TOUCHSTONE 4: I measure understanding against high expectations.
Explanation
Educators keeping academic performance and grades on student learning is the feature attraction of touchstone four. To keep performance and effort differentiated in the classroom educators can develop effort rubrics that can be posted in the classroom to guide students in expected behavioral expectations while doing a variety of activities. Educators can help students individualize behavioral rubrics to keep them on task and focused, however grades for effort and behavioral rubrics should not find their way into the grade book. We must only “judge” our students on academic performance and not try to manage behavior via our grading systems. If we look into mastery of standards and standards based grading, we need to reflect student grades accordingly. The issue with including non-academic performance in grades is we are not reflecting the true understanding of the standards we hope to teach. We also need to take a stance on homework as practice and assign grades accordingly. The portion of homework towards a final grade needs to be minimized, homework needs to provide valuable feedback and students should be allowed to make up missing work. Assessments both conducted formative and summative need to be challenging to students to access deeper concepts and critical thinking skills. To achieve this, it is better to develop assessments with open-ended response questions, than to have a fifty question multiple choice test. Educators are doing a major disservice to students by padding grades with effort, behavior and participation for success down the road. College professors, bosses, and supervisors will not care about effort and behavior in our student’s future for grades and pay raises. They will simply be kicked out of school for poor effort and behavioral issues and in their careers will simply be fired. In a student’s adult life, they are rewarded by performance only, we as educators should apply that now.
Application
When developing my course syllabus for the blending learning Captains Course, I determined that my final grade breakdown would be devoting 45% of the grade to exams and projects, 25% to discussion posts, 15% to journaling and 15% towards classwork assignments. My late work policy is to deduct 10% for all graded material turned in post due date however, I will except late work until the last day of the term for a grade. I also have set this class up on a pass/fail basis with an 80% minimum for pass/fail criteria. Most graded work and assessments are blended with a multitude of methods for assessing but are heavily weighted to open-ended essay questioning and creating projects to elevate students higher level thinking on Bloom’s Taxonomy scale.
Additional Resources
