Category Archives: sbar

Stopping students from "cramming"

by Alex. Schultz

So it is the end of the quarter and the past two weeks I have been bombarded by students “re-assessing” their standards. We use standards based grading and students can re-do any of their assessments until they meet the standard fully. It is supposes to be a process of student submitting work, getting feedback, and then refining their work and understanding. This is happening with some students, but what has happened this week has been more of an “Oh crap” moment of poor grades from students and/or their parents. So then they quickly write up and re-do as many standards as possible, often of questionable quality of work.

With the new quarter starting Monday I am instituting two changes to try to correct this gaming of the system and to encourage students to really wrestle with the content without focusing on grades. First of all to prevent the wait until the last minute attitude, students will be required to initiate a re-assessment of a standard within two weeks of the first assessment or they forfeit the opportunity to re-assess. With a re-assessment attempt they will gain another two week window to continue to work on the assessment. By this I hope to encourage students to begin re-assessment immediately and build in a habit of doing and receiving feedback and doing again and of course eliminate waiting until the end of the quarter to cram.

The second thing is also quite simple, but I think that it will be powerful is I realized an easy way to withhold grades from students. I think many teachers realize that as soon as a grade has been attached to any assignment students have been conditioned to view it as “done” and are not motivated to continue in it. We use an LMS called Echo(similar to Blackboard or Moodle) where students submit their work and we assign grades. What we normally do in our class is have students submit a link to a Google Doc where the actual work is done. We then add comments to the GDoc and put a score in Echo. The change I plan to make is that I will not “publish” the grades in Echo. Therefore students will not be able to see the score I have assigned to it. Instead I will tell the class that I have read their assignments and left them comments. I will give them time in class to look at the comments, revise their work, and re-submit. By not showing them their scores I eliminate the student who says, “I have a 70% (or a 80% or even a 100%) and that is good enough for me.” In a way I can force the first cycle of feedback/re-assessment without the students thinking about the grade. Hopefully they will continue to fix things even after I finally hit publish.

Of course if neither of these changes prove helpful I will adapt and look for other solutions to encourage students to always view their learning as a process rather than something that they are “done” with.

Chicken or the Egg?

This post is part of a series where I look at the “recipe” of PBL (problem based learning) and give an overview of each step and then explain how I have adapted it to the “flavor” of my teaching philosophy and style. I also use SBG (standards based grading) for my assessment method and that influences some of my methods. My hope is that it will be both a good introduction to someone new to PBL and a source of ideas for those who are already teaching with PBL.
by ecatoncheires

Process:
The age old question of which came first, the chicken or the egg, applies to how many teachers feel when attempting their first PBL project. Where do you start designing a PBL project? Should you start with the standards or with an end product in mind? Or should you start with an authentic audience and what their needs might be? In short, the answer is YES! There really is no right or wrong way to start to design it and different people start at different places.

I think starting with someone from the community who will partner with you in planning a project is one of the best ways. This ensures that the project will be authentic and serve a “real world” purpose or solve an actual problem as opposed to a fictional one. That said, I have yet to have a project using this method. The disadvantages are finding a community partner who is willing to dedicate the time and energy to plan, introduce, and assess the final projects. But if you have the opportunity and I have seen projects that have, this is a great method.

My Method:
For my Global Studies class I started out by focusing on the standards rather than audience or product. I did have some products in mind that I want students to produce throughout the year such as video, hands-on art piece, graphic novel, debate, etc. I knew I wanted students to create a variety of products through various methods both on the computer and off. I also knew that I wanted my first products to be simple so that students could be successful while they learned the process and build up to more challenging products and more choice as the year progressed.

I started by printing out a list of all of my state standards and cutting them into individual strips. There were somewhere in the neighborhood of 60 of them. I then sorted them by theme ignoring for the most part chronological order of events. I was a bit overwhelmed by the number of them. Then I discovered that the standards had been graded into power standards and color-coded by which topics most commonly appeared on the state assessments. There were only 8 blue ones that are on every test and 9 green ones that one third of are on the test each year. The rest were the less common red ones. As I looked at the red standards most of them were actually sub-standards of the larger themes of the blue and green ones. So I ended up throwing away all of the red slips and focusing on the blue/green ones.

I explain all of this to bring out one important philosophy of PBL that would serve you well to accept. You are not going to “cover” all of the standards. You should intentionally skip some and focus on what you in your professional judgment consider to be the most important. The PBL philosophy is to go deeper on fewer things that students will actually retain and remember rather than shallowly hitting everything.

For a social studies class I also decided to teach thematically instead of chronologically. That topic probably deserves a post in and of itself, but this choice allowed me to combine events from different time periods and tie together the larger themes of history. For example I tied together the Black Plague with small pox of the Columbian Exchange in a project focused on disease. When we looked at the Arab Spring Revolutions we traced the tensions in the Middle East back to imperialism and all the way back to the origins of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.

Once I had the standards grouped by themes I put those themes in order creating a scope and sequence for the year. This gave me an overall plan and helped me visualize how the different projects would build off from each other.

The next step was to create Driving Questions, which will be my next post…