I’m thinking back to a related-rates¹ project I had my kids do. They related the immersion of a popular culture character’s name (like, “Jeannie” in the late 1960′s) to the frequency of it as a baby name (Social Security Administration data).

Some students had a hard time with the project, and ended up watering down their investigations. I was lax on them, knowing that they’d be assessed on related rates several times in the future.

Their investigations started grand and ended up with hardly any luster at all, as they tried to get it all done during class (ugh, I hate that mentality)

The more I think back though, the more I wonder if being a bit more prim would’ve been good for them without watering down my assessment scheme.

What do you all think would be a suitable and defensible policy?

1. Yeah, yeah, related rates are a joke contrived for calculus one courses; I know. But they’re a gatekeeper, and until every college everywhere stops including them (or at least starts teaching them as “the implicit chain rule,” I’ll still have to teach the garbage.

Thank GOD I can write about math again. I’ve come through my blue period (being obsessed with grading reform) and I’m back to actually teaching math.

How do they pick these pictures?

Right now I have one math student; she’s a refugee from the Pre-Calc II class down the hall, and I’ve taken her on as an independent study.

Oh, what’s Pre-Calc II you ask? It’s a class my school created to prevent sophomores and freshmen from taking Calculus. Yes, we had that problem. No, it’s not a good problem to have.

Pre-Calc II is basically an annoying amount of trig taht no one ever uses (I was a physicist) and a bunch of stuff about conics precariously teetering on a dearth of orbital mechanics.

Let’s think for a second what it means to have a plentitude of sophomores ready to take calculus. It means that you had students get through Algebra, Algebra II, Geometry, and some sort of Pre-Calc (srsly, what is that?) in 3 academic years or less. This was possible at my school because of block scheduling and the way our middle school accelerates kids, but I kind of think it’s kind of bonkers.

Which leads me to the question, is there such a thing–before I try to invent it and waste my whole summer–as a mental abstraction aptitude metric that people don’t balk at? Seriously, is there? I’d love a link.

Well, back to the action, my little refugee came to me bruised and battered from scheduling issues and mismatched pedagogy. It kind of felt like nursing a sulking falcon back to health (which I’ve done, in a figuratively literal sense).

I have no explanation for this. I just like raptors. Rap-tors. Awesome.

The process went like this:

Fugee: What chapters should I learn and how many days should I spend on each?

Me: I don’t know, it depends on what we can motivate properly.

Fugee: So, like one per week with quizzes on Fridays?

Me: Ha, ok, sure.

Fugee: Why are you laughing at me?

Me: Oh, I’m not, sorry. Here, roll this iron ball by this magnet and come up with a model for its motion…

Here’s what we’ve done so far:

• My little Fugee has built a parabolic oven from a directerix and focus (you’d be surprised how little they really understand when they read those little definitions in the book about how these things are constructed)
• She has dealt with the square dartboard.
• She has learned to use GeoGebra to find relationships between arbitrary measures on ellipses, hyperbola, and whatnot.
• I had her build a tethered-cow-and-barn system and optimize the grazing area.
• She has surveyed and found the altitude of nearly ever lamp post on campus.
• She has created a unit circle and divined such things as tangent, cosecant, and versine.
• And now she’s messing around with shapes that have more than two foci. I honestly have no idea where this is going.

Here’s my thought-knot. This is an independent study, so I have very little time to devote to her proper math education; hence all the trite little activities above. Although she claims to like math again, and she’s excited to take Calculus next year (which will be all about sailboats, btw), I can’t help but feel like I basically reached half-a-knuckle deep into my bag of cheapest tricks.

Is it progress that she thought this was awesome even though I feel like I’m short changing her?

Oh, and by the way, I’m a Phoenix! FML!

xkcd explains feedback perfectly.

This student hadn’t really done much towards meeting his competencies. He was a in-and-out kind of student. I called him on it, and his behavior totally changed today. I hope tomorrow bodes well also!

There’s a fine line between expecting students to fill in competency gaps using feedback and just mailing them a bobcat. I haven’t found that line perfectly yet, but I can’t help but believe that a more psychologically-sound how-to-teach-responsibility has to somehow distill out of this zaniness.

Will students truly learn to value feedback as the currency of learning rather than points or grades? As I leave something like 75-100 text/video comments each day, I have to hope so.

And then you get this email:

Mr Cornally, I uploaded a paper I wrote last night to BlueHarvest. I’m going to be gone the rest of the week for state Jazz, and I’m bummed because I think my paper is really good and I want to talk to you about it and maybe get something check off [marked proficient, in our parlence]. Can you please leave me some feedback before Friday so I can revise it at while we’re at contest?

This student has crossed the Feedback Threshold (FeedThresh, as we call it). He:

• Knows that first attempts are rarely perfect, and often require serious revising.
• Wants expert feedback on work that is established and based on research and the literature.
• Knows that his learning is not tied to class time or any other arbitrary unit of time or space.

The small victories, right? I feel kind of like Hawkeye shooting arrows at the end of The Avengers. Look at me, I’m helping! right? Right?

Does it matter if I know the order in which the Star Wars settings are visited in order to assess well as a fan? What is assessment’s use? How can you possible rank me in my first course in biology? These are the questions I struggle with daily instead of cleaning my classroom, which is a disaster at this point.

I digress. Let’s teach with Star Wars today. I think I’m going to set my kids to the question: How strong and what type of field must the shields be around the death star. Get the white boards. Go!

Oh, and here’s a saber-toothed tiger.

The format uses some pretty fancy audio/video integration as well as a shared canvas and an unexplained bowl of fruit sent to your closest 3D printer. Tune in Wednesday, May 2nd at 8:30 CST for some serious shop talk.

Topics will include:

• Using numberless assessment strategies
• Using moments of clarity as standards
• Avoiding lab manuals at all costs (especially printing)
• The concept of “audience” in a competency-based classroom
• Teaching particle physics to teenagers (eggs, models, FNAL)

Seriously, though, CBE is a way of individualizing education by keeping track of individual competencies and allowing for asynchronous projects and learning. Teachers change into project managers, and students are forced into the role of project leaders. I use BlueHarvest to keep track of it all.

Competency-Based education (CBE) in my classroom looks like this: There’s a line of students about 5-6 long that are waiting to have a conference with me. I have a copious list of questions connected to each standard ready to go. The other 20 or so students are buried in computers, posters, calling contacts for their projects, or working somewhere off site. None of them are working on the same thing, and all projects have been initiated by students and vetted by me.

Here’s a flow chat I made for parent-teacher conferences!

COMIC SANS IN FULL EFFECT. HIDE YOUR DAUGHTERS.

Competency-Based Education is a natural offshoot of the standards-based grading philosophy. If we’re going to make it explicit what kids are to know, and we’re going to put a heavier weight on communication of progress on those standards, it stands to reason that the timeline and method by which these standards are met is arbitrary.

At its core CBE allows students to approach material in their own way. Many students are uncomfortable with this at first and often feel that the instructor has “left them to flounder” or that they’ve been “forced into an independent study.”

I would argue that these sentiments are remnants of a system where students are used to being led from idea to idea with little concern for the narrative arc of the course — by teacher or student.

Traditionally, students spend very little time in the planning stages of learning. As all adults figure out, the success of any endeavor–whether it be learning, building something, or throwing a party–lies in equally in the planning and the execution. I want to help students through this realization.

Take this quote from a recent convert:

This [CBE] is way harder because you always make me connect my previous projects to the one I’m doing. I have include more than one standard in a project, no matter how hard I try to stay on task.

This student seems to have a negative emotion tied to this. I have effervescent glee:

Here’s another gem:

Yea, my friends say they don’t like you as much as they did last quarter, but they feel like they’re doing more work and learning more than they ever have in other classes.

I can’t vouch for the trustworthiness of that comment, but I’ll take the connotations.

It takes roughly 90 minutes to administer 10 oral examinations that are deep enough to determine whether a student is competent. If my students aren’t working in groups, this means about 10 other students did not get to talk with me that day. So it takes about two blocks to give students the time they need to either: get an assessment of the negative space between them and mastery, demonstrate mastery, or simply talk over some content.

Here’s a cherub talking about project design:

I was just planning on making PowerPoints for everything, but after the first two didn’t really teach me anything, and you kept making me go back and answer harder questions, I made this children’s book about a hot dog that gets digested instead.

The student then went on to ace the question-and-answer portion of the examination, whereas he normally faltered even being able to refer to his hamstringing PowerPoint slides.

Finally, I caught myself chastising a student who was sitting in the back of my room being a bit too loud as I was giving an oral exam.

“Work on something! Anything!” I snapped.

Normally for me this would be a classic poor teacher-ism. Students generally have no idea what “something” is.

Today, the student knew exactly what to do, because he was in control of how, when, and what he was learning about. He got to work, and had something to show for his time at the end of the block.

That said, I really try not to be; teaching is just really hard. At the end of each day–when I rest my locked arms on crooked knees supporting my entire upper body, exhausted from answering 650 Maslow-rific questions, standing for 7 hours, and not peeing once–I can’t help but think about those kids who still don’t have an effing clue what a spleen does.

This student wants to become a math teacher. Again, maybe because I’m inspiring, or maybe it’s a subtle kick in the junk. Who knows! But she’s going to be damn good either way.

The Smiley Method:

She shared with me an assessment method that I can’t help but love: The Smiley Method.

One of her professors gives students a timeline for becoming proficient, which he records as semi-arcs in the grade book. 180 degrees = half way to mastery.

The kicker is that each assignment has a deadline at which you have to meet proficiency (270 degrees), after which you can keep reassessing as you wish in order to get the full circle, which is then playfully transformed into the ultimate in motivation, a smiley face (see dog, above).

Genius? Games? Questionable psychology? The roulette that is assessment is never boring! Discuss in the comments, please.

I can’t help but wonder how a timeline for proficiency makes any sense. What happens if you only get 265 degrees on the “due date?”

$!@#&^%! DUE DATES:

That said, a lot of people are hung up on retaining due dates, and I hope the previous anecdote provides something to chew on.

Personally, I only believe in due dates that exist, and my arbitrary assignment of when something should be learned is just that, arbitrary. However, our semester does end, the science fair is one night, and students do need to graduate. (see disastrous summer assessment below…)

Those dates feel a little more natural to me than, “Welp, I guess it’s time for a quiz… because… um… It’s been 5 days?” Or, worse, “I’m done teaching this, let’s move on…”

I’m going to make a wild, hand-waving declaration that this will be the flavor of SBG I sit on for a while*

• Quizzes every Thursday (or so)
• Quizzes cover a relatively new standard and a random old one.
• All scores will be binary (got it or don’t)
• Scores are reported rarely, and comments are given in their stead more often than not. (BlueHarvest will allow for limited number entry soon)
• Onus will be on students to demonstrate proficiency in ways other than quizzes so that they can curate their own feedback profile.

My current experiment, which consists of totally asynchronous project-based learning, and intermittent TED style talks, is working ok. I’ve had to extend my course into the summer to relieve the stress of the May 30th deadline.

I suppose what I’m asking is a little intense. A binary “yes” is really hard to get. An ‘A’ now results from high mastery of 90% of the content, whereas it used to be an mathematical game where some standards could be thrown under the bus.

Students are slowly taking to the idea that feedback is valuable commodity. The number of students that queue up just to talk something over is increasing, while the number of dejected, but-I-deserve-credit-because-I-made-this-crappy-PowerPoint is going down.

Experiment or die. Right?

Here are my responses to the initial questions compiled by the attendees (Attendee Questions: My super thought out responses not typed the night before or anything like that)

1. What does your grade book look like? BlueHarvest or ActiveGrade
2. How do you calculate the final grade? Percentage of standards considered proficient. There are other options. Averaging standard scores (probably should add a bias of +6, if using a 4-point scale). Setting rules, like: Got any 2′s? That’s a ‘C’
   
3. For reporting, we will use beginning-developing-secure-extends. For rubrics of written work (narration, for example), I am secure on making the rubrics on everything except extends. MORE of the same is not extends. What if we use ‘published outside of school’ as the extends for all written work? -Jim Calkins, WBMS. I love this idea. I’ve been toying with the concept of “audience” heavily this semester, and I think it’s a bigger idea than any of us realize. Although, I have a hard time with “extends” being the top of the scale from a bookkeeping perspective, but not from a philosophical one. I think it will be hard to avoid cookie-cutter extensions, though.
   
4. How do you design instruction, handouts, and assessments to reflect standards being taught?  Are the standards explicitly mentioned?  If so, just as needed, or are they mindfully and meaningfully verbalized and/or written on handouts and assessments? I would recommend shifting the meta-cognitive load onto the students. Model for them the process of connecting class activities back to the standards, at first, and then back off. The most important thing is to have the students justify the usefulness of each standard. Without these few days at the beginning of a semester you’re psychologically sunk. For this reason, I’ve experimented with rolling out standards when they’re first “instructed” upon.
5. Writing generally takes more time to assess than an objective math problem, for example.  With 100 or more students on a roster, describe and explain a manageable system for formative and culminating written assessments when multiple revision opportunities are offered. Just do what you already do. Break down each paper into the common writing/expression standards and assess each on each assignment. I thought SBG would be way more work, and it was for a while, by now I’m down to more efficient useful assessments that actually get at the kids’ knowledge rather than just making them “do enough work.” As far as allowing re-writes, I think you have to judge that based on whether they actually want to publish the piece, or just wait for the next book/prompt to show growth from the previous one. Don’t get caught in the false equation of reassessment and retakes. (Not equal)
6. Explain how student accountability for learning the content is part of the standards based grading philosophy.  During our district’s grade reform discussions, not penalizing students for late work and giving half credit for missing work have both been mentioned.  For example, if students have not read a piece of literature for homework, then classroom discussion suffers.  How can I assess if the standard is being met if students haven’t done any coursework during the course? Do the students see the motivation in meeting the standard or reading the literature? People rarely shy away from learning, but they often do from mandates and ultimatums. SBG is designed to communicate what the student needs to work on to get better. This often comes at the cost of arbitrary deadlines, but ends up teaching the student the harsh reality of true deadlines (semester, summer, etc…)
   
7. Do students need to master the learning of one standard before moving onto the next? No. No way. The central theme of SBG is that you can’t possibly know how long it will take anyone to learn anything.
8. How do you define mastery of the standards?  Do we need to calibrate our understanding of a four, three, etc., for each standard to explain this process to students and parents? First of all, I would suggest using a 5-10 scale so that you don’t have to do a bunch of math each time a parent wants to see a grade. (unless of course you can wean them off of running grades) For me, and this is unpopular, mastery is meeting my expectations, which I keep as a high as I can possibly defend. A lot of people define mastery as extension, but I think that will come naturally from students who are engaged, not from an assessment scheme.
9. With the number of standards we must teach and how they’re sometimes assessed in individual, multiple assessments, how do we easily monitor student progress?  Do we mainly indicate and assess power standards in the grade book? Yup. Don’t simply dump in Iowa Core or whatever zany, esoteric, jargonified list you’re nominally beholden to. Have the kids help you write the standards so that they can refer back to the names and descriptions later. I would say no more than 40 per class.
10. How is standards-based grading different than putting a letter grade on an assignment?  Does a number or letter convey the same meaning? It’s all a form of reductionism, which implies loss of information. SBG is significantly less lossy than traditionally grading because it skips the step of arbitrarily averaging scores from multiple ideas (standards) into one assessment score on a quiz or paper. If you report out by major idea, then a number or letter will tell that student where to spend their precious remediation time.
11. Does a retake mean a new assessment/test needs created and given?  Just correcting mistakes on a test doesn’t seem valid to demonstrate mastery but is it? “Retake” is a dirty word. Using that word will damn any SBG impetus you had at your school. It totally depends on the standard. If you’re assessing diction, give feedback on Paper 1 just like you normally would. Then on Paper 2, look for the implementation of that feedback. Who care is Paper 1 was about Hamlet, and Paper 2 is about Asimov. When a student flubs something on an assessment, feedback is the only currency (like I need to tell that to English teachers), but students will want to immediately throw that feedback up as learning, which is, at best, short term.
12. Is it assumed that the standards of which we speak are the Common Core standards adopted by Iowa? Adapt them, reduce them, make them not sound like someone put the jargon machine on “random.”
13. I too am concerned about what I perceive to be a lack of deadlines in SBG philosophy.  If a student doesn’t complete the reading, he can’t participate in the discussion that will enhance his understanding of what he’s read.  And when the rest of the class starts the assignment/activity/project that is built upon the reading, this student won’t have the necessary understandings to compete it. If the structure of our classes is built upon sharing common texts, kids can’t work on their own timelines.  And frankly, it doesn’t seem to be a case of some needing more time than others to master anything at all–they’re just not making the time to get work done.  I don’t want to enable procrastinating!  As a middle school teacher, I’m trying to teach timeliness (which, by the way, is a 21st Century Skill). They’re not going to do it in either assessment system, so don’t expect the way you grade to fix this. However, the idea that they’re never damned to an averaged grade because of late work or immaturity might spur some hope and time for actually finishing the assignment. But don’t get stuck on the deadline thing. I think it’s been sold way too hard that SBG is bereft of deadlines; that’s simply not true. There are hard deadlines, and you need to choose them, and have them make sense. They need to have as little to do with you wanting to teach responsibility (which is almost impossible), and everything to do with how a product of learning is time dependent somehow. (like publishing in a newspaper, or being in a play)
14. Don’t we need to agree what a 4 means?  (And 3, 2, 1?)  I strongly believe that demonstrating mastery is NOT NOT NOT an A.  We need to expect students to go “above and beyond,” as least part of the time. This is a touchy issue, especially with inflated grades actually determining how students get into college. Here’s my defense of 4 as mastery: How many students master everything in your curriculum now? None? Thought so. How many get D’s by mastering none of it? A lot of the D’s. A ‘B’ in SBG implies 85% mastery, which I’m ok with. Even better, a ‘D’ in SBG implies that a student who’s used to learning nothing, actually learned more than half of the course content. Win.

I’m sweating; It’s really nerve-wracking to write for English teachers. I wonder how students feel?

Yeah? So what if this is what I do with my prep?

 First, don’t attempt to understand Laser Pandas; the Laser Pandas will choose to understand you.

The point of Laser Pandas was to be a bad game. My premise is, and always will be, that teachers take far too much of the cognitive load onto themselves. We get caught up in the minutia of lesson planning and quickly forget that this is where all the thinking is done.

My students took to Laser Pandas quite willingly, but for the wrong reasons. As you can imagine, teenagers in a school will flock to nearly anything that doesn’t smell like sitting in a seat and listening. This is embarrassing for what we call “education”, and only good for me because even my most paltry attempts at fun will be considered monumental by comparison. Kind of like reverse sun spots. Let’s fix this:

The pandas were separated into heads, bodies, and appendages pieces and randomly passed out to students. For instance, a student may end up with a panda that is blind, has scuba tanks, and has lobster hands. Now, let the awkward biology-class mating simulations begin!

Here are the rules.

Here’s the point: The students are to create new rules for the game. They are to make it more accurate. I love this kind of lesson because it’s so stupidly simple even I can understand it.

Fun => Not good enough => Edit => More Fun => Repeat

You could even give a quiz, if you’re so inclined, about rule edits. You could make each student run a round of LzrPndz and have other students critique.

Laser Pandas never stops teaching. Laser Pandas loves you and wants what’s best for your understanding of genetics. Laser Pandas is better than Laser Cats.

I usually spend my Sundays watching marginal sports programming. It’s a habit I’ve retained since college. Today, it’s NCAA championship women’s bowling.

Humanity has a quality to it that is completely ineffable, but I know that it’s seen in part during sport. You know, getting something done–anything–despite cultural valuation on whether it should be done, where does that live? How do you riff on that?

Serendipitously, I went bowling this weekend, too. We didn’t take it seriously, and I scored an 88. You’re worthy, you’re worthy, get up, it’s ok.

The ESPN announcer just said that a steely-eyed girl was “first team all-american.” My mind is being blown.

Think about that for a second. Such a set exists and is finite.

If a tenacity for bowling, replete with the inherent subtleties of technique and panache (a girl just threw for a spare and walked away before it was halfway down the lane, consider her shoulder brushed), can exist, it makes me wonder why that feeling doesn’t normally exist in the classroom.

I’m not saying it never exists, I’m just saying that the normal American classroom has a feel that is quite opposite that of the NCAA women’s championship bowling match. Am I now envious of bowlers? Yup.

For me, the crux seems to be time. Student after student have presented fantastic ideas to me that I hope to help guide to fruition. My heart sings when students want to embark on projects that are new to them and me. However most of these projects die the slow death of day-to-day tedium.

“I just don’t think I’ll get my homework done, Mr. C.” or some iteration of this-project-would-be-cool-if-I-didn’t-have-grades-and-homework-to-worry-about.

The kids aren’t dumb, they’re grades really do matter, but at what point are we going to agree that buy-in teaches deeper lessons than, oh, anything?

My classroom is no different. My students have until the end of May to become proficient in 18 biology standards. I’ve given them the freedom to approach these however they want, but a few are choosing the easiest route they can find, despite it not being successful at demonstrating any kind of proficiency.

The last part truly amazes me. The only students who are moving efficiently through the curriculum are those that are doing the crazy projects; the students who are running experiments or spending their time asking me questions instead of the other way around are the ones who are excelling. Not all of them are typical ‘A’ students either.

What does this mean? It means we have a timing problem folks.

Week 3:

We are now entering week 3 of my biology experiment, and things are interesting. Here’s a quick recap:

Students have been given the standards list and free reign over how they become proficient. Some are using me as a content delivery device and some are choosing only to come to me for assessment (read: feedback), most are some mixture of the two. Students are graded on a binary scale, with the currency being feedback. The students only get a “yes” if we both agree that they can identify and use their knowledge outside of classroom.

The rub has been getting students to show proficiency in ways that are not boring. A large minority paradoxically love PowerPoint. I don’t know how this happened, considering that they all claim to hate it when teachers use ppt. Even more paradoxically, students who choose to create powerpoints to show proficiency rarely if ever do so on the first or second go round. Paraparadoxically, people who choose Keynote always assess well the first time and generally more likeable (I joke, I joke).

My talks (given and recorded about twice a week) have gotten more surgical. They began as vaguely interconnected TED-style bits about things I like (bacon). Students have begun requesting topics, or even playing a fun game of whose-line-is-it-anyway-style requests. For instance, today was penguins and chromosomes. I’m more than happy to oblige.

I can’t help but think about the hours those NCAA bowlers must spend on the lanes doing something that most people do as a semi-bored lark.

I also can’t help but think about some of the powerpoints I’m about to lambaste tomorrow, and how they share little to nothing with those (athletes’?) athletes’ mentality on getting something learned.

Either way, the experiments continue, and I become a modicum better at teaching.

Party on, Wayne.