Here to There Differentiatedly

From Google Maps

It arrived in the post yesterday.

Reading it, I can hear his voice reading it to me. That is either cool or creepy, I can't decide yet. Inflections, emphasis, pacing, even hand gestures appear in my mind.

Again, cool or creepy, and I've only read the first chapter of Fair Isn't Always Equal by @rickwormeli.

It's been on my list for a couple of years now, but finally bought a copy. It is used, which I like to do.

Used books are whacky. This one has obvious water damaged and the previous owner (s?) stopped using orange highlighter after the first chapter. There are also mysterious stains that look like dead mosquitoes or fingernail polish in the first few pages. Like I said, whacky.

Enough...

This week, the baseball team I coach in the summer is heading to Hamburg, Minnesota, thus the map.

I know this is trite, but it just hit me again. How do my students learn? If the destination is Hamburg, what is the best way for us to travel there. The destination is the final goal, but the journey is so different for each of these routes. The topography and what we would see along the way varies even in this short jaunt across central Minnesota.

From the Intranets

Ooh! Aaahh! Here's the big tie in to what I'm thinking and reflecting about after reading chapter one. (I wouldn't have highlighted the same stuff as the previous owner of the book, no wonder they quit working through it.)

Chapter 1 challenges me to think about being fair in my classroom. Fair as being defined as differentiated instruction for my students.

This year, I'm expecting a full boat in all my biology classes. Don't think there will be a class smaller than 24, but whatever. The point of thought is that there will be a pile of learners: each one with their own style and need for getting to the final objective of learning the biology standards as identified.

Last year was my second year of using standards based grading. That has been an amazing transformation for me. If you're bored, scroll back through some previous posts. With the standards and the associated "I Can" statements placed in front of the students, how can differentiated instruction work best to help them achieve mastery. How can I make the biology classroom more fair in that way?

The mind-set of differentiated instruction asks me to consider more and more the need for competent, independent learners. Each of these minds engaged in biology is unique, and one of the challenges is to create competent biologists. The want for them to take their learning up and carry it to the standard and become proficient can make it fair.

How do I help them know themselves as learners? That question shakes me, but it is a goal attainable. My job is to give them the skills to know themselves: strengths, weaknesses, shortcomings, holes...

How do I get them to "Hamburg"?

1. get to know them as learners
2. build relationships
3. incite their curiosity 
4. encourage them to know themselves as competent, independent learners
5. make their biology experience fair

THAT is some stuff to do!

SBG to SBL

http://www.lnap.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/07/change.jpg

If nothing, this journey has been about reflection.

...which is a good thing...

Flip the hour glass back over, rewind the clock or just take the crystal off of the face of your Timex and push the hands back. Any of those images work for me, to look back at where this past two plus years have taken me in my quest to find a more appropriate tool for communicating learning to students.

In the fall of 2013, the science department was on board standards based grading. In a community of five teachers, this was my doing. I don't say that with pride or arrogance, it just was. The previous year (2012), it was me. I was alone in the movement away from traditional grading practices.

Department members looked on and wondered. It was a passage. We have always been a strong department and worked well together, but I know they were pretty much like, "What the heck are you doing?" and "This is not my idea, but it will impact all of us!"

It did impact all. Resources were made available, conversations were long and eventually by the end of 2012-2013, as a department the move had begun to SBG.

Grades are communication, not compensation. That is the point, the "stay on message" idea that keeps coming back and must be stated, and stated and restated.

Initially, my grade book was filled with every assessment taken. I do mean every, you could scroll for days across the spreadsheet. It was TMI! Then conferences came and conversations came with parents about why 3 out of 4 was not a bad thing. The change for this year came to only putting summative assessments in the grade book. (This idea came from @garnet_hillman.)  Parents only want to see what impacts little Ignatius's grade. That was a good move and simplified communication via gradebook. We use iCampus and the way I torture it, is to have 2 scores: one a SBG score (1-4) and then a percentage score that can be converted into a grade.

Formative Assessments are still the bread and butter of the biology classroom. I've taken forms from Bob Kuhn (@APBIORoswell) and Carolyn Durley (@c_durley) for students to control. The form has the Minnesota Science Standards and then I've taken the standard apart into smaller "I Can" statements. Those are what we really are measuring. Students then record their own progress through the I Can's and reflect on what they need to work on.

Change. Those are two examples from the past year that will make communication more effective.

As a department, we've decided to start using standards based learning, rather than grading. Students in our school come to the island of SBL when walking to the science department. They have been indoctrinated to think points, rather than learning.

We are going to focus on the learning part of what we do. Students remain shocked when hearing me say, "I don't care about the grade, I care about the learning." Hopefully, this will reinforce this message.

Change will be a constant on this journey, no question about that!

OH "It is impossible to get a 4"

http://bicyclethailand.com/

Students say insightful things, if we listen.

The most recent summative assessment was given prior to winter break. The days leading up to it saw students seeking understanding with questions about the content. Several came for help during FLEX, which is a half hour period at the end of the day built for remediation, making up work, find answers to questions, free reading and other activities

At the beginning of the session, one of the students uttered the phrase, "It is impossible to get a 4."

We went about the business of answering questions related to transport of materials in and out of a cell. Chunk of whiteboard and markers in hand, my students and I discussed how and why and where and the importance of transporting things across and through the membrane.

I asked the student what he meant. His response was something to the effect, "You expect so much from us to get a four."

As the day ended and students left, I reflected on those student thoughts....and came to "cool." Currently, the gradebook in our district has to be converted to a letter grade. That is not what I want, since it reflects the old traditional notion that "grades are compensation."

What about the picture above.

Looking back at my gradebook from the past year and a half, I have in fact given fewer A's than previously. I don't doubt that my grades in my career have been inflated and not an accurate representation of what students know or can demonstrate. Now that grades communicate learning against the Minnesota Science Standards, the bloat-ation has been removed.

So, yeah, it is hard to get a four. Students get to four, but with effort and mastery of content.

They recognize that, which is even better.

Pushing to the Right

Here is the data on the first summative assessment of the year. There are a number of things that are striking about the image.

1. I was disappointed in the number of students not meeting the standard the first attempt. After lots of practice, the scores on formative assessments indicated students had come to some level of mastery. There is some work that needs to be done in the future with the formative assessments being a predictor of success or failure.
2. Once the shock of the first assessment had passed, students used the retake/redo policy to demonstrate learning and have been consistently showing me that.
3. Some students, even with the retake/redo policy won't make the effort to learn more and try again.
4. Students saw what the assessment style was like and will make the adjustment for the next summative assessment.

The retake/redo business has been formalized with the application process*.  Last year at this time, I would be overwhelmed by the students retaking a portion of an assessment. I gave up my prep, my lunch, before and after school..... There is no doubt that I'll still have a lot of students trying to re-learn or learn for the first time in order to reach proficiency and earn the 3, but the chaos will be a bit more contained to a couple of regularly scheduled times. If that doesn't work for the students.....I'll have that conversation on an individual basis.

*Thanks again to @c_durley and @crystalkirch for ideas about applications to reassess.

3 out of 4 is NOT 75%

this is not 3 out of 4

We had parent teacher conferences this week.

I like parent teacher conferences.

I like getting more information about students, since I mostly just get a 60 minute snapshot daily.

I don't know what they are like at home, with their siblings, with their parents......... I like conferences.

This is the second year of standards based grading in my Biology classes. It has been an odyssey, a decided journey to this point. Transitioning from year one to year two has been far easier than then "IPO" of last year. Every start up probably has some rough patches.

Conferences bring another chance to talk about standards based grades and this time mostly with parents. When the night was through, people who came in looking at grade sheets seeing a score of 3 out of 4 and thinking "75%" now understood. A 3 means their student was proficient with a content or skill standard. They had mastered the "I Can Statements" (thanks C.D.!) to a degree the mark of 3 was designated. It was a means to communicate to Ss and parents about with had been learned.

Parents asked questions, we had conversations, they sought salience, we talked more.

The grade book software used in the district is not perfect for SBG, but as a science department, we've made the best of the situation. Almost all the scores in our grade book reflect formative work. The work is assigned a value out of 4, but the weight is 0. Only the summative assignments are assigned a weight and even then, because of the software and the way the rest of the building runs.....it gets ugly and convoluted.

I recently gave a summative assessment with multiple standards embedded in it. The grade book screenshot to the right illustrates  how we've decided to report. Entries titled EDSBG (Experimental Design SBG) and EDSA (ED Summative Assessment), the two scores present a score out of 4 and then a conversion into a number the software can convert into a percentage and letter grade.  A SBG score was determined by taking the total number of points earned from the various standard scores and dividing by the total number of standards assessed. This turns out to be an average score, but since it is a summative, I feel okay about that. As a department, we sat down and said that a 3 was equivalent to 80% or a B. (We made our percents out of x/10. That is why you see the numbers like 6.5 or 8.5.)

In my gut, I don't like that, because a 3 is not a percentage, it states a mastery of a standard. Until our system allows us to do it differently, this is how it is happening.

In the SBG boxes or percentage, you'll see some carets in the corners. These are an indication that the Ss have had opportunity to redo a one or more of the standards embedded in the test.

Communication was key on the night. I had a handout to explain more and pointed them to a screencast about standards based grades.

Parents walked away with understanding of 3 out of 4 not being 75%, but a measure of learning against a standard.

Cool.

How is this not better?

It was Sunday, like yesterday afternoon.

I got this text message from a student. He was attempting to access something on our AP Bio Moodle site.

He couldn't, so he shoots me a text message.

I fix the problem.

Formative assessment taken. Feedback given.

How is this not better?

Cool.

Standards Based Grading Consensus

I teach in a department of 5 people.

We are a strong department: forward thinkers, risk takers, academic, fun, humorous, independent, good faculty members for the school, take a lot of time for students.....the list could go on.

Last year when I showed up with some new toys and said, "Hey, I'm flipping my biology class and doing standards based grades!"

They looked, watched, asked questions, provided skepticism, provided encouragement, wondered what the heck I was doing. As the year went along, the department asked more questions and each tested the waters of both flipping lessons and SBG.

By the end of the year, we had really hammered out some really good thoughts about how to use learning targets for students. To be sure, there were long conversations about 1-4 grading schemes and how did that translate into F to A. How does that show up on a transcript? What did mastery look like? How do you measure that? How did you set up your grade book? How did students react? What if I don't do it the same way you do? How do you explain this to students and parents?

from: http://bit.ly/1d1jIDB

We pulled up the Smartboard and looked at my grade book from last school year. Questions were asked about why did I use that as a summative assessment or that as a formative assessment? How did I come to final grades for students? How did I show student growth? How do you easily communicate that?

To say that having people peer into the bowels of a grade book and ask me to defend the how and why, brought an uneasy feeling. It was kind of like pulling back the curtain on the Great Oz. I have to admit as the year went along, the clarity and management of grading became better. The grades 3rd trimester were better aligned with what SBG should be......first trimester???? Back to true confessions, not as clear at the start of the process.

The questions generated truly forced a lot of quick introspection. Thoughts caught in the eddies of my

From http://bit.ly/14g8zKt

brain, abruptly thrown into the stream of conscious work and out it comes. "There, I've said it. Now we can work with that idea, because it is finally out in the open."

Yesterday, when the group of us sat down, I didn't realize it would be a growth opportunity. I wound up entertaining an exercise that I had not really planned on engaging. It transcended into a unfolding  that caused learning and reinforcement about what I think, believe and understand about what has been done in the steps along the SBG trek. The 90 minutes of conversation certainly allowed these colleagues a clear look at what and why in grading in room 103 in 2012-2013.

That points to a journey started last year in SBG.

First trimester I was trying to put together material for my flipped classroom and be coherent with the scheme of SBG. Second trimester, closer to clarity in the grade book and journeying on. Third trimester, precision was in sight, but still I felt that the goal was near-at-hand.

As we stood yaking, it was a moment of true collaboration with these friends on the journey. I know the queries and challenges to be faced are but the "tip of the iceberg", but now the odyssey of one has a crew of five.

I'm looking forward to the exploration and work in SBG this year.