Throwing Out Grades to Enhance Learning: Feedback-focused assessment

So, semester one has come to an end and it is time to reflect on my practice. It’s like cleaning off the make-up and seeing the real person underneath. It means that I have to face myself - the smile, the wrinkles, and the blemishes. Starting with the ugly. This was a messy process. Anyone that says that going gradeless is easy is a gigantic LIAR. The process was a lot of work, more work than I have put into teaching in awhile - like rookie teacher starting from scratch kind of hard work. It meant rethinking why I used a lesson or activity, and what information and skills student’s needed to demonstrate their learning. Redesigning assignments, tweaking rubrics, adding layers of scaffolding, and helping students self reflect was time consuming - actually it grew into somewhat of a black hole. The constant conferencing interspersed with compact lessons and marking to provide better feedback created stress and tears for me. Frustration mounted and feelings of defeat grew until final ass...

This entry was originally published on my personal blog here . As the title of this entry may suggest this entry is serving as a place to express my thoughts around how last semester went and the changes I am hoping to make. My desire is that this "public diary" will help me to be accountable to my goals, will inspire someone else to take a risk, and will model that we (teacher) practice what we preach - we are all learners. What worked well that I will continue : Having students engage in deconstructing curriculum (specifically the math processes and instructional language) Making students reflect on their learning (often!) Having a grounding document for evaluation (learning map with overarching learning goals) evaluation is based in criteria Having students analyze their evidence of learning to determine their grades (and conferencing about it) Constructing success criteria with students What I will strive to do better : Engage in curriculum deconstruct...

This entry was originally published on my personal blog here . It has been awhile since my last entry. Life and work got a little overwhelming, in retrospect. The midterm part of the semester contributed to that (you can read about it  here ) on top of having 3 straight days of PL/a conference to attend to and I was well behind where I would have liked to be in terms of giving feedback to student. Summative evaluations began to pile up, the essentials had to be prioritized and returned first. No matter what anybody tells you, 84 students is a lot. But too often this number of students for a secondary educator is a normal reality. So we need to make this better. We need to find ways to meet student's needs, give them the feedback they need and deserve, and still come out sane on the other side. I wish I could tell you that this reflection was going to provide you with the magic answer. But...I don't have it... Yet. I am determined to find a way. I am determined to figure...

My role in our TLLP is different. I am an Instructional Coach, so I no longer have a class of my own. I will tell you about an experience I had, and a practice that worked well when I had my own classes. In my final years as a classroom teacher, I maintained a drastically reduced focus on grades, and had some great results with both students and parents. I found that key to working with the parents was to give them some other type of feedback that they could understand and relate to. I did this by having the students email their parents every two weeks. This was usually a two paragraph email with the first paragraph outlining what was going on in the school. We usually brainstormed a few things that were going on in the building and the students could choose a few that were relevant to them -- or pick other ones. The second paragraph outlined what they were learning in my class. The learning goals were posted, so they could use these s a starting point. Students who wished to elabora...

"However, the thing that really matters in feedback is the relationship between the student and the teacher. Every teacher knows that the same feedback given to two similar students can make one try harder and the second give up. When teachers know their students well, they know when to push and when to back off. Moreover, if students don’t believe their teachers know what they’re talking about or don’t have the students’ best interests at heart, they won’t invest the time to process and put to work the feedback teachers give them. Ultimately, when you know your students and your students trust you, you can ignore all the “rules” of feedback. Without that relationship, all the research in the world won’t matter." ~from “Is the Feedback You’re Giving Students Helping or Hindering?” by Dylan Wiliam This quote from Dylan Wiliam is resonating strongly with me today. As a team we spent today mostly looking at student self-assessment. We visited Jonathan So ’s grade 6 classroo...

This post was originally posted on my personal blog  here . It has been an observation of mine that students are struggling to transfer the meta-cognition skills gained in other places into the math classroom. The ideas and structures I am putting onto their math learning seem to be very different than anything they have done in math before that they do not realize they have done it elsewhere. It has made for some interesting reflection on my part. In continuing with my journey to explore student reflection I wanted to have students self-evaluate at midterm and conference with me to determine their report grade and report card comments. I set this up using an assignment on Google Classroom and had the sign up for a conference time-slot. My grade 10s were given a reflection document that included a few things (outlined via images below). Part 1: Identify pieces of evidence and start to identify criteria from the map that were evident in that evidence Part 2: Highlight wh...

So, it's been a crazy few weeks since my last post and now it's time to just sit down with a hot chocolate and type... I'll start with the highlights which include completing some course specific PD, meeting Starr Sackstein, and having some epiphanies about my own practice. Then I'll end with some next steps for myself (got to model what I preach, right?). Within my department, there were concerns that we were not ready to deal with grade 9 gradeless. I wanted to do it justice - I figured that my two years of dabbling with gradeless was some background compared to my colleagues who may be dealing with gradeless for the first time. I approached my principal (Jim Kardash) and he was extremely generous in giving us three full days of release - two of which were with the Board's Instructional Coordinator (Kristen Clark). As a course group, we first conferred to create common assessment practices and assignments. That one day was a whirlwind of productive collaborati...

This post is essentially a conversation that occurred on Twitter yesterday and this morning about formative and summative assessment, mastery, issues around grade 12U students wanting to know their grade because they need to apply to university, teaching students to self assess based on the success criteria and more. It's amazing that teachers from both elementary and secondary and in more than one board are contributing to the conversation. [ View the story "Feedback Focussed Assessment" on Storify ]

This post was initially published here . In the second full week of school I put a lot of focus on starting to develop student's skills in self- and peer-assessment. Without these skills the idea of developing an environment that creates more autonomous learners likely would not happen (and the burden of giving descriptive feedback would fall entirely on me - and I also have a goal to get more sleep this year). Here is the gist of the steps I attempted to take last week: 1. Give students questions to use when reflecting on their work (such as "Have I written my solution so that someone else can follow it?"). I put these on the board and uploaded a photo of them to our Google Site for student's to reference. 2. Introduce the model I am using for descriptive feedback (Acknowledge what you are doing well; Describe what your next step should be; Determine how/when you are going to work on your next step). I also put this on the board and uploaded a photo to our Si...

I’ve been teaching grade 9 Geography for over 15 years now and when I say 15 years, multiply that by two semesters and multiply that by at least two sections each semester. So many, many times. I’ve never been happy with how my “Landform Regions of Canada” lessons have turned out. I don’t know why, but it’s very difficult for the students to connect their theoretical learning with actual pictures of the Canadian landscape. I have tried graphic organizers with notes from the textbook, slide shows with many pictures, picture books and art from each landscape, videos, webquests, starting from the geological history, starting from issues based in each region, starting from national parks in each region, students presenting different regions/ecozone to the class, to name a few. I wish I could take all the students on a cross-country drive so they can see it for themselves so I’ve been looking for a good VR experience (if you know of one, PLEASE let me know!).  Then there are the philo...

We have now had two weeks of school and the rhythm is returning. Clubs and teams are up and running and classes are even going on their first field trips. It’s amazing how quickly everyone gets into the swing of things. However, I have been taking it pretty slowly in my classes. This is partially because all the “official documents” that I need to give the students are still not complete and partially because I don’t want to overwhelm students with the whole gradeless, feedback-focused, place-based and inquiry-based program all at once. I ran my grade 9, Issues in Canadian Geography, classes as gradeless last year. Essentially, the whole course was inquiry-based and we used five overarching learning goals that followed the inquiry cycle and that were organized into a learning map. Students completed guided and then open inquiries based on the curriculum. I consulted with students as they moved through the inquiry cycle and gave verbal and some written feedback (usually through Google F...

This blog was initially published on my personal blog here . What, Why and Where I am finally embarking on my vision of a "gradeless" classroom. What does that mean? It means that my students will receive feedback that is feedback-based. Learning becomes about learning. Grades take a step back and are determine for reporting periods. Why am I going here? I am giving the ownership of learning back to my students. For too long I have been the owner of the learning. It was believed that the teacher "gave" marks and students always wanted to know what they needed to "do" to get an 80. The shift is simple - I give feedback based on set criteria that students need to work toward and they reflect on their learning and act on a next step to meet those criteria.  Where am I now? In the past 2-3 years I have done some work with creating overarching learning goals and reformatting evaluations (i.e. taking marks off of quizzes, using one-point rubrics...