My grade book will be open for the whole year to allow students to do just that, but with the marking period ending soon, many students (and parents) are concerned about the grades. All of my students took a skill assessment on Friday and now have multiple skills to represent their learning so far.
I began class today by putting the grade book on the board, sorted by overall grade.
"What do you notice about this?"
One of the first things they noticed was how much green was on the screen. They noticed how the class as a whole was doing was fairly well. They also noticed the rather wide gaps between the classes.
We also talked about what it meant that several students didn't finish. We talked about taking your time, but also knowing the material well enough that it didn't take forever. When I took the quiz to make up the answer key, it took about 5 minutes, which means it shouldn't take them more than 20.
Before I handed back to the assessments, we talked about what steps they needed to accomplish before they could reassess.
Skill Corrections!
1) Use a separate sheet of paper
2) Correct answer with ALL work clearly shown
3) At least one sentence describing the mistake that was made, leading to the incorrect answer
4) Test and corrections signed by a parent
5) Test and corrections stapled together
I then gave them the rest of the period to work on their corrections. Several asked if they could work together and I strongly encouraged it.
"If you are able to teach another person, you'll be able to understand it MUCH better yourself."
I made sure to tell them how proud I was of their work and their effort. Time to start working on the next skill list...
Sounds like you're trying to support your students to reflect on what they're doing, and why - which is awesome.
ReplyDeleteI have a thought experiment for you. I'm wondering what it might have afforded if you had done something like set up 4 or 5 non-permanent vertical surfaces (aka hanging whiteboard? or chart paper?) around the room. At each 'station,' the chart paper or white board displays 3-4 examples of related "mistakes" from the assessment; students rotate through each station with the directions, "first take 2 whole minutes of silent 'notice' time in which you look at each example of student work on the assessment and try to figure out what the person was thinking. THEN take 5 minutes as a group to discuss similarities across the examples, and try to answer as a group, 'what do these problems have in common? How might these students revise their thinking?'"
Each group rotates through each station (so maybe 30 minutes total) before going back to their desks to correct their assessment as you've described.
obviously every instructional choices has some tradeoffs, and one thing I'm noticing about the corrections exercise you described here (compared to what I described above) is that students are focused on their OWN ideas, which they're obviously more familiar with, and they can use those as a resource to help others with ideas they mastered. My thinking is, how can we give students opportunity to recognize 'kinds of' mistakes and their consequences, rather than just individual mistakes?
As always, thanks for sharing your classroom with us internet groupies!