February 2015 – Mysteries and Manners

Why I’m Changing my Mind About Grades – Part III

February 20, 2015

walnutcove-grades — source: cse.buffalo.edu

What usually happens when a student fails an assessment?

Does he

a) come to see the teacher to find out what he did not understand

b) get reprimanded by his parents and try to do better next time on a different assessment

c) roll his eyes and forget it about it

In my experience, the answer is usually C. A and B do occur, occasionally. A, of course, is the best option and the one for which all good teachers hope. After all, grades should be about learning and if a student fails an assessment that means he has not learned what he was supposed to learn.

Perhaps this failure to learn is the teacher’s fault. Perhaps it is the student’s fault. Perhaps it is nobody’s fault. But it happens. And what we hope is that a student can gain some helpful information from an assessment, such as: “Oh. I have not actually mastered Parallelism. I should go talk to Ms. Shea to find out what I did not understand for the sake of learning itself.”

Ha.

Under normal circumstances, and under most grading systems, option A rarely occurs because the student, the teacher – nay, the class itself – has already moved on to a new objective or concept. Why waste time laboring over an exam you failed when you have another one looming on the horizon? If a final exam is coming up, then perhaps you will ask the teacher to help you so that you do not make the same errors on the final exam. But this points-based motivation is hardly ideal.

What we really want is for kids to be intrinsically motivated. To care not about grades for grades’ sake, but to care about grades only insofar as they reflect learning.

This sort of virtuous motivation may be 90% grace, 5% parent-influence, 4% peer influence and only 1% teacher influence, but we must do what we can with that 1%.

Assessments can be a learning experience. And if the assessment says, “you did not master this concept,” then, ideally, the student should go back, try again, and then retake (an altered version of) the assessment so that we can measure whether or not he has mastered the concept the second time.

Therefore, I have decided to offer retakes this semester – something I NEVER thought I would do. I used to think that if a student had not mastered the objective by the time of the assessment, then his grade should reflect that. If I schedule the test for Februrary 19th and the student did not study, or studied incorrectly, or thought he paid attention in class but did not… then for any of the those reasons he deserves to earn a low grade.

This, as far as it goes, is true. But the real question is this: what happens after failure? Do we want our kids to fail (or perform poorly) and merely move onto the next topic, hoping for a better outcome next time? (Experience shows all teachers that the kids who fail one assessment are far more likely to fail the next one, even if it is on a completely different objective unrelated to the first.)

Or…

Do we want them to go back to that failed assessment, analyze it, think about it, talk to us about it, and learn from their mistakes? Of course we want the latter. Because grades should not be about punishment, they should be about what a student has learned. And if he can show us he has achieved the objective after all, even on a second (or third!) try, shouldn’t his grade reflect that learning and progress?

Yes? Are you with me?

So how do we make this happen? By allowing retakes for assessments.

This is my new retake policy in a letter I wrote to my kids:

Dear Sophomores, Based on the research we have been discussing in class and that has been presented by [Principal], I believe it is in your best interest to adjust our grading policy for second semester so that your grades will more accurately reflect your learning. However, I also believe it would be best to introduce a gradual change based upon some of the feedback I received in your grading proposals instead of the full assessment-only model. The changes are:

Re-takes for assessments will be introduced

After certain major assessments, and at my discretion after looking at your performance, I will be offering re-takes on certain assessments so that you can learn from your mistakes and show me that you have met the learning objective. The retakes I offer will be available to all students, regardless of your original grade. If you chose to retake the assessment, I will not average your scores: the higher grade will go into the grade book to reflect your mastery.

In order to retake an assessment, you must complete the following:

Two days of NHS study hall with me or with the student mentors to review concepts you missed on the assessment.

A full-page typed letter explaining how you prepared for the first assessment, the mistakes made on the previous assessment, how you prepared for this retake, what your plan of action is from this point to avoid making these mistakes again.

These requirements are in place to ensure that you try your best on all your assessments, and that you only retake an assessment to show me your growth in learning.

Homework will make up a smaller percentage of your overall grade

You will still receive credit for homework, bell work, and other completion grades on a random basis. This will be worth 15% of your overall grade in this class. Late work will be accepted for a reduced grade (70%) until the end of the unit. After this time, late work will not be accepted. The goal in this adjusted policy is to ensure more clearly that your grades reflect your learning of the Archdiocesan standards and objectives. If you or your parents have any questions, please email me. I will be happy to meet with you to discuss the policy. Sincerely, Ms. Maura Shea [email]

Ideally, I would allow retakes on ALL assessments. But since I am still grading some non-assessment work (homework, bell work, class work, etc.) my principal suggested I take a partial approach. Basically, I am trying to offer retakes on as many assessments as I can. Keep in mind that this means creating NEW assessments and grading a LOT more of them. Ahem.

Later, I gave each student a simplified version they put in their binders for easy reference:

Retakes

Sign up for two spots [on the schedule posted by the door] – one so that we can go over your previous assessment, and another so that you can retake a new assessment.

Check in with me to make sure these times are okay.

Prepare your typed letter.

How did you prepare for your first assessment?

What are the mistakes you made on the first assessment – why did they happen?

How did you prepare for this retake?

What is your plan of action to avoid making the same mistakes?

Come see me on the scheduled days!

Thoughts? Suggestions? In my next post, I’ll explain how this new policy (implemented in January) has been working so far.

Read Part I here.

Read Part II here.

On Teaching Poetry

February 7, 2015

“I ask them to take a poem / and hold it up to the light / like a color slide” (Billy Collins, “Introduction to Poetry” 1-3). Picture source: genius.com

More thoughts coming soon on my dramatic change in grading policy! (I sound like an advertisement…)

In the meantime, I’ve just finished teaching a poetry unit and thought I’d share some ideas.

The first time I taught a poetry unit to high school students a few years ago, I knew I was in for a rough time. I remembered how much I hated poetry when I was in high school (even though I loved reading challenging prose like Augustine and Dostoevsky). Indeed, from the moment I uttered the word “poetry” in connection to our next unit of study to my kids, I got so many groans and eye-rolls that I briefly considered skipping the thing altogether.

What helped me most was reflecting on the reasons I used to hate poetry. They were pretty straightforward and can pretty much be summed up by one idea:

I hated that poets were being difficult and obscure on purpose.

As a relatively open-minded high school student, I could forgive Shakespeare for the fact that his language reflected the 16th century and even Hawthorne for his interminable sentences and hopelessly flowery diction – he was a 19th century Romantic, after all. Charles Dickens was making money to support himself for every unnecessary descriptive paragraph he wrote in Great Expectations, and I could even forgive Flannery O’Connor and Faulkner for their mysterious and disturbing characters and plot twists.

I could not, however, forgive Emily Dickinson for her inexplicable dashes.

Nor e. e. cummings for his annoying rejection of simple capitalization and punctuation.

Nor Sylvia Path for her confessional whining.

Nor, especially, William Carlos Williams for his infuriating wheelbarrow.

What made things much worse was the fact that I felt like my high school English teachers were demanding that we find the “deeper meaning” of these stupid puzzles. But of course I had no idea what Emily meant by her “Certain Slant of Light” nor what “One Art” Miss Elizabeth Bishop was referring to nor why Edgar Allan Poe was so obsessed by some lady named “Annabelle Lee”. And yet my teachers seem to think the answers were obvious.

Like many other high school teachers, several of mine insisted upon psycho-analyzing the poets and explaining their weird defiance of all common sense writing by praising them for their “revolutionary” challenge of the “patriarchal norms” of the English language. Apparently, I was supposed to appreciate poetry and like the fact that these dysfunctional people called poets couldn’t just say what they meant like everyone else.

After thinking about my own hatred of poetry as a high school student, I saw at once that I would have to develop a different approach with my own kids.

I must not demand that they appreciate poetry, nor that they be expected to know what Wallace Stevens was up to, nor even understand it in the common sense of the word “understand.”

But my University of Dallas Junior Poet educated self, who had fallen in love eventually with Emily Dickinson and Richard Wilbur and W. H. Auden, was also unwilling to let them just rhyme along with Shel Silverstein and Dr. Seuss.

The key to teaching poetry is answering the question how.

How can we help our kids get inside a poem?

How can we help them admire (even if they do not necessarily like) the games poets play with language?

How can we help them respect poetry even if they do not understand it?

Marianne Moore, in her famous meta-poem “Poetry,” observes that “we do not admire what we cannot understand.” So how do we help them understand without demanding that they tackle the impossible?

I start with this poem by Billy Collins, which says better what I am getting at than anything else I have read:

Introduction to Poetry by Billy Collins

I ask them to take a poem
and hold it up to the light
like a color slide

or press an ear against its hive.

I say drop a mouse into a poem
and watch him probe his way out,
or walk inside the poem’s room

and feel the walls for a light switch.

I want them to waterski
across the surface of a poem
waving at the author’s name on the shore.

But all they want to do
is tie the poem to a chair with rope
and torture a confession out of it.

They begin beating it with a hose
to find out what it really means.

Billy Collins, “Introduction to Poetry” from The Apple that Astonished Paris. Copyright � 1988, 1996 by Billy Collins. Reprinted with the permission of the University of Arkansas Press.