I asked students to write about their grades, and their responses reflect student thinking about grades, school, and learning. Students have a hard time getting used to my policy on grading and reteaching. When I announced it at the beginning of school, one student was vocally opposed to students who pass a test using up tutoring resources to improve a… Read more →
This year’s campus book study is Doug Lemov’s Teach Like a Champion: 49 Techniques That Put Students on the Path to College. In a twist on our usual book studies, this year each teacher on campus has selected one of the book’s classroom strategies and filmed videotaped video recorded it in action. Watching the videos is a great way to… Read more →
Here’s the grading system my students expected at the beginning of the year:As Rick DuFour points out, a big part of this process was “immature people making immature decisions.” Think for a second about what a grade means in this system. Think about terms like “grade inflation” and “standards” in the context of this system. I began the school year… Read more →
This morning several students on campus participated in a panel, answering staff questions about learning styles and classroom environments. We learned a lot. At one point, students were asked about reading and writing in non-Language Arts classes. One of my students described an activity that we do, and he got all the major points. Made me feel good. Here’s the… Read more →
A friend forwarded me an email for an online holiday sale: We’ll be offering a coupon code for 10% off which will be in addition to the up to 20% you can take off your products. That’ll mean up to 28% off 1000s of products. Our promo code will be CMT12. The reason it is up to 28% off and… Read more →
I propose a simple account of how we generate intuitive opinions on complex matters. If a satisfactory answer to a hard question is not found quickly, [the intuitive capacity] will find a related question that is easier and will answer it. I call the operation of answering one question in place of another substitution. -Daniel Kahneman, Thinking Fast and Slow… Read more →
If we define “formative assessments” as those that impact instruction, I am hard-pressed to decide what is not a formative assessment! This year, my PLC teachers have developed a targeted, proactive system of reteach and retest. Students cannot retest if they have not had a new learning experience, and a student cannot keep a grade lower than an 80. While… Read more →
Students can be like quicksilver in the computer lab. You have firewalls in place, you’re observant, but you turn your back for a second and find one of them reading the wikipedia article on the Bloods and the Crips. (True story. But at least he wasn’t editing the article for accuracy.) Symbaloo allows users to create a graphical list of… Read more →
This app by Riley Lark, et. al. is nice for gathering data or engaging students. You visit the app at http://activeprompt.herokuapp.com/ and upload an image. Students visit a link (Symbaloo, anyone?) and place a dot on the image according to your prompt (where will these lines intersect? Which best represents your solution? the prompts are limitless!). Then a teacher link… Read more →
…it serves no purpose to a student with limited conceptual understanding. If they evaluate their answer and decide that it doesn’t make sense, they don’t know how to fix it. Their options are to start over completely, or ignore the issue. Is it any surprise they choose ignore?
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