Edustange

Zoom in on your home location with Google Earth. There is your home right down to a car you owned three years ago in the driveway. Moose Jaw: your place on the planet, the ephemeral center of your personal geography (50°24′13.21″N, 105°32′23.56″W). Select your destination down to tenths of a second latitude and longitude, let’s say the North-East Cliffs of Molokai (21°10′35.93″N, 156°46′7.98″W).  Execute the operation and watch the virtual flight of your journey. A graceful arch to a virtual stratosphere ascends along the great circle before plunging to earth at the precise point you have established as a destination.  Global positioning is exciting in its exactitude. Each year Google Earth is enhanced with add-ons and the data on any given location grows in complexity. The process of refining continues. We know so much about where we are and where we want to go. The virtual journey between these two points is a blur of exhilarating motion. The real journey is an often frustrating complexity of interdependent factors and problematic conditions.

Yesterday was a PLC Day here: Professional Learning Communities. I had a very productive day. Sans direct contact with young people, it was a confluence of many personal interests. I suppose the young people in my life were present through my reflections on the names crossing my screen and in the assessments that crossed my desk. My time was divided between goal setting with two partnerships in the fourth and fifth grades and processing pre-tests. I was a good boy and did not detour into class preparation. I love a good test and the satisfaction of well correlated data. The spreadsheet results of the math assessment revealed clear patterns and exceptions. The fifth graders are strong math students. What’s this? Eight out of the ten missed the same item. We will definitely be working on factoring this year. The fourth grade results were more heterogeneous than the fifth grade results and that is problematic. I understand each of my twenty-two students a little better now. They are, you might say, becoming differentiated in my mind.

I felt less satisfied when I reached home. Despite our collective sense of renewal and refined purpose in education, I realized I had been engaged in a familiar activity, defining the problem and clarifying the outcomes. Knowing where your students are at and setting a goal seems very purposeful but the larger challenge is the journey between. It always seems to be about assessment for learning. Assessment differentiates our young people and the new assessments do this as much the old ones did. I recall reflecting on my state of preparedness for parent-teacher (woops! student-led) interviews yesterday. I have so much quantified data to share! Numbers and phrases are so comforting. Where is the research and dialogue on differentiated instruction?

Minutes into a lesson, I am sorting the two cohorts into differentiated groups. Whether I am responding to these different groups, or even whether I am effectively bringing these groups together is   my concern. Again, it must be asked, what does differentiated instruction look, sound and feel like in our classrooms? How do we know when this is happening?

Last year I worked with twenty-seven fifth and sixth grade students. It was a community school with greater personnel resources than I have this year. Half of my class were English as second language students. The city’s ESL program was consolidated in our elementary school. Additionally I had two designated students. There were many challenges in the situation but we were able to meet them. The students became accustomed to differentiated groups shifting throughout the day. Two ESL teachers half time, a student support teacher half time, a fulltime paraprofessional and I shared the job of dealing with these flexible groupings. I ran the principal classroom with my groups independently or team-teaching with my SST partner. All three teachers had their classroom space for pull-out groups. By agreement with additional colleagues, individual students could work independently elsewhere. Space was at a premium within the classroom. I had an area for the classroom computers but otherwise had to maintain tight rows of desks. This year I have a smaller, essentially more homogeneous grouping and work virtually alone. It is a more common arrangement. It also challenges differentiated instruction.

Differentiated instruction might involve young people working independently or in small groups. It seeks to address a multiplicity of learning styles so even when students are working toward identical learning outcomes they might both approach and then express their learning in different ways. The classroom teacher needs routines to anticipate and react to a constantly changing dynamic. Young people will be challenged to understand the routines and when necessary switch independently to new tasks without reference to their teacher. To assume differentiated instruction will amount to three or four groupings sustained throughout the school year is optimistic. We are introducing a learning environment of serious complexity into an institution that frankly prises routine and standardized systems. Uniform assessments are given to all students and curricular student learning outcomes are intended for each young person applied by cohort. Public education is industrial by design.

We are striving to remember that young people are pilots of their own craft. Some planes move faster than others, some carry groups heading to similar destinations, while any number carry individual passengers. There are many planes up there now and they are leaving and departing from a busy airport.  They have to wait their turns to depart and arrive. They have to keep to their assigned flight paths or in an instant it is all chaos. Watching them all are the traffic controllers: checking individual planes, making course corrections, ordering them all. I understand that traffic controllers have one of the most stressful jobs in the world. The burnout rate is high.

I am beginning to understand the adaptations we have made to assessment and appreciate the renewed commitment to the old ideas of pretesting and teaching purposefully to a test (rather than testing what you might have taught). The resources for this are coming together. We need to ramp up our efforts on the larger task of designing environments and learning cultures where differentiated learning can happen.

 The Big Ideas of Our Assessment Practice

Include only achievement; don’t include student behaviors in grades (effort, participation, adherence to class rules, lates, dishonesty, etc.).

Don’t reduce marks on work submitted late, provide support for the learner.

Seek only evidence that more work has resulted in a higher level of achievement; don’t give points for extra credit or use bonus points.

Don’t punish academic dishonesty with reduced grades; apply other consequences and reassess to determine actual level of achievement.

Don’t include attendance in grade determination; report absences separately.

Use only individual achievement evidence; don’t include group scores in grades. The intention is to develop achievement and social improvements on the learning journey.

Organize and report evidence by student learning outcomes; don’t organize information in grading books/records by assessment methods or simply summarize into a single grade.

Provide clear descriptions of achievement expectations/student learning outcomes; don’t assign grades using inappropriate or unclear performance student learning outcomes.

Compare each student’s performance to preset student learning outcomes; don’t assign grades based on student’s achievement compared to other students.

Rely only on quality assessments; don’t rely on evidence gathered using assessments that fail to meet standards of quality.

Summarizing information and determining final grade.  Criterion referenced.  Show student learning of preset student learning outcomes.  Describe what performance looks like beyond letter or number grade.

Consider the measures of central tendency and use professional judgment; don’t rely on the mean (average of services of scores).

Don’t include zeros in grade determination when evidence is missing or as punishment. Use alternatives, such as reassessing to determine real achievement or use “I” for incomplete or insufficient evidence.  Give opportunity to replace an incomplete with a score without penalty.  Zeros: only shows lack of evidence – it does not show student achievement; give numeric value to something not assessed; involve inappropriate mathematics; distort grades; are counterproductive to motivation to learn.

Student work is assessed frequently (formative assessment) and graded occasionally (summative assessments).  Use only summative evidence; don’t use information from practice and formative assessments to determine grades. Don’t grade everything

Involve students.  Ensure students have meaningful involvement in tracking, reporting, and communicating their learning and status.

Student work is assessed frequently (formative assessment) and graded occasionally (summative assessments).  Use only summative evidence; don’t use information from practice and formative assessments to determine grades. Don’t grade everything.

Final exams/Culminating Evaluation:  This is not limited to exams and refers to any form of final assessment that requires students to synthesize their learning over a term or semester.

Emphasize more recent achievement.  “Most recent evidence completely replaces out-of-date evidence when it is reasonable to do so. For example, how well students write at the end of the grading period is more important than how well they write at the beginning, and later evidence of improved content understanding is more important than early evidence” (Stiggins & Chappuis, 2005, p. 223).

Involve students.  Ensure students have meaningful involvement in a) tracking, b) reporting, and  c) communicating their learning and status.

Use a Variety of Assessments

Prairie South School Division, Grading Policy Changes  April 2009