Secondary Standards- Based Grading and Reporting Handbook

Secondary Standards- Based Grading and Reporting Handbook offers some valuable input on effective grading that clearly reflects each students ability. They lay out six principles to help teachers avoid misconstruing a students ability by focusing on extraneous details. Principle one suggests that “Grades and reports should be based on clearly specified learning goals and performance standards.” This is the baseline for consistent and efficient grading, for the effective grading is directly tied to standards, which need to be clear if we are to clearly grade. Principle two states that “evidence used for grading should be valid.” What this means, the students competence, with respect to the standard you are measuring, shouldn’t be influenced by their abilities that aren’t directly specified in the standard. For example, while it is important for students to turn in work on time, that variable doesn’t have much to say about their ability to do the assigned math problems. A student can be proficient in multiplication but turn in their work late. Another principle I liked was to not use everything in grades. Lets say Student A struggles in a unit in the early stages and gets poor grades on the formative. The teacher realizes this and helps the student learn the material and the student then aces the summative. The student if graded on everything, would get a final grade of significantly much less than if not graded on everything. Those earlier formatives are intended to be mile-markers to help inform the teacher, not grades that can be potentially detrimental to a students overall success. The student who mastered the material, when once struggled, needs a grade to reflect their mastery of the content, not the struggle it took them to get there. Learning is about improving, making mistakes and learning from them, and there a certain necessity for grace in the classroom as we, teachers, guide the students through the struggle of learning and towards mastery.

"California State Universities Expository Reading and Writing Course Assignment Template "

This text offers input for teachers on getting students to better understand the text they are reading and how to write about the text more critically. Concerning the writing task, a teachers role is to guide the students into taking the text they have read, the ideas and themes, and channeling that into a text of their own ideas about the text, for various audiences. To be most effective, a teachers role is creative a hypothetical audience for the students to write to, usually peer or an academic level. The text states, “A well-designed writing prompt can minimize the sense of pretense and model the basic elements of an actual rhetorical situation.” This means that having students practice writing to a designed audience will help them in the real world to write effectively to any given audience.

The text offers some key strategies to help the students understand the assignment better. It is imperative that students understand the purpose of the writing task and who the audience is, so it is helpful to pose questions that they may answer, such as: What genre is this? What format will it have? And what is your rhetorical purpose? Then it is important to guide students to take a stance in their writing. Too easy can a analysis paper look more like a summary. So a teacher must pose questions about the issues concerning the text they are studying, so the may begin to develop their own views and stances on those issues. Questions may look like the following: What is the gist of your argument in one or two sentences? What is your main claim? What evidence best supports your argument? What evidence might you use in relation to what others say about your argument? These questions, very beneficial in a class discussion, will help the students best identify their stance, its significance, and where to go from there in their writing assignment.

The Common Core State Standards for English Language Arts Instruction in Grades 6–12

This section deals with how English Language Arts teachers are to implement the Common Core State Standards in the best way possible. Contrary to negative opinion, the Common Core Standards aren’t as restrictive as they have been vilified to seem. The actually merely provide a set of general standards that teachers are to implement when carefully and creatively crafting their own curriculum. Teachers are to “implement the Common Core State Standards in light of the best thinking and research on the teaching of English.”

The Standards were adopted during Obama’s administration, after Bush’s No Child Left Behind: A program where states created their standards individually. The big problems with that were that we had some states doing a much better job than others: a growing disparity between the educational success of each state. Also, there were still many high school students who lacked the abilities and skills to be successful in college. ‘The hope of Common Core State Standards is that a more consistent set of goals across states will make standards-based reform more effective.” This would significantly help resolve issues like that of high school students being unprepared for college. The general population views the standards as “a way of holding adults in the system accountable to the children they are education.” With a certain set of standards across the board, the desired result is the same and it is a much more effective system in checking the success of not only the administration but also implemented programs and teaching practices.

A fear is that a set of standards will create a problem with keeping up with the times and continual improvement in technology and changing of 21^st century needs. However, “The Partnership for 21^st century skills has proposed a curriculum framework that identifies the importance of 21^st century learning areas, including life and career skills, critical thinking, communication, collaboration, creativity, technology and information/media literacy. This curriculum framework will also help to keep Common Core State Standards in check and as current as possible. I would see this as more beneficial than a state by state standards program, which could easily have states fall behind with antiquated programs and strategies.

Why Discussions Fail

Brookfield’s Why Discussions Fail

Brookfield, in Why Discussions Fail, describes the aims of discussion as being: to develop critical, informed understanding, to enhance self-critique, to foster appreciation for diverse views, and to help people take informed action. While these are great and noble goals, Brookfield understands that discussion easily fails in the classroom due to reasons such as a lack of student preparedness, unrealistic expectations, and no ground rules. To combat this epidemic of plagued discussion attempts, Brookfield offers a variety of strategies to help insure the success of a classroom discussion. While not every tactic may work for every teacher, it is important for a teacher to understand their strengths and weaknesses to better assess which strategies may be more viable for their teaching style.

            The discussion strategy that really stood out to me is one the Brookfield calls The Circle of Voices. Just like the circle of life, okay maybe not so existentialist or lion-king-esque… The circle of voices has students get into a circle formation where they then share their ideas about a topic, taking turns, most often following around the circle. One of the ground rules is that while someone is talking, no one else can be talking. This helps to create an atmosphere where students, who normally are quiet or don’t talk much in class, are able to express their views, due in part to the fact that discussion is happening automatic and not for the student to decide when or if to speak out. Once the initial circle of voices is completed, the students then begin an open, more informal discussion. The ground rule here is that students are only allowed to talk about another students ideas, and not their own. This is great because for one it foster the dialogue aspect of discussion, where students are participating in this back and forth, and it prevents students from doing what Brookfield calls “Grandstanding”, where a single student takes the stage and wreaks havoc with his ideas. The students participate in this open discussion for as long as needed. I would be interested to try this type of discussion strategy in my classroom and see if students respond to it well. I like the ways it can get students talking, and about others ideas, but I also worry about making anyone feel like to have to speak. Overall though, it seems like a fun, engaging discussion activity.