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First week with SBG and portfolios

With about a week of school done, its time to break the communications blackout that I’ve seemingly been under lately.  I’ve mostly been dealing with the technical stuff that needs to happen at the beginning of the year to support the kind of classes I like to run.  I’ve been getting everyone logged into their own MacBook and signing them up for Edmodo, my Moodle site, textbook sites, Evernote, and Blogger, for starters.

Students spent the first few days of school visiting CogDogRoo and cooltoolsforschools to give them ideas on ways to share their knowledge in fun ways using web 2.0 tools. A few even created mini-reviews of what they did this summer and shared them with their friends (a really good use of Facebook by students is to pull a few pictures from Facebook into a web2.0 tool to share a bit about themselves).

I was visiting Apple HQ while they were working with the web 2.0 sites (more about that later, if Apple’s nondisclosure statement allows), but when I got back to school we started working on the vision for assessment and the class climate for the year.

When trying to communicate my vision, I found that its hard to stand in front of classes and admit that you are not sure exactly what they will learn this year, that you as a teacher have decided to let your students have some control over the content that they will learn.  I tried doing that, but I’m not sure they believe me, yet.

Standards-based grading was also a bit of a challenge to explain, as they have no experience of it in their other classes. I’m sure its the kind of thing that needs to be lived to be truly understood, but I think most students have a general idea of how they will be graded.  We just need to negotiate the details of what they will be graded on.

So far, portfolios seem to be the best way to collect student work for the purposes of evaluation of learning, especially if I’m going to allow students some autonomy in meeting the standards.  We are currently in the throes of getting set up with (mostly) Blogger accounts and figuring out the basics of blogging. Chemistry students will probably end up with a mix of online and paper portfolios, given the symbolic nature of some of the math and chemical equations, but the other preps (AP Bio, biology, A & P) will rely on blogs more, I suspect.

The next steps are to direct student learning in the major content and skill standards for each class, have them collect artifacts into their portfolios, and then evaluate them for their ability to demonstrate mastery of the standards. We’ll see how that goes over the next few weeks.

Bottom line: in the first week I’ve worked out some of the glitches in access to technology for students, shown them some tools to use, and begun to establish a student-centered classroom by allowing for multiple ways to demonstrate learning.

2010 08 30 Assessment and Grades
Learning Environments
Science Teaching with Technology Comments (0) Permalink

On the Edge again- Ready to dive into standards-based grading

Time to leapBack at school in these frantic few days before students arrive, I guess I’m as ready as I will be to put into practice another overhaul of my grading practices.

Here’s a quick history of the changes in my high school science classroom. First, I reduced the point values that I was awarding students for formative assessments in the ‘binary grading‘ scheme I used last year. Now I’ve done away with the summative point system entirely. Instead I’ll be using a standards-based gradebook to keep track of key skills and concepts that students learn about and demonstrate. We’ll be using portfolio/blog platforms and Edmodo to keep track of student artifacts and reflections of learning, with the occasional quiz, midterm, and final exam thrown in for fun via Moodle.

If you’re interested in the details, all documents related to my grading system for this year can be found at my parent and community page.

Jumping off the Edge again. Wish me luck!

2010 08 17 General Teaching Comments (1) Permalink

A minimalist standards-based grading system: dream version

Jason Buell got me thinking again with his latest post in which he gives some great tips for all the SBG newbies. A main point of his post was for us to not be too self-satisfied with our pretty lists of standards. Instead, according to Jason, we should be taking a close look at the assessments that we are going to use so that we can define our anchors and give concrete examples of good (and bad) work for students to follow.

Thinking about assessments, here’s what I realized that I needed to clarify about my classroom:

  • Will some (or all!) students be doing something unique to meet a certain standard?
  • Is it possible for one of my biology classes to decide to learn about a slightly different set of ideas about biochemistry than another biology class?
  • How do I go about writing the assessments ahead of time if these two conditions apply?
  • Most importantly: why did I write my standards and learning goals so broadly that they don’t drill down to specific content knowledge?

To answer these questions for myself and the occasional reader stumbling across this post, here’s how I picture my classroom in a couple weeks when school starts:

(insert dream sequence sound effect and shimmery visuals here)

Students will be introduced to the new system of assessment, we’ll call it SBG for now, in which points are not summed, averages are defunct (except in the inflexible beast of the school’s online gradebook), and the highest number anyone will see on an assessment is a 4. After the initial shock, the students and I will look at examples of what the record-keeping system will look like (in my parent letter, sbgradebook.com, and a spreadsheet or two) and discuss the 4 level rubric and its descriptors.

We’ll talk about why we have major Standards and Learning Goals to focus us so it is not a completely student-driven system. (I do need students to meet the Colorado Community College Common Course guidelines for each course, if they are to deserve college credit for my classes. That’s why I have the Standards and Learning Goals that I do. They are borrowed directly from what the colleges of Colorado have requested as the SLO’s, the student learning outcomes, that students are to master.)

Then we will get down to the business of starting on our first units of study. Here’s where the classroom becomes intentionally unscripted, or at least less scripted than in past years. I hope to be the guide-on-the-side type and give students some freedom in what they study in my classes, so long as they are making progress both in the content-specific Learning Goals and the performance-based Standards.  The students and I will probably have a chat at the beginning of each topical unit to define in more detail the supporting concepts worth focusing on, both in my mind and theirs. From there, they will pursue their own paths to demonstrating mastery of the skill and content standards for that unit. Surely some Web 2.0 stuff will be generated. Some inquiry-ish lab experiments will be performed. Portfolios and blogs will be created. Much fun will be had by all.

(insert exiting dream sequence sounds and return to reality visuals here)

So that’s what my classroom might look like, based on a vision derived from my summer reading and the communal brain that was ISTE10, that students need to be producers of content and they need to follow their passions whenever possible.

With this sort of idealistic, student-driven philosophy, I don’t think I can write many assessments between now and when school starts.  I haven’t met my students yet.

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2010 08 10 Assessment and Grades
Learning Environments Comments (2) Permalink

SBG / SBAR Standards for Chemistry 2010-2011

I finished a draft of the assessment framework that I will use in my chemistry class this school year. It follows the basic model that I established for all of my science classes with 9 major Standards and 10 specific Learning Goals for chemistry content knowledge.

The standards document can be found here. Feel free to comment and/or borrow.

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2010 08 03 Assessment and Grades Comments (0) Permalink

Almost ready for primetime: details of my SBG plan for 2010-2011

First, let me say that the documents posted below are truly products of the SBG Borg. At least four people other than myself are responsible for the standards-based grading system that I’ve put together. Sometimes its hard to know where one person’s ideas begin and end, but I’ve tried to give credit for the different pieces that I have shamelessly stolen. Kudos to Matt Townsley, Shawn Cornally, Jason Buell, Frank Noschese, and others for giving me the building blocks that helped put together a system that I think will work for my science classes this year.

In summary, I’ve put together a nested SBG system with 9 major Standards that represent the major skills that I want students to be able to perform. It’s “nested” because the first standard is directly content related and so will have its own set of content-specific Learning Goals that will be assessed independently of each other: standards within a standard. Both the first Standard’s Learning Goals and the 9 Standards together will use conjunctive scoring to determine the final grade.  The plan is for online portfolios (yay 1:1!) and face-to-face conferences to be most of the assessment pieces, which will help students meet the Standards that I’ve chosen.

The two documents that I have mostly complete so far are my assessment philosophy (an explanation of my SBG system) and a more specific list of the Standards and Learning Goals for my biology class.

Feel free to comment on them or pirate them if they are useful. We want the SBG Borg to spread. You will be assimilated.

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2010 07 29 Assessment and Grades Comments (3) Permalink

Update on standards-based grading plans: don’t forget the 3 P’s

I’ve updated my list of biology standards slightly over the past few days.  The latest version with some explanatory notes can be seen here.

The motivation for the changes came from a great post by Paula White. She inspired me to add a couple more standards that are less about content and more about community. She reminded me that I should be assessing the 3P’s: performance, progress, and process. I had a lot of performance standards, which are easy to write for an upper level science class, but was lacking in the progress (self-assessment, metacognition) and process (group work, attitude, etc.) standards. I added two more standards and combined two others so that my total number of major standards sits at 9, which will translate into 9 columns in the gradebook.

This 9 standard system, assuming it doesn’t morph much more, will probably become the foundation for all of my classes, regardless of content. Only the first standard is content-specific and will vary between courses, but the other standards represent outcomes that should be achieved in any upper-level science class. I’ll keep a midterm and final in each course per semester, as well, to keep kids on their toes as far as standardized testing goes.

Although its a work in progress, if you see any glaring problems this system creates down the road, feel free to share a comment. Lots of folks are interested in SBG/sbar right now and as a collective unit we’ll come up with better plans than we can alone.

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2010 07 15 Assessment and Grades Comments (2) Permalink

Subjectively assessing my students with SBG

Ever quote yourself in your own blog? There’s probably a rule against it but I’m about to do just that:

I’ve wondered, too, how objective SBG is. But the more I read lately, the more I’m convinced that what we need is not standardized, objective grading systems but more subjective grading systems, those that allow the teacher to personalize assessment for each student and students to have a role in defining the assessments. This should be done, though, in the framework of high expectations and defined learning targets. I’m still new enough at this to be idealistic, but I think SBG is the way to allow this to happen. –me, in the comments on my last post.

At least one reader of that post was interested enough in this comment to warrant further explanation:

I admit it, I’m biased. After all, what’s wrong with thinking that my students are the coolest kids in the world and that they are doing fantastic work that everyone should know about? I don’t have a problem with being biased. In fact I’m going to put my bias into my assessments.

Here is a fundamental question I ask myself regarding assessment of students: do I as a teacher want to assess a set of well-crafted standards that may be achieved multiple ways or do I want kids to take more objective standardized tests? My answer is yes, I do. Both. But not in equal amounts.

A caring classroom community demands subjective assessment because objective assessment is impersonal and generalized. If I always assess everyone the same way, then the community collapses into me vs. them because each student is just another row in the gradebook. The traditional model of education would continue with kids trying to game the system. Learning would continue to take a back seat to gathering points towards the grade.

subjective |səbˈjektiv| -based on or influenced by personal feelings, tastes, or opinions

But if instead, I use a consistent set of standards to subjectively grade each student on what I believe they personally can and have achieved,  I can put a value on their progress that is independent of every other student in that class. It will be independent of other students because the assessment of progress on the standards should come, in part, from the students themselves, and they are going to have unique perspectives on their own learning.

Of course my opinion enters into it; I’m a person, too. Students should be striving to create excellent products to demonstrate their learning and as the saying goes, beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Every product ever produced has an audience, I am simply part of that audience and will judge each product just like everyone else does. What may be different is that I have a set of standards that the students and I have worked out to use to judge the final products.

I think teachers kid themselves when they claim objectivity in grading. Or worse, maybe they are truly objective and don’t really differentiate between one student and the next, a one-size-fits all educator.  Instead, I vote we set up systems that allow subjectivity in assessments so that students’ unique talents and interests can be rewarded in the most productive way possible.

2010 07 14 Assessment and Grades Comments (0) Permalink

Standards-based grading: Chemistry vs. Biology standards

I’ve made a little progress towards implementing standards-based grading (sbar) for next year and thought I would throw it out there for those of you in the same boat and for the sbar pros to critique.  It was actually pretty easy to choose the standards that will go in the grade book for my classes, since I teach mostly concurrent credit classes which need to be articulated with Colorado’s Community College Common Courses guidelines.  The guidelines are very handy in that they have lists of “standard competencies” that students are supposed to master in the course.  I have simply reworked those a bit to give my students the learning targets to achieve during the school year.

So far I’ve worked on my chemistry and biology preps and it is remarkable the difference between them in terms of the standards that are linked to each course. I am currently thinking of trying out 8 biology standards and 10 chemistry standards. As Shawn Cornally has pointed out here and here, there seems to be a difference between qualitative courses like biology (lots of facts to memorize) and quantitative courses like chemistry (lots of procedural skills to master) in terms of the standards one focuses on.

The biology standards are much more process-oriented and not necessarily tied to specific content topics. I like this set of standards because it downplays the sometimes disconnected trivial knowledge tidbits that we biology teachers get hung up on. Sure, the content is still important, but it will no longer make up the bulk of the grade.

Chemistry standards were much easier to organize, as I suspect physics standards would be, because we tend to teach sets of skills that build on each other as the course progresses. Understand atoms to understand compounds to understand reactions and so on. Hopefully with a standards-based system in place, I can have an easier time of reevaluating and assisting students who may take longer to acquire some of the skills taught earlier in the course so that they are not so lost in the later stages.

What I have yet to figure out, and some of you sbar pros can weigh in on this, is how to translate the standards that I have into what actually appears in the gradebook for students to see. I want students and their parents to know where their strengths and weaknesses are in terms of content and procedural knowledge, but I also want to keep the reporting and grade calculation as simple as possible: mutually exclusive goals, perhaps.

My initial thought is to have only the 8 or 10 major standards appear in my online gradebook along with midterm and final exam grades.  Progress towards the standards would be tracked separately, perhaps in a student-accessible spreadsheet or using Shawn’s SBG gradebook. I’ve wondered, too, about visualizing student progress using Roambi if I go the spreadsheet route.

I’ll be working on the standards for my other two preps, Anatomy and Physiology and AP Biology, over the next few weeks, but I suspect that the standards for those classes will look a lot like the biology standards, given their qualitative content. I’ll also be working out the mechanics of how to track grades, keep students informed of their progress, assess and reassess, and compute final grades in an sbar system. No small task, but that’s what summers are for. (Update: revised standards and the philosophy behind them are discussed here)

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2010 07 05 Assessment and Grades Comments (13) Permalink

Putting the Cart Before the Teacher in 1:1

To steal a trademark joke from some of my favorite bloggers, the title really should read: Putting the Cart Before the Horse Teacher in 1:1. Or as Matt Townsley and Russ Goerend asked in an unplugged session here at ISTE10 (link), is having 1:1 computers the chicken or the egg? I’m going to interpret this question as: which comes first, the vision for what to do with 1:1 computers or the purchase of 1:1 computers? (Aside: I gave them an answer that Matt interpreted as “the barn”).

In my classroom, at least, the cart came before the teacher (me) really knew what to do with it.  I knew that kids needed computers because computers were cool for our digital natives and regular lectures were boring them and that so many cool things for science teaching were available on the web and…and…and. But that wasn’t really a vision for what to DO with the laptops, as such.

But I managed to get a cart anyway, thanks to my brave and hardworking IT staff.  And that has made all the difference.

As a science teacher I love doing experiments and, simply put, I couldn’t experiment with what works in 1:1 without the right tools. Most scientific experiments need some specialized equipment and whether its a thermocycler, mass spectrometer, or electron microscope, the experiment can’t happen without the tool.  1:1 computing is no different.  The tools have to be there or teachers will always teach the same way that they have for years.

But should every horse teacher get their own cart?  Not yet. Lets face it, some horses teachers are resistant to pulling anything new, and to saddle them with the extra load of a cart might cause them to buck and kick back.  Not good for students.

What will work to get to our ideal vision for teachers and their technology use? Jealousy!

Jealousy is the most important emotion in teaching. Use jealousy! -Leigh Zeitz @ ISTE10

Putting the cool tools in the hands of a few teachers who have the beginnings of a vision and desire for 1:1 is going to give way greater long term returns than a blanket purchase of laptops for every kid. First it will work out some of the kinks in your technology infrastructure with a more limited hardware expenditure.  Second, when these trailblazing teachers have success with 1:1, their neighbor teachers will notice. Teachers will notice because students will notice and talk about how different the 1:1 experience is.  Ideally, this is the point in which jealousy kicks in. Why do they get to do that? How come they get 1:1 computers?

Once jealousy kicks in, there may some desire on the part of the resistant teacher to also have a 1:1 classroom. From there you have them hooked. Administrators might link 1:1 hardware to achievement of a certain level of professional development or some other criteria. Now while this might seem to be awful that students are denied the technology in some classes, I guarantee that it is better than what might happen with a totally resistant teacher.

So try jealousy.  Let me know if it works.

2010 06 29 Learning Environments
Mostly Technology
Science Teaching with Technology Comments (0) Permalink

Distributed Teaching and 1:1 Learning

Yesterday I had the privilege to attend EduBloggerCon at ISTE 2010 and participate in sessions about online learning, 1:1 implementation, student visions of education, and iPads as 1:1 devices.  I picked up some common themes in all these sessions that are worth putting in ink (bytes?).

First some centering questions: Why is 1:1 computing happening? The pain of setting up a device for every student, the cost of those devices, the legal crap about locking down certain sites, and the general hassle of it all should (and does) prevent schools from going 1:1. So why the big push? Is it being mandated by states or perhaps local boards of education? If so, what are the laptops/tablets/pad/touches supposed to be used FOR?

I’m not sure that everyone going 1:1 has a vision for why they are going 1:1, other than some general sense that technology is available and needed, so let me throw out some vision derived from our conversations at #ebc10:

Simply put, students need devices that allow for distributed teaching. Lets define this as students using and creating the resources for learning that are available online. For example, students in my AP Biology class spent hours this past school year watching the YouTube channels of other science teachers, their favorite being bozemanbiology. I’m a reasonably techie person but I haven’t managed to create my own series of video lectures yet, so I point my students to those resources that others have made. YouTube, iTunesU, and all the online college resources like MIT’s OpenCourseWare have way better resources than I could put together by myself and students can access them over and over whenever and wherever they want to. That’s the benefit of distributed teaching.

Some teachers are doing distributed teaching way better than I am. One of the conversations yesterday was with Monika Hardy (@monk51295) and her students about how they are taking advantage of distributed teaching to each create their own courses.  These students are planning their own courses based on what their interests are, rather than having to choose from a limited set of topics that the teachers in the physical school building are capable or willing to offer. The plan is for these students to design their own learning experiences with the help of experts in the field that they want to study. Some of those experts, by the way, are students that have set up their own YouTube channels and are producing their own tutorial videos, often at the request of other students (example here).

Imagine these brave, creative students trying to create their own online courses in a school that is tech-deprived, with a few laptops and crappy network infrastructure. These kids are out of luck, in such a case, as their videos fail to load, their Skype calls are dropped or painfully choppy, or they can’t add to the course wiki or upload to YouTube because the network is down or blocked.

What 1:1 learning ought to be about is enabling students like this to follow their passion beyond the bounds of the brick and mortar school to find and create the resources that will take their learning to the next level. In a final analysis, it does not matter which tools enable kids to do this, but they do need the tools to get to where the teachers are. As summarized nicely by Monika, our job as educators is to prepare them for this distributed way of learning by providing access, process (training), and a community in which to share their successes and frustrations. (Another good summary of Monika’s student session can be found here)

So why is your school going 1:1?

2010 06 27 Learning Environments
Mostly Technology
Science Teaching with Technology Comments (0) Permalink