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Showing posts from June, 2015

Designing instruction and remediation for SBG

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I use standards based grading in a hybrid classroom.  I will write more about hybrid learning at a later date, but here is the general idea.  Students rotate through 3 stations.  The first station is the independent station.  At this station, students work individually.  About half of the time I have students learning new information via tutorials or videos.  The other half of the time students reflect on their learning through journal writing and practice skills. The second station is the direct station.  At this station, students work in a small group (about 5-11 students) with the teacher.  This station ends up being differentiated.  The teacher can reteach what was to be learned at the independent station if students are struggling or they can go into more challenging extension.  This station could be used for guided practice and review as well.  I also use this station for administering formal exams. The last stat...

Setting up your gradebook

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In this post I'll describe how I set up my gradebook.  I  used a blend between standards based grading and traditional grading.  If you were to use a 100% SBG approach, your gradebook set-up would be a little easier because you would only assess student progress towards mastery of standards.  Therefore, you would have fewer categories (if any).   I use an 80%-20% split between SBG and traditional grading.  Although I love SBG, I feel like I could not measure complex tasks via SBG.  Therefore, I wanted to have a way to incorporate projects and group work into students' grades.  I also wanted to track traditional things like assignment completion, participation, and preparedness.  Each of these things ends up being a very small portion of the grade, but it is still helpful to have access to this data when looking back at student progress to identify areas for improvement. My school uses Sapphire but I also used PowerSchool , Sasi, and...

Creating an objectives list

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Here is where things start to get interesting, especially if you are working with other teachers.  For each class you teach, you will need to make a list of objectives.  I made a list this past year for algebra 1 and algebra 2 that I have linked here.  I already have plans to make changes to both of these lists.  I will post those updated lists when they are complete as well as a geometry list. To make your list, you can simply use your current pacing guide and determine what you feel to be the most important topics in the course.  I typically had 2-3 objectives per section.  It would be worth your time to check this list against your states eligible content to be sure that you are not missing anything.  I teach on a year round traditional schedule where I meet with my students for 50 minutes each day.  The algebra 1 course had 110 objectives and I felt that the pacing was perfect.  The algebra 2 course had 153 objectives and it w...

Communicating about SBG with Stakeholders

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One of the most difficult parts of implementing SBG is communicating with stakeholders.  This was especially true for me because I chose to use SBG on my own.  One of my co-workers worked with me, but every other teacher in our building used traditional grading.  My coworker and I worked together sometimes, but we also had the freedom to do what we felt was best for our kids.  To educated my students' parent and my administrators, I started by doing research about other schools.  I found this FAQ document from Excelsior Springs and borrowed very heavily.   I shared my objectives lists, my own FAQ sheet, my rubrics, my plan for weighting various portions of my students grades, and my plan for teaching, assessing  & remediating with my administrators.  They all thought is was awesome and agreed to back me up if I had parent complaints.  Luckily, I had none.  In retrospect, I guess it is hard to argue with basing a stude...

My first ever conference presentation & more on SBG

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Today was the first time that I presented at a conference.  I love conferences; I usually spend a good chunk of my summer break to attend them.  This year, I thought I'd get a little more involved.  It is certainly different presenting to adults than to teenagers.  Especially because many of the adults are more experienced and higher ranking than I am.  I don't think I did a great job, but it could have been worse.  The best part is that I presenting on the same topic in August, so I'll have time to revamp, just like I do with classroom lessons.  In a later post, I'll share some of what I learned at the sessions I attended.  For now, here is my next post about SBG. How is objectives-based grading different from traditional grading?  In a traditional classroom students’ grades based on all of the work assigned.  This includes classwork, homework, projects, quizzes, tests, effort, attitude, etc.  The teacher records a score fo...

Summer Fun and an Introduction to Standards Based Grading.

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This summer I decided to apply to speak at several conferences.  Since I don’t have any classroom action happening this summer, I am planning to start my blog by organizing my thoughts for these presentations.  I’ll be giving 6 presentations on 3 topics at 4 conferences.  The topics are standards based grading, hybrid learning and utilizing the MTBoS. I’m going to start with my philosophy for using standards based grading in this first post.  There are certainly other ways to implement standards based grading; this is just how I did it. First, standards based grading has other names.  I use objectives based grading.  I’ve also heard proficiency based grading, concepts based grading and target based grading.  They are all the same concept.  I chose objectives based grading because my state standards (PA) are very broad.  Our state broke each standard into 2-3 pieces of eligible content.  Those were still very broad.  For ...

My first post :)

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After about a year of lurking in the MTBoS background, I've decided that it is time to start by own blog.  I'm hoping to use this as a platform to reflect on my lessons and to share resources that I create or borrow and use in my own classroom. Joining twitter last summer has provided me with the best professional development that I have ever had.  Many of the people that I follow have blogs and those blogs have helped me grow during this past year.  I'm hoping that having my own blog will give me a way to chronicle my personal adventures in teaching. Here goes nothing ...