A Journey Into a Standards Based Grading Hybrid- Part 1

I'm a bit obsessive and have spent way too many hours reading every blog, tweet, research paper, etc. I could about standards based grading. It is summer after all, so I've got spades of time. I want to start by saying I absolutely LOVE the concept of standards based grading (or SBG for short). It makes perfect sense and I'm flabbergasted that I haven't heard anything about it before (I only graduated from my undergrad 3 years ago), and just happen to stumble across it this summer. My first exposure was from this blog, which led me to this blog, which spelled it out in the level of detail I wanted/needed (including posts on how to apply it to different subjects!).
This is one of those times I hate being a 6th grade teacher; since we're at the middle school and 5th grade is at the 4 feeder elementary schools we get minimal information about the students we're to have, and since these kids are being blended into one school for the first time issues could pop up where they didn't exist before. What we have heard is that next year's class is just as lazy as last year's class (and last year's class was VERY lazy) and they're very immature (prone to whining and crying). But even knowing that, I blame my greenness for my ideology that this year my class will run perfectly; every activity will run smoothly, all my students will love me and do all their work, they'll learn everything I teach them, and unicorns will prance around below blue skies and rainbows (that last one was a bit sarcastic, but you get the idea). Throw into the mix that I'll be teaching two AIG (academically intellectually gifted) classes and one regular class this year (I have only ever taught regular classes), and I think I'm going to go with a SBG hybrid model. I'm not comfortable jumping all in from the beginning. Here are my notes on what I've learned from others with a few musings of my own, let me know what you think.

1) Grades for my regular class will be 10% from Clipboard Math (a spiral review activity our students work on every day), 10% from notes (questions answered in eduCanon videos and reflection bookmarks completed once a unit), 80% SBG. Grades for my AIG students will be 7% Clipboard Math, 7% notes, 6% superstar homework (check out this link for the 6th grade series, it's problem-solving/higher-order-thinking practice), 80% SBG.

2) Assessments for SBG will be discussions in class, the final exit ticket for an LT, weekly quizzes, unit tests. Our district gives a "benchmark test" at the end of each quarter, I'm not sure if or how this will factor into their grade.

3) SBG will be on a 0-10 scale I got from here. 10 is advanced (can only be achieved by earning two or more 9's), 8-9 is proficient (wiggle room for little computation errors, missing label, etc.), 6-7 is basic, 0-5 below basic. 1 is they started the problem but didn't get far (underlined correct key words, messed around with the numbers a bit but obviously had no idea what they were doing). 0 is they didn't do anything with the problem.
I'm going with a 10 point scale because my district (and our required grade book system) is based on percentages. If it's a 4 point scale, and 3 means proficient, I don't want that showing up as a 75% in the grade book. Especially since we're on a 7 point grading scale, so 75% is a D. Yikes! Proficient canNOT be a D. My AIG parents would be freaking out, blowing up my email and phone, and stampeding my room for a change.

4) If a student has a 0 on a LT I contact their parents and tutor them during lunch; there's no excuse for getting a 0. This tells me they're either so lost they need immediate intervention, or so lazy they won't even pick up their pencil. And either they need a lot of 1-on-1 support or they need a lesson that actions (or inaction) have consequences, and if they waste my class time I will take their social time to make it up.

5) LT grades will not go down if they don't do as well on a later assessment. This is the part that has made me do the most thinking. I can understand why some people allow their LT grades to go down, it reflects the student's most current understanding of a target. My thoughts on that are first, what if they had a bad day, and that's why they did poorly on the second assessment. Most people would say, "Well, then they practice and see me for a re-assessment." That would add to my number of re-assessments exponentially, it would be more than I could handle, especially my first year at this. Second, if their grade is to show how well they understand a target, and at one point they were proficient, I don't see the benefit of punishing them for forgetting a few things. Honestly, this is 6th grade math, and some of my students don't know where they're going to sleep tonight or where they're going to get their next meal, so in that context what does it matter if they went down 2 or even 5 points on a topic.
I want their grade to show me what they have been able to push their minds to do. I need to have faith that my assessments are truly measuring their level, then I won't have to question that the earlier higher grade was a fluke. My plan, in exchange, is to keep track of their level progression for each LT. So maybe their level for dividing fractions went 5/7/8/7/6. In cases like this where they're showing quite a bit of forgetfulness I'll have a conversation with the student about how well they truly feel they understand the topic and why their score has been slipping. If it's an isolated target I might just give them a practice activity to work through and then we'll discuss it, if it's a pattern and they're truly declining I'll contact parents about what we need to do to provide that student with more support.

6) Homework- except for superstars- will be provided but not required. I will also be giving students the answers to the problems. I want homework to be about practicing skills. If they have the answers they know instantly if they're doing it right or wrong. The next day for the warm up we can discuss any issues they had. While this isn't completely an SBG thing, it's new to me, and I'm worried about it. As I mentioned, my students next year have a history of laziness, and I'm afraid that if it's not graded they won't do it. In the past I have tried making homework optional (now granted, I didn't give them the answers) and practically no one even looked at it, even my best students admitted to it. And I know they'll have a lot of required homework from their other teachers...

So, what do you think about all this? Have I lost my mind?

AVID- preparing the "middle" for college

I have just finished my second year of teaching, and both years have been at the same school. I went to a national conference last week and discovered some things that are normal and run-of-the-mill for me are not for other districts. So, on that basis, I want to talk to you about a program called AVID.
AVID is an acronym (Advancement Via Individual Determination) and the program is dedicated to those students in the middle; the ones who are often overlooked because they're not constantly struggling and not pushing the boundaries of our curriculum. These students are, on average, B or C students who want to go to college but are the first in their family. The AVID program is designed to start in elementary school, teaching students the skills needed (note-taking, organization, prioritization, etc.) to do well in school. In middle school, skills can be taught school-wide, but the focus is on a core group of students (about 20-25 per grade level) who continue working on skills in core classes that will help them progress to college AND they take an AVID elective class that focuses on those skills as well as beginning to look at colleges and what it'll take to get into one. Then in high school students continue with the AVID elective class and they help students prepare for college (applications, tours, interviews, etc.). There is also a piece of the AVID program that continues into higher education, but I don't know anything about it.
This conference I went to last week was an AVID conference. I went with about 40 other people from my school district to the 3-day, 5000-participant, conference in Dallas and it was AMAZING! We spent about half our time working with our site team (the group of people from our school who would be responsible for implementing and evaluating the AVID program at our school), and the other half was spent working on AVID techniques with other teachers from our content area (so I was with 60 other math teachers). The first part I loved about the conference was that they had a Math 1 and a Math 2 strands. So people who did Math 1 last year went to Math 2 this year, so they could take it a step further and not hear the same things they did last year.
At the end of the conference we did an activity in our math strand called Give One, Take One. We took three post-it notes and on each post-it we wrote a different strategy we want to try using in the next school year. We also wrote when we wanted to have tried each strategy by, our name, and our email address. We swapped post-its with three people and are responsible for contacting those people to see how they did with the strategy they gave us. I'm not sure I just did a good job explaining the whole process, but here are the three strategies I hope to implement this year:
1) Sentence Frames- the one thing I LOVED about this strategy was how it will especially help our ELL (English Language Learner) students. The leaders of our session focused on using this strategy with vocabulary. You basically give students a sentence with blanks for missing pieces, but my Ah-Ha! moment was when they said the blanks should be where numbers would go, NOT words. Let's look at an example:
       The _________ of 36 is 6.
       The square root of ____ is ____.
The first sentence frame has a blank where "square root" should be, and the only thing that would fit in that blank is square root; that's a very limited sentence and doesn't lead to individualization. But the second sentence frame could be completed in any number of ways; the student could put 4 and 2, 9 and 3, 225 and 15 or any square (perfect or not) and its square root! Awesome, right?! This idea took sentence frames to a whole new level for me, and I want to use it this year in my class room. My students do Frayer Models for vocabulary, and one of the boxes is Word in a Sentence, and I will use a sentence frame in each Frayer Model. It was on one of my post-it notes, and I think I put October as when I would like to have tried it by; so I'm expecting an email in October asking how sentence frames is going for me.
2) Cornell Notes- If you have not heard of Cornell notes (or c-notes) I HIGHLY suggest you do some research. It's a method of taking notes that pushes students to be more mentally involved, instead of just mindlessly copying the teacher. At the top right students put their name, date and core/period (I won't be doing this part because my students will be using a notebook, but this would be good for classes where notes are taken on loose-sleeve paper and organized in a binder). To the left of that they put the topic and objective (for me this will be the title of the notes and the standard). Below all that they put the "essential question(s)" ( which are the question(s) they should be able to answer after finishing the notes on that page; I am changing the name to "topic question" because our county uses the name "essential question" in another way). Skip down to the bottom of the page, about 4 or 5 lines are blocked off for the summary. Between the essential questions and the summary a vertical line is drawn about 2 to 2 1/2 inches from the left side of the page. To the right of the line is where the students take their notes, however they or their teacher wants. To the left of the line is where they write their Study Questions.
Here is how C-notes work; students start by filling in the top of the page (teacher provides topic, objective and essential questions). Teacher teaches and students take notes in the Notes box. For homework (or within 8 hours of taking the notes) students go back and modify their notes; crossing out what was not needed, adding extra to fill in any holes. Students also, for homework create the Study Questions; it's kind of like Jeopardy, where the notes are the answers and the students create the questions. So if we took notes about finding area of rectangles they would have the steps for finding area followed by a few examples. The Study Question for the steps might be "How do I find the area of a rectangle?". The Study Questions for the examples would be the example problem. The idea is students could cover the right side of their page and use the questions on the left to study and quiz themselves. The next day in class, as a warm-up, students would write the summary for the notes at the bottom of the page. Now students have looked at that one set of notes three times, and they are three times as likely to remember the information. Our session leaders told us about GIST Summaries, where students circle/highlight/underline 3-5 important words/phrases from their notes and use those to write a summary of their notes as well as answer the essential question(s) (I think I would use a GIST Summary for homework the second night, so students will have looked at the material four times :)
I think I said I wanted to have tried this by December (I plan on using the layout beginning day 1, but I'm going to guide students in the Study Question process; begin by giving them the questions, then we develop questions together, then they create questions on their own)

Here is a picture of what the Cornell Notes sheet looks like; I found it by googling "Cornell Notes". There are also sheets where the Notes area is blank, and where the Notes area is graph paper.

3) Tutorials- I'm going to start by showing you the Tutorial Request Form (again, I found this by googling "AVID Tutorial Request Form Sample".

In the AVID elective, students have Tutorials twice a week (Tuesdays and Thursdays), but I'm going to tell you how I plan to modify the process for my class.

I plan on doing Tutorials as time allows (there are a few days the first quarter where we will have time to review) and the day before each test. Students will fill out this form (or something similar) 2-3 days before; the question they chose should be a higher level question. I love this form because it makes them pick a question they are struggling with, in a topic they don't fully understand, and really break it down to find out exactly where their confusion is. One of my biggest pet peeves is when I ask a student which part they don't understand and they say, "The whole thing," when in fact it is just one step of the process that is tripping them up. So, this form will help them identify where they are having problems. I will look through the submitted forms and break them up into groups based on similar problems. Each group has about 6 or 7 students and a "tutor" (someone with more knowledge of the topic- an 8th grader, high school/college volunteer, or teacher). The student in each group who feels they need the most help will present their problem. (All groups will be working simultaneously, in different parts of the room, so the student presenting doesn't have to feel like everyone is watching them) The presenter will go up the their group's board and will write their original question, as much work as they can do on their own, and write out their POC (point of confusion). While the confused student is presenting, the tutor will be writing their notes for them, so the student presenting can focus on what they're doing on the board but still have a written log of what was done. Now the cool part is the tutor and other students in the group will help clarify the thinking of the presenter, but can ONLY ask questions such as "do we have notes on this?", "what do our notes say to do next?", "is there something that we can eliminate or that is missing?" The non-presenters in each group focus not on the solution to the problem, but on the presenter's thinking. They keep going until the presenter has an answer they are satisfied with. Since all students in the group struggled with the same concept, each student then writes a summary/reflection of their learning from that problem, and- time allowing- share their summary/reflection with the group. 

We watched a video demo of this at our conference (the video was on completing the square) and the whole process- of working through the problem- took about 20 minutes. To our horror, there was an error in the process (the student was doing b^2/2 not (b/2)^2) and the tutor didn't catch it. The leaders of our session informed us that in this situation the teacher should give the group about 5 minutes to catch the mistake, keep asking questions like "are you sure you're doing the steps in the correct order?" or "do you see an error in your process?". If the presenter doesn't catch their mistake the teacher can take 30 seconds to tell the student their process is wrong and quickly tell the student how to fix it (do not take the pen, let the student do all the writing).

This strategy seems extremely powerful, if utilized correctly, so I'll need to do more research on the process before I implement it in class. On my post-it note I said I want to have used this strategy before May, so I'll have plenty of time to fluently understand the process, explain it to my students, and try it in class.

This conference was extremely useful and I learned more strategies than I know what to do with. In my two short years of teaching I have learned to focus my energy on 2-3 new things each year. I know that if I tried to do it all this year it would be overwhelming and nothing would be done well; but if I focus on just a few new things each year I can really work on perfecting them and fitting them to my class.