End of Year Reflections

With my first year teaching Grade 7 Math and Science over, I have come away really loving this year. Compared with my past few years where I have taught four or five classes, working with only two classes over two subjects and homeroom made the year feel quite different. I felt that I worked more closely with the students, parents and supports in the school due to having half of the number of faces and stories to work with. Yes, the downside is that I didn't get a chance to meet the whole grade, but I am looking forward to being in the same class and having the same set up next year. With this in mind, I have made my "Affirm, Refine and Aspire" for next year. 

Affirm:

The big thing that was affirmed for me this year is that I do love Middle School. I really enjoy how my students are wanting independence in their learning, want to explore the world around them, play games and challenge themselves, me and their peers. I also love how forgiving this age group is if you are honest with them. I have learned that once they feel you are on the same "team" as them, they will be alright with me saying "hey, I want to try something out today. I think that it will be fun, and I look forward to your feedback afterwards". They are concerned about their performance, but are open to seeing and focusing on their personal growth and goal setting rather than a percentage grade at the end. 

Refine:

This year I focused on assessment and evaluation; its purpose, goals and outcomes in my class. I started, with the support of my teaching team, using a Standards Based Grading (SBG) platform with my class. This method meshed perfectly with my Challenge by Choice activities as well as my strong belief in creating opportunities at any point for students to demonstrate their understanding. Going into next year, I want to refine how I will be using SBG. I will start the year with using Fresh Grade, a program to organize the evaluations and assessments as well as the standards. I am considering giving students the list of goals at the start of each unit and encouraging them to track their own growth over the year and take ownership over their learning. From using a quiz goal list in Khan Academy I have seen how my students used it to take the responsibility in their learning and review. I am hoping that the same thing will be possible in their "Learning Goals" (Standards) 

Aspire:

My mind, as it always has, always goes BIG with my ideas and goals. However, what has happened is that my big thinking and great ideas are great, but they also don't provide the time and breathing room for my students big ideas and personal exploration. I am setting the goal for next year to be more "Grade 7". To me this means that I am not trying to get my students to create final products that are reflective of a Grade 10, but ones that are reflective of each person at Grade 7. To do this, I am planning on taking the first three months of the school year to show my students the thinking routines, goal setting and essential skills (such as research, communication, and group work) that they will need for the year. After this, I am hoping to create more open ended projects, questions and ideas that my students will use tools described before to explore and communicate their learning. I also want to aspire to more individual check in time with students, going over their goals and what they are doing to meet the goals over time. 

To help with my goals, I am taking time over the summer to learning. I am taking the online course called "Science and Cooking" to get Grade 7 ideas for creating experiments that my students will do at home and explain the science to their families. I will explore Standard Based Grading further by reading Rick Wormeli and I am also looking at online tools that would be the best for my students to track their learning.

I also am setting the goal of taking more time for my own reflection over the year, and trying to do a better job on my blog. I want to track my thinking and development going forward so I can be better at explaining how I got to the end to others when they ask.

Hope that you all have a great summer! 

 

Transitioning to Standards Based Grading: The Evaluation

I am currently on a journey with my teaching partner to transition our Grade 7 Math and Science classroom into a Standards Based Grading (SBG) classroom. We are the only ones in our Middle School program doing it, so I have been very grateful for the ideas and feedback from others through the #SBLchat on twitter, online conferences and other teachers blogs.

This post is my reflection prior to handing back the first standards based written evaluation (test) to our students and their parents. So far, I am feeling pretty good. 

Due to the recommendations of others, at the start of the unit we handed the students out the list of the three standards that we were exploring as well as the success criteria for each. Since I am in Ontario, our success criteria was identified to be one clearly stated expectation for each of the categories (Knowledge, Application, Thinking and Communication). This way we ensured that each standard had a balance between the categories. 

Click here for this document. 

Students, with the standards in hand, didn't really get too excited. I however told them how excited I was... and they gave me a round of applause for my enthusiasm. Needless to say, that by presenting them with the standards at the start made no difference than in the past unit. So we continued on, completing activities in class, formative quizzes, challenge by choice stations and weekly homework. Each weekly quiz had a standard at the top so the students could gauge their development and understanding. The one difference that did occur was when the written evaluation time was decided, the students were not asking "Miss, what is on the test?". They all were aware of the standards as it was identified in each assignment, activity and homework problem that they did. 

Prior to the evaluation the students did a reflection identifying how they felt about their understanding for each standard (Working on, Proficient and Mastered) and they created their own review based on their reflection. The students appeared fairly confident and not stressed. 

Click here for this document.

As for me, I was very happy. Since having created the standards and how clear they were for the students, they were also clear to me. Instead of having "Fractions" be the title of the evaluation where before I would have been stressed to create an evaluation that was challenging, reflected the standards, but also would allow the students to show their understanding, having the standards, the creation of the evaluation was easier. I knew exactly what kinds of understanding I was needing to look for. Since there were no "marks" for each question, I could have standards appear in multiple questions, allowing me to see the understanding of my students thinking in diverse problems. At the end I was not trying to determine the "weight" of each question based on the marks out of the total, but now I could create an evaluation that focused on the student showing understanding.

Now that the evaluation has been written, the next part is if the students and parents will understand the feedback. One challenge has been that we don't use percentages, but instead use levels where 3 is meeting the expectations. Parents, struggling to understand how they child is doing, try every which way to convert the level into a percentage, which they understand since it reflects their upbringing. Our the evaluation we have given a level, but also shown where that level came from. This is done through a table at the back outlining the success criteria under each category that the students were provided at the start of the unit. Parents now will be able to see what specific idea/skill/method of explanation their child is working on/proficient/mastered. 

Click here for the evaluation.

Our next step is for the students to complete a reflection upon the return of the evaluation, emailing home this reflection, and then going through the evaluation with their family. We are then asking parents to give us feedback to say if they have a better understanding of their child's understanding and next steps. Hopefully this feedback (in an anonymous survey) will help us identify our next steps for supporting our students and parents to transition into, what we are hoping will be, a growth mindset evaluation process.

Next post will be looking at the parent feedback. I have also been testing out the FreshGrade mark book software and I will also be sharing my thoughts on it.

After reading this, if you have any ideas or recommendations for me, please comment them below. This is a growing stage and all feedback is helpful.