Monthly Archives: February 2009

Saturday Morning Assignment

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Our first task of the day is to find something to read on Google Reader, blog about it, then tweet. So I went back to an article I read by Scott McLeod on assessment 

High school grading: Mastery v. handing things in

One of the students in my data-driven decision-making class (for discussion purposes, let’s call her ‘Jen’) posted this in our online discussion area:

Most grading at the high school level is more reflective of responsibility (just handing things in) and not on whether the student has truly mastered the content.

There are a lot of issues embedded in this short sentence. For example…

  1. What does ‘true mastery of content’ mean (or look like) for secondary students?
  2. Does high school grading really get at the idea of student responsibility?
  3. If yes to #2, is ‘handing things in’ a good measure of student responsibility?
  4. Does student regurgitation of low-level factual recall items on quizzes and tests constitute ‘handing things in’ or ‘mastery?’

What do you think? Do you agree with Jen’s initial statement?

So here was my response to this post:

I was just thinking today about how I used to assign a business letter on the first day of my grade 12 English class. The purpose was for students to introduce themselves to me. I gave them a template and a model to follow, but I didn’t really “teach” the business letter.

And then I marked it.

“What the heck were you thinking!” I asked myself. “How can you mark something that you didn’t teach?” Well if I don’t mark it, they won’t see it as valuable and therefore won’t hand it in.

So now I would say to the old me, “There needs to be another reason for them to hand it in other than for marks. If you can’t come up with a good enough reason, then it’s probably not a valid assessment. And if you’re marking something that you haven’t taught, then you’re an evaluator–not a teacher.”

I would really like to see some innovative suggestions to get students to see the value in assessment that is not grading, ie. ways to get around assigning a mark for being responsible when that isn’t a curriculum expectation.

In our board’s report cards, we are asked to record learning skills but they don’t factor into any overall grades.

Should there be a separate grade for learning skills? Are students mature enough to understand the importance of completi

ng formative assessments for reasons other than grades? How do we make it matter?

expbound


Will Richardson is teaching me lots today

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Just a short post to say how much I’m enjoying today’s conference. Probably the most interesting part of the day for me was watching everybody start to see the potential of twitter as they started to add people.

 

I also learned about hashtags which has nothing to do with anything illegal ;) We used it to see all the tweets about today’s conference. Right now people are learning about blogger so I’m differentiating my learning. 

Will write some more later.

 

It’s Saturday morning and I had a good night’s sleep for the first time in many days.

Just wanted to link this post to some of the things other people are writing about:

Doug spent more time summing up yesterday than I did. He even included a video. I’m glad he included the message from our unions about technology and communication. 

Shannon posted this link to Mike Fisher’s examination of Bloom’s taxonomy and digital technology. It’s an interesting way to sort the different types of technology.

Also Will Richardson replied to my tweet about curling. Just for the record, that’s two replies from Will Richardson. 

I’m a geek.

 

Instructional Intelligence

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Just attended a great PD session today by Barrie Bennett. Dr. Bennett has been working with our board for a number of years now, and I’m always amazed by how much I learn every time I hear him speak. He’s an inspiring speaker and a very likeable individual who never makes teachers feel guilty for not knowing or doing enough. I’m picking him up tomorrow to take him to a session where he will be working with a group of teachers from our board, helping them with their action research projects.

My brain is very full, but there were a couple of big ideas that I can’t wait to try when I’m back in the classroom. One is team analysis, the other is synectics (see my notes that I posted for more on these).

Barrie also really got me thinking about planning with the end in mind when he talked about the difference between an outcome and an objective and how you turn an outcome into an objective. Great stuff!

Also got a chance to talk to my husband as a colleague which was strange and fun at the same time.

Generation Share

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“Each generation imagines itself to be more intelligent than the one that went before it, and wiser than the one that comes after it.” – George Orwell

When people talk about Generation Y or the Net Generation, they’re almost talking about me, although I think technically, I’m part of Generation X.  I’m a little too young to really fall into Generation X, and a little too old to relate to Generation Y, so I think I have an interesting–though far from unique perspective. I feel a bit more like an observer.

I was just thinking about all the applications out there that are designed to share information and collaborate: Limewire, Google docs, Scribd, Youtube, Flicker, Wikipedia, Facebook, etc. and I know that a lot of people –and I don’t want to make this an age thing, but let’s admit, it is a generational thing– are a little turned off by this. It’s invasive. But the idea of sharing information seems to be something that the younger generation take for granted. Why would I keep something I made or thought about to myself when I can share it with other people and get instant feedback? There are definitely dangers inherent in this, I won’t argue that, but this isn’t a post about internet safety.

Thinking back to conversations I’ve had with other teachers, some have them have candidly expressed an unwillingness to share their lesson plans and ideas. “I worked so hard on it,” one teacher said to me. “I don’t want someone else taking it and screwing it up, or taking credit for work they didn’t do.”

I understand that sentiment completely , maybe because I’m not part of Generation Y. But I suspect that this sentiment isn’t as common with younger people because they have grown up in an age where information is accessible all the time, and where you don’t have to be picked up by a publisher in order to be published.

Are our students better at sharing than we are? If so, what will the implications be?

Comic Life and Reluctant Writers

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Here’s a copy of the powerpoint presentation I used in my portion of a workshop on Comic Life and literacy a few weeks ago. I’ve posted it before, but apparently not supposed to embed google docs. So here it is with scribd. The film clip doesn’t work when viewing it this way.

Comic Life