Lori wrote:
<<Having just attended a weekend seminar with Harvey Daniels, his advice
regarding assessment is ringing in my ears. First, says he, teachers need to
let go of the sense that everything a student does must be graded but,
realizing that we have grade books and need to leave a few tracks, he called
for binary grading. As he described this, it is an all or nothing sytem--19
points if you do it, 0 if you don't. >>
I've heard of something like this, I think from a book I read by Glasser. He
advocates using only the grades A, B, or incomplete. You can do well, or you
need to keep working. If you believe (as I do) that "you can GET smart" (i.e.
all students are capable of high achievement on rigorous work), then you don't
want to put a final grade on work that is under a student's potential. An
"incomplete" tells kids they're still in progress, whereas a C or D or F tells
them either "well, this is how far you came, and that's it" or "you failed",
neither of which are forward-looking (i.e. "you can get there in the future,
keep working at it"), and both of which are demoralizing.
Can you go into the next grade with "incomplete"s on your record? Why not?
Glasser does say that this takes school-wide commitment, a high level of
collegiality and working together on the part of teachers, to help each other
with new ideas and strategies to really teach those kids who have not achieved
that A or B. It also takes a different kind of focus... one not on
knowledge-gaining (which requires a good memory and often a kind of
intelligence that some kids just aren't strong in) but on aquisition of
thinking skills, which anyone can do. Knowing "stuff" is overrated, since
anyone can look up anything in the world easily nowadays, but unless you know
HOW to use knowledge, what good does it do you?
Anyway, some of these are larger issues than what you can deal with here,
Kelly, but I think personally that there is something to offering an A, B, or
incomplete for reading strategies. You're either thinking through texts really
well, you're getting there, or you need to keep at it. I always struggled with
the idea of grades. Putting all I knew about a student and what she had
acheived in a quarter into a little scan-tron bubble was ridiculous, as far as
I was concerned. The Learning Record which Sally worked with a team on in the
90's was a great resource for alternate, rich, narrative "grades", but it just
never got off the ground, it seems. This at least seems a workable solution in
a more traditional grading setup.
These discussions of assessment and grading are always interesting to me. I
look forward to seeing what everyone's perspectives are on this!
Take care,
Stacy
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