Standards-Based Grading: Passive Aggression
The hulk meme is getting a bit out of control. There are about 50,000 different hulk-related personas on twitter, all typing in capital letters. I’ve retired the Cornally-Hulk. Mostly because being mean and angry never really changes peoples’ minds.
No longer! Well, at least not when I'm feeling happy.
Now that I’ve been proselytizing SBG at my school for a while, I’ve developed a core group of students that totally drink the Kool-Aid. By that I mean they actually want to think, learn, and don’t really care about their grades. This group of students might represent the only professionally meaningful thing I’ve ever done, well, that and this.
One of these students came to me upset. She was obviously having a philosophical dilemma; she said that another teacher had told her that this SBG fad sweeping through our school was ridiculous. She was all worried because the other teacher had claimed that this whole “retesting” thing was going to ruin kids’ ability to study for “real” classes and college.
I couldn’t help but hulk out a little. I could feel my brow deepening and my shorts ripping. My emotional response had more to do with the fight over this student’s view of education than about any particular system.
To her, both teachers represent authority. How is she supposed to choose between us? It was very uncomfortable to have to make the decision to completely disagree with a colleague directly to a student’s face. Perhaps it was unprofessional.
The conversation played out like this: We talked about how recess is given to elementary students but not to middle or high school kids. We talked about developmentally appropriate education and the psychology of motivation. We talked about how preparing for college is not the same as mimicking college verbatim. Disregarding the psychotic amount of time I get to spend with my high schoolers in favor of the lecture-ignore model that college makes bank off of seems ridiculous to me.
I told her that SBG reflects learning, and grades should not be on the pedestal that they are, acting as the soul product of our school system.
Common SBG Misconceptions:
I can totally empathize with the other teacher. At first, SBG seems as flimsy as boiled spaghetti and half as rigorous.
However, the grand misconception is that somehow “retesting” is this free-for-all where everyone just tries the same problem until they get it perfect and then everyone hugs and does the happy dance.
That couldn’t be further from the truth. Reassessments (not retesting) are generally more difficult — varied in context and application — and require the student to identify the content standard from within a tangled mass of information, or better yet, a lack thereof.
It makes me absolutely crazy to imagine this student wondering which one of us is preparing her for her future, and which one is lying. The false dichotomy there hurts. The fact that we spend all this time arguing about grading at all is the real tragedy.
All I want for my students is to be able to interact with a piece of knowledge, step back for a second, surmise the situation, and then approach learning with a fervor that has nothing to do with “just doing something.” That’s not good enough.
I had a student seriously pissed at me today, because I said that, “No, I will not simply explain the answer to what is about to be an 84-minute exploration of seismology.”
Her retort was telling: “I want to go to a good college, so what’s the answer? I need to get an A on this test.”
“You won’t get an A unless you understand earthquakes.” I said.
“Fine, I’ll just have someone from last semester tell me the answer.” She said.
Rest of her group: face-palm.
To Put My Foot Down:
1. Don’t define yourself by the “difficulty” of your assessments. Get over yourself. No one cares how many people fail your class.
2. The only thing that matters is extensibility. How many of your students actually learned the material well enough to use it later in a unique situation that has none of the trappings of the previous hamstringing problem?
3. Proceduralism is barely on the learning spectrum. I could teach a fifth grader to take the derivative of a polynomial, but most fifth graders can’t grasp the concept of infinitesimals. Which matters more: doing it, or understanding it?
Explaining Teaching to Non-Teachers: Context Before Content Inquiry Stylee: “Human” Error
[...] Standards-Based Grading: Passive Aggression [...]
I have an 18 year old son who is going to college unprepared (at least in math) and I believe it is because he just knows how to play the game.
I was his 8th grade math teacher, he took Algebra and I mistakenly recommended him for Geometry in 9th grade because he wanted it and his meaningless grade in my class warranted it. (I have just started using SBG). I knew in my heart that he should repeat Algebra, though. I teach at a pK-12 private school. When he went to high school he passed and moved along, Geometry and Alg 2 then Discrete Math. I was smart enough by then to know he shouldn’t take pre-calc with his flimsy foundation. He got an abysmal score on the math section of his ACTs (13-14) but luckily his reading scores (in the 30s) gave him a decent overall score and he got in to the college he wanted. He strongly dislikes math know and I worry about his ability to pass a college level math course.
If I (and his high school teachers) had been doing SBG, I don’t think this would have happened. I would have known how to remediate and he would know what he needed to learn before it got to this point.
Anna: Wow, that might be the most powerful comment ever read. I have to try as hard as I can to keep the fact that these are other people’s children in the forefront of my mind. They have a future. They will exist after my class. They will have to come home at break, and explain whether they’re getting anything out of their thousands-of-dollars education, and if I’m the person that trained them to game it instead, yikes.
For those of us who want to change, SBG is really a powerful tool. What would you say to people in your department that don’t like it?
What would you say to people in your department that don’t like it?
I think the people in my department don’t want to change and I’m probably just irritating to them. I am giving a talk on it next week though so we’ll see…
That’s awesome! How are you planning to introduce it, and who’s you’re audience?
I may be double posting on this, I deleted what I was typing…sorry.
Anyway, when I started on my SBG journey about 6 years ago I decided I had to do it no matter what anyone thought. So, some angry parents, a couple of trips to the superintendents office, and 5 years later, our entire department (minus THAT guy) is grading by standards.
What I found effective was sharing my success stories with department members that I had good relationships with and then always soliciting feedback from my students. Having that written feedback from students is key to establishing the validity of what you are doing.
I believe very strongly that ideas that are educationally sound and defensible are worth fighting for. It might take a while and be a little painful but worth it in the end.
I’m giving a talk at MCTM (Minnesota) next Sat. and my principal asked me to give a short version at a faculty meeting in a few weeks. I’ll post my presentation on my blog when I finish it. I’m a bit embarrassed about my blog but I’ll try and get over it.
As a former university professor I can assure you that the thing that annoyed me most was students who cared more about how to get good grades than on learning. The look on their faces when I told them that I had designed the assessment to reward the people who had learned things was probably the next most annoying thing: why should this be such an odd concept. I love what you are doing here.
In addition to this colleague’s comment about preparing for college, a commentor on a previous post said something about preparing students for life where they get graded. I didn’t respond then because I was rendered speechless.
School is the only place where you are graded. In the Real World (TM) you are not graded. You do an adequate job, you do an outstanding job, you fail to perform significantly (and get a warning and then fired). That’s it. There is no “how do I do this thing my boss asked me to do well enough to get an A, B, or C?” And most of time (especially if you have a job requiring a college education), you have to figure it out for yourself.
Maybe you’ll never need to figure out some seismology problem again after taking Sean’s class. But you WILL have to solve problems. On your own. Frequently. That’s what Real Life (TM) involves.
Thinking about it, you sometimes get to “retest” in Real Life, too. Because your boss might recognize that that was a tough problem and that while your strategy didn’t work, you learned stuff from trying it (and it was a sensible strategy) and you should be allowed to take another run at solving it, perhaps with the help of one of your colleagues.
Corollary to #1
Don’t define yourself by the number of A’s you give out. Get over yourself. No one cares how many As you give out.
The beauty/horror of Apple’s Power School software:
I can go into my students grades and see how they have done on every assignment/test/etc.
I’m so tired of seeing: Homework-> A, A, A, A, A Test -> D Grade B
Also, Shawn, I would love to see what one of your assessments looks like, so I can compare it to my own
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Hey Shawn,
I just want to say thank you for the great website and clear explanation of SBG. This is my second semester of teaching science to elementary education teachers using SBG and it’s been a blast! Your experiences in this post remind me of several that I have had as well.
ara
(Warning: Contains philosophy) What you said reminds me of John Dewey’s idea about an “educative experience.” He thought that the litmus test for whether an experience was educative or non-educative was whether or not the learner left the experience more ready to get more out of her/his next experience. Learning makes us more “response-able”, better equipped to respond (ask questions, think, etc) in future situations. (Note: That’s obviously my interpretation of Dewey). I’m betting your student will take this contrast between you and the other teacher and chew on it for a long time, eventually realizing (as most of us do eventually) that real learning in the real world involves independent thought rather than simple reward/punishment schemes. Well done, glad you hulked out, and keep on truckin’.
Your colleague reminds me of Lucille from Arrested Development:
Lucille: [flashback] Dinner’s ready. We’re having Lindsay chops. What? I just wanted to be ready in case some bully at school was as clever as I am.
Narrator: No bully ever would be.
To be fair to your colleague, the students that do go on to college will find “bullies that are as clever as he is” and give tests like he/she does. But I agree with Aaron: the college-bound kids will figure out that they need to take exams to do well.
As a college professor, I will say that I would MUCH rather have a student who learned the high school content than is comfortable taking tests. So if your colleague can convince us that his/her way leads to more learning, I am all for it (but I think that we have already seen that the old way is far from ideal).
Bret
Plus they might just get a prof like Bret that uses some form of SBG so you were actually “preparing them for University” all along.
I feel your pain. The real issue is what “prepared for college” means. If it means having a solid understanding of the concepts that colleges require of you – truly learning and not learning and purging, then SBG will get you there. If it means learning HOW to learn and taking an active role in shaping your learning then nothing will prepare a kid better than SBG done right.
On the other hand if, as your colleague suggests, preparing for college means learning how to make your entire grade rest on two large exams, then SBG might not do that. However, if that is the goal, then what we really need to do is teach kids how to cram better and continually give them high pressure, high stakes tests. We might also want to start speaking with an accent and have inconvenient office hours.
I always laugh out loud at staff meetings when the issue having of final exams comes up and someone waxes on about how important those are for “preparing kids for college.” I always try to imagine all of those students taking their first college final and being confused as to what to do. If only we had tested them more in high school…
BTW Shawn – very much looking forward to meeting you in Green Lake next month. If you have time for a beer it’s on me.
Re: the “preparing them for college” meme that infects our high schools. I love to point out that if taking three hour exams is so important to our students’ success in college, maybe we should have them do it more often than seven times over four years (we don’t make seniors take spring exams… I guess they don’t need anymore practice with exams by that point).
In middle school there is the “preparing them for high school” meme, which usually takes on the flavor of giving the students loads of homework. Why so much homework? So they will know how to do homework! Makes perfect (non)sense! We have several students in our school who came from middle schools where no formal homework was given (beyond “you should read every night, like grown-ups do”). They also had no grades! Whoa! They must SUCK at high school, right? Nope, they are the best, most well-rounded, and calmest lovers of learning that you can imagine. It takes them, oh, two nights to get used to homework and, maybe, one test to get used to grades. Not bad in exchange for sanity, now is it?
This reminds me of how writing in lab notebooks in pen is supposed to prepare students to maintain lab notebooks professionally. Really? I have kept notarized notebooks of research results in grad school and at three different companies. Each time, the specifics of “how to keep a lab notebook” were different. Each time I learned the company’s (university’s) requirements in half an hour. Jeez. Can we concentrate on physics, please?