One Under the Belt, Not Below

Due to details to gory to mention, I've been away from this for a couple of weeks. That doesn't mean I've not thought about this push toward "two sigma", because I think about it daily, hourly, minutely....

The biology class has one trimester under it's belt. So what did that look like?

It was a lot of work. It was a lot of work. There was a lot of work involved, and then more.

What did I get out of all this work?

1. I know my students better than at any point in my career. I had close conversation with many on a daily basis about science and what they understood and more importantly what they didn't understand.
2. The learning curve was sharp and log based for both the students and myself. Post course survey gave me clear data that they understood what SBG was about. It didn't take them long to change their brains to figure out what they needed to do for learning. (That doesn't necessarily mean they did it, but they understood what it took).
3. Students are still reluctant learners by themselves. Many still want me to "tell" them what they need to know, instead of trusting the standards and rubrics to guide them to learning. I fear that will be the case with every class, every year, unless our school moves to SBG across the board.
4. Explaining SBG got better and easier for myself, students and parents as we dove in. I had vision, but needed the doing to figure out really what it was going to look like. One of the coolest moments happened at the start of Trimester 2, when new students arrived and the experienced explained how it all work. That was reward.
5. Students are working toward mastery and beyond. In the last weeks of the trimester, I met with students before school, during passing time, over lunch, during FLEX, and after school to get things done and get to proficiency. For some it was about the grade, for many it was about the learning: post course survey showed that.
6. I still have a long way to go to get to "Flipped Mastery Classroom".
7. The work was good.
8. Students generated a lot of evidence. I don't like our grading software, with the way it is set up and the way it looks to students and parents. Since almost everything was formative, there was a lot of evidence to show growth and change over time. I included almost all of the formative work in the gradebook. It was only there for practice, but demonstrated so much learning.
9. I've learned to love spreadsheets with conditional formatting. I can make the data jump out and help students get to mastery more quickly.
10. Moodle has become my enemy and my friend. The organization is quirky and bulky, but the information that I've grabbed from using Moodle quizzes has focused learning on the things that need to be learned.

The rewards of getting to know and understand my students' learning has far exceeded what I thought would happen this year.

Good work, it has been.