertaking, was intimidating.

The problem is that the last few sentences of the paragraph above are no longer common place at universities.  They are what is going on in high school.  Yes, some of these things do still happen at the university level, but now they are far too often what you hear if you ask any high school student to describe their workload.  What happened to the fun?  What happened to building a passion for learning?  What happened to learning where your passions lie so that you can pursue them after you graduate from high school?  In short, when did high school become harder than college?

What is the typical scenario in a classroom around this time of year?  It is a mad rush to get the curriculum covered before the end of the year.  Or, frantically cover the material so the students are at least exposed to it before they sit for their final exams.  Teachers pile on projects, assessments, HW, quizzes, etc. in a mind blowing proportion.  Then we wonder why students, and teachers, are stressed?  Really?  Grade 12 teachers say they have to prepare students for university.  Grade 11 teachers say they have to prepare students for Grade 12.  And on down the assembly line to the point that Grade 5 teachers are stressing their already stressed out students about the intimidating halls of the middle school.  Even the kindergarten teachers are in on the game saying they have to prepare their students to enter first grade!  Let students find their passions.  Focus on fewer topics, but do them well.  Is there really a need to teach students in middle school about quadratics if they still have not mastered adding, subtracting, multiplying and dividing fractions?  Do we still have to use Shakespeare to teach literature?  What happened to looking forward to Science because you, the student, were actually doing an experiment?

Stop the madness, people!  Look around.  Why enter the mad dash when we could just as easily discuss with the next grade level teacher what it was that got covered and what did not get covered?  Our students are people, not robots.  They are not going to end up at the exact same point at the exact same time, so stop wasting energy trying to make this happen.  Bring the fun back into learning.

Why do we test students?

There are many answers and viewpoints to this question.  No matter which educator, parent, student, administrator or policy maker you ask, you get a slightly different answer.  Most of these answers can be summed up to essentially this..."to see what the students have learned."  To an extent, I can agree with this summation.  However, is that really what we are doing as teachers?  Sometimes.

Other times we are not testing to determine what our students have learned.  Sometimes we test our students because the school/district/State requires the assessment.  They gather the data from all students that took the test and behind some magical closed door session there comes an algorithm of some sort to rank our students based on the answers they had supplied.  (The "They" can be teachers, administrators, standardized assessment companies, school boards, etc. depending upon the test in question.)  The rank can come in the form of a letter grade, a number score, a percentile ranking, a placement on a given rubric, a t-score, a z-score, a pass/fail result, or in some cases, no feedback to the test taker at all.  These are the cases that are truly where the tail is wagging the dog.  It does not make sense and it is far too common that there is little to no benefit for the student.

Many school leaders talk about "doing what is right for our students", "standing behind our students", or "putting students at the forefront", and many other wonderful statements to their stakeholders.  I am not against these being said at all.  Quite the contrary.  I am absolutely behind each of these statements.  My concern is that many times the actions of our school leaders do not back up these statements, and testing is certainly one of these actions.  Why test students if there is no follow up to the test?  Why gather data just to gather data?  Why gather data simply to rank our students against one another?  What is the point?

Students are assessed on a regular basis in every aspect of their education.  Most of these are formative in nature.  Meaning, the results and/or feedback they receive (or do not receive) from these assessments informs their learning in some way or another.  These formative assessments can be class discussions, quizzes, projects, speeches, skits, games, exit tickets, presentations, or just about any other form you can think of that gives the student an opportunity to show their learning at any given point about any given learning target.  As teachers, we take the opportunity to gauge our students' learning against said learning targets and then adjust our teaching accordingly.  Then at a later point, hopefully after several other formative assessments and feedback have been taken and given, we give our students a summative assessment.  Sadly, this is where many assessment cycles stop...in schools.

However, students are also being formatively assessed by their peers on a regular basis.  They are constantly being assessed on how they dress, how they talk, who they sit with at lunch, who their friends are on social media, what they post on social media, what they like or don't like on social media, this list goes on further than we want to admit and in many cases these assessments mean more to the student than anything we do in the classroom.  These social assessments guide how each student approaches everything they do in and out of school.

The difference?  Immediate application of learning, reflection and feedback.  But why does this difference have to exist?  Why are we not giving more meaningful (to the student) assessments?  Why are we not giving time for students, and teachers, to reflect on learning and feedback to guide future lessons?  Why do we as teachers feel we need to be the guardians of the information at all times?  Let these things go.  Listen to our students.  They want our guidance, not our governance.  Find ways to spark their curiosity.  Find projects that put their learning into action.  Assess them in more ways than just paper and pencil.  Set the expectations high, give them the support they need, guide them in the right direction, let them use their past experiences and curiosity lead them to learn.

Stop testing students and start assessing learning.  We have the power and ability to do this within our classrooms.  What is stopping you?

"What's my motivation?"

I am not sure how many of you have seen it, or even paid attention to it if you did see it, but this quote was in a Sprite commercial a few years back.  It was not that special nor was it even the real focus of the commercial...come to think of it, do commercials now ever focus on the actual product they are promoting?  Either way, this quote has stuck in my head ever since the first time I had heard it come from the actors' mouth.  At first I mocked it because the actor used a completely false British accent and sounded out of place.  However, the more I thought about it over the years, the more it had an impact on me. I began thinking more deeply about the words in the question and took the question more seriously.  Maybe this was maturity, maybe this was life having a funny way of putting things in my face that I needed to acknowledge, maybe it was just my strange way of thinking about things that don't mean much during my alone time driving to and from work.  No matter what the reason, I began to take this question seriously, and still do today.

This simple quote also led me to another interesting curiosity...quotes in general.  I am fascinated with quotes.  I am enamored with quotes from famous athletes, actors, educators, philosophers, political figures, religious figures, etc.  I used to (when I had a single room that I called "mine") decorate my classroom walls and doors with the quotes that would strike me as a theme for each new school year.  I took it on as a sort of internal challenge.  I still find myself ending emails that I send to my team with motivational quotes pertaining to the challenge at hand.

My newest quote, and nearest to my heart, that I have made my mantra is from Thomas Wayne (and Alfred Pennyworth)..."And why do we fall Bruce?  So we can learn to pick ourselves up."  This simple, yet powerful, quote can be applied to many situations in life.  I was faced with a huge personal and professional challenge toward the end of 2016.  This quote helped me face the challenge head-on and overcome it at the same time.  I found a great picture of the quote with the Batman logo in the background and made it my background screen on my phone.  I looked at this numerous times a day and thought about constantly.  By doing this, I found myself metaphorically picking myself up and getting back on track.  By doing this, I reverted back to the Sprite quote and asked myself the question again.  I have now found a new motivation and am ready to take on new challenges proudly and without reservation.

What is the point of this post?  Take it as you will, but my intention is to prove that the words that come out of our mouths have power behind them that we may or may not have intended.  Words can help us find motivation, character, meaning, laughter or focus.  On the other side, words can also put stereotypes, hate, anger, and fear in the minds of others.  That being said, if you are reading this post be mindful of the words that you use.  You may not think much about them sometimes, but you never know who is listening and what impact they will have on that individual.

I leave you with this..."Words are, in my humble opinion, our most inexhaustible use of magic.  Capable of inflicting injury, and remedying it."  - Albus Dumbledore