I can recall when I first started my teaching career a heated grading discussion amongst veteran staff in my school. Two professionals were in a hot debate about what to do with a 69.5 when 70 was a passing grade.

Now, I know, and hopefully you do also that such a conversation is not very valuable.

Grading can be subjective. Over the years I have met many who believe their method is the best. Furthermore, I learned that very few staff ever learned about grading in college. Most staff graded based on what they thought was right or based on standard practices in their school. But, what was done was not always fair and often did not measure learning.

There is a lot of research on grading and best practice for grading. We should learn from it and use it. I suggest starting with the work of Rick Wormeli and Doug Reeves to expand your ideas and to help staff take a journey towards using best practice for grading. Rick Wormeli reminds us that grading should preserve hope; using grades as a weapon is not a great motivator for students or adult learners.

Here are some reflection points to start conversation in your school.

What is the purpose of failure when a student cannot recover from it?

What research exists to support a total points method of grading?

Does extra credit belong in your school? I have to comment on this one- My own children brought in many boxes of tissues to classrooms to earn 10 points on a test. If that is the practice of a school, what does the grade mean if bonus points are added for bringing in tissues?

Should retakes be allowed? Well, as Rick Wormeli reminds us, most things we do in life you can do again and you can do them for full credit.

Will students be allowed or required to keep working on an assignment until it is satisfactory?

How much will homework be factored into the final grade? Should it be a part of a final grade?

Or, what is homework?

How much will quizzes, unit tests, and final exams be factored into the final grade? Are the assessments used for grading good assessments?

If a student fails to turn in work on time, does your school have a standard practice?

Here is a great point from Rick Wormeli. If we simply give students a zero and don’t allow them to turn in work after it was due, won’t some students happily take the zero rather than do the work? How does allowing this irresponsible behavior encourage students to act responsibly?

Discussion of mastery learning and use of the average are excellent topics to study as a faculty as part of a plan of using best practice.

Consider this example- I use this in interviews:

I person wants to become a better runner. They go to the track at the local high school and run a mile in 10 minutes. Each day practice occurs and every Friday the mile is run again. Over the course of 8 weeks with diligent practice the person’s mile time goes down 2.5 minutes.

What is the mile time?

Now your quick answer would be 7.5 minutes and that is correct. Now think of this example in a classroom. A bad initial test, intervention(practice opportunities), learning, and then improvement on a culminating assessment demonstrating mastery. Should the initial bad grade be averaged in? Would the mile time of the runner be 7.5 minutes if each week a time was kept and an average was created?

Grading discussions can be challenging. I encourage you to start a dialogue, look at best practice, and honestly reflect on what you do.

My Scholastic Blogs

By Laura Robb

The research on writing about reading is in, and it’s truly compelling! An article by Steve Graham and Karen Harris in the January/February 2016 Reading Teacher has implications for all teachers and all subjects. The research is clear and decisive on this point: when teachers have students write about books students can read, their comprehension jumps 24 percentile points. This is in contrast to simply reading, rereading, and studying. In addition, when students write about content material presented in class, comprehension jumps nine percentile points. The study makes it clear that it’s the students who must do the reading which means that teachers need to find materials on specific topics that all students—even those reading below grade level—can read.
The writing discussed in the research doesn’t focus on formal essays and paragraphs. So what does this mean for teachers of students in grades K to 12? The researchers aren’t suggesting that students answer questions after completing each chapter in a book. Moreover, prior to writing, it’s beneficial to have students turn and talk about their reading with a partner. Partner talk stimulates thinking, helps students clarify ideas, and often allows them to observe ideas that differ from theirs.
To support teachers with writing to improve comprehension, I’ve included the suggestions that follow:
K to 12 Students need a readers’ notebook to draw and/or write their responses to materials they are reading.
Primary Students can stop-to-think during guided and independent reading to talk about a character, an event, a setting, a problem in fictional texts, and specific details in informational texts. Students can use a framework to retell and/or summarize reading materials. They can also create lists of words that describe a character or their feelings toward an event or character.
Middle Grade, Middle and High School Students can develop lists of words that describe a character’s personality traits. They can also write the text messages two characters from a book might write to each other. In addition, students can write short summaries, post book reviews on a class website, take notes in their own words, as well as write a readers’ theater script and perform it with classmates.
Pausing after reading a chunk of text to analyze characters’ personality traits, assess how characters resolved a problem, list their emotional reactions to an event or decision, and make inferences with informational texts can also improve comprehension. After completing a book, students can identify themes, illustrate an event that sparked their personal interest, and use graphics to show a key event.
Teachers can ask students to revisit entries in their notebooks and adjust them as well as use their notebook entries and notes to write paragraphs or essays that inform or argue for a claim.

My Scholastic Blogs

By Laura Robb and Evan Robb

Get your students out of their desks and learning by doing. Organize students into collaborative groups of three to five and encourage meaningful talk. Limit teacher talk to twelve to fifteen minutes in a 45-minute class. Use the rest of your class time for actively engaging students in learning. Gordon Wells said in The Meaning Makers (Heinemann, 1986) that all learning is the guided reinvention of knowledge. The teacher creates situations where students, through discussions, reading, writing, and observing come to understand information.

TAP INTO STUDENTS SOCIAL NATURES TO MAKE LEARNING ACTIVE

Students love to talk. They do it well. And it’s a great way for them to enlarge vocabulary, observe the thinking of peers, and clarify ideas. Here are some ways to involve students in paired and small group discussions.

Turn and Talk. Ask students to turn to their partner and discuss a question, word, project, video, book talk. This is a simple, tried and true way to involve students in meaningful talk. Remember to ask partners to share with the class.

Learning Buddies. Invite students to discuss a short text, a book, video, blog, wiki, or article. Help students set guidelines for their discussions.

Peer Revise and Edit. Organize students into partners or small groups and have them read each other’s drafts. Using a rubric or writing criteria, partners can suggest ways to improve the content, mechanics, and usage.

Study Buddies. Most middle grade and middle school students don’t study because they are unsure how to study. This type of review asks students to think about what they’re read, viewed on line, learned, and their written notes. Set aside one to two class periods and provide pairs with suggestions for studying. Students can:

Create high level questions they believe will be on the test. Show them that words like why, how, evaluate, compare, contrast, lead to questions that have more than one answer. Good questions always have more than one answer and use text details and/or inferences as support for answers.

360 Degree Math Partnerships. Put whiteboards all around your classroom. Have students solve math problems at the board. Stand in the middle of the classroom and observe students. Immediately offer support to students who “don’t get it.” You can also have students work together so that the one who understands can show how to think through the problem to the student who requires help. This gets students doing math during class and allows the teacher to spot problems immediately and offer support.

Organize Cross-Grade Projects. Develop projects with teachers on your team and/or with students in lower grades. Students can work together in different classrooms and in the library. Try some of these suggestions:

• Older students become reading buddies to younger students. Once a week, set aside time for students to read together and discuss their books.
• Older students listen to younger students read their writing and provide feedback on content.
• Peer partners can design and film a video.
• Peer partners can create a website or blog and continually update it.

Let Students Teach Each Other. As a teacher when you have to teach, you immerse yourself in a topic so deeply that you can think, read, speak, and write about it with ease. The same holds true for your students. The pyramid suggests that teaching results in the most retention of a topic. Here are ways that students can teach one another:

• Use Jigsaw. Give pairs or small groups sections of texts to discuss and then teach to the group. Texts can be magazine articles, online pieces, sections from a content textbook or chapters from informational texts and literature.
• Organize Panel Presentations. Have small groups become experts on a topic and plan a panel presentation that teaches the class.
• Develop Teaching Blogs. Organize students into groups and give each group part of a topic to study. For example, for human rights, one group canexplainthis concept according to the United Nations, other countries, and interviews that students conduct; another group can give examples of violations of human rights and how each one was handled; a third group can study human rights from an historical perspective; a fourth group can delve into people who advocated for human rights, what motivated them, and how they changed events. Using a blog, students can teach one another by posting findings and inviting other groups to respond.
• Teach Younger Students. Challenge older students to develop active-learning lessons on making inferences, solving equations, conducting an experiment, etc. To teach these lessons to younger students means older students must have a deep understanding of their topic.
• Peer Book Conferences. Once students have conferred about a book with their teacher, ask them to pair-up and confer about a book with a partner. Partners document peer book conferences and turn their write-ups into the teacher. See form at the end of the newsletter.

INTEGRATE SPEAKING AND LISTENING IN ACTIVE LEARNING ACTIVITIES

The Common Core asks teachers to involve students in speaking and listening activities. Here are some suggestions that work:

• Present monthly book talks and develop standards for presenters and listeners.
• Argue for a claim in a speech in addition to writing essays.
• Write and perform a readers theater script based on a specific text.
• Conduct interviews in front of the class. Interviews can be between characters from a book or to explore a student’s expertise on a topic.
• Write and perform a dramatic monologue. Students’ monologues can be based on an historical figure, a famous scientist or mathematician, or a character from a book.

EMBRACE THE WORKSHOP MODEL

Reading and writing workshops are active learning teaching models. A read aloud and mini-lesson open workshop. Students spend most of class time reading books they choose and writing about topics they choose and care about. The teacher makes the rounds and holds brief conferences with students, leading her to figuring out which students require longer conferences; she also organizes student partnerships so students can confer with and support each another.

PRINCIPAL  THOUGHTS

Laura shares ideas to help make classrooms more engaging, student focused, and dynamic.  Student engagement coupled with purposeful learning can not only increase student learning but it also can make learning more enjoyable for student and teacher.  This blog contains great Monday morning strategies as you the teacher work to increase student engagement in a purposeful strategic way! I hope your principal is an encourager of trying new strategies to increase student engagement! Overly compliant classrooms devoid of conversation, engagement, collaboration and communication need to be part of our past.

My Scholastic Blogs

Principals can create a climate where teachers value interventions and make them part of their teaching plans.  Here are some tips for helping teachers understand that interventions matter.

• Have teachers discuss the kinds of interventions they use at team and depart meetings.
• Focus some of your walkthroughs on observing the teacher circulating among students with a clipboard in hand and completing on-the-spot repairs or scheduling an exploratory conference.
• Invite teachers to share a successful intervention with colleagues at a faculty meeting.
• Organize professional book study groups that focus on interventions; join a group so you model your investment. Give teachers choice of books and purchase them using school funds.
• Invite teachers to share the Tier 1 instructional practices that are working in their classrooms.
• Invite teachers to share students’ work that shows progress because of interventions.

Because the classroom teacher is the key to helping a diverse group of learners improve, it’s important to help teachers enlarge their knowledge of how to intervene and also to celebrate their success with a note from you!

Two Book Suggestions for Professional Study Groups

• RTI From All Sides: What Every Teacher Needs to Know, K-8, by Mary Howard, Heinemann,  2009
• The Reading Intervention Toolkit by Laura Robb, 4 to 8, Shell Education, 2016

Evan Robb, Principal Johnson Williams Middle School and author of:

The Principal’s Leadership Sourcebook, Scholastic, 2007.

Follow Evan Robb on Twitter: @ERobbPrincipal

Sign up for The Daily Robb Review—it’s free!

www.therobbreview.org