Standards Based Grading Response

I have some experience with standards based grading although I cannot remember the criteria at all. I just remember parent/teacher conferences in elementary school. All of my scores were based on a 1-4. There were no zeros, but like I sad I don't remember much more than that. I have always liked the idea of standards based grading for numerous reasons that I will attempt to fit in here.

First of all, standards based grading seems to be the most beneficial way for students, parents, and teachers to evaluate students progress toward objectives. We can clearly say, here is what we are shooting for, this number is based on how close you are to achieving the objective. A five means you are proficient. Let's move together toward making that a five. Giving the parameters of what matches a 1-5 will help students know what they need a work on to achieve their goal to become a 5 in this standard. We will then know when to move on with instruction. While an argument can be made for grades doing the same thing, let's speak on grades and what it means to students.

Grades are an issue in all of our lives. As a student I am worried about my grades and how it will effect my future, as are my students with their grades. As a teacher I am worried about my own instruction when my students get bad grades, as are their parents. The difference between traditional grades and standards based grading is the latter can be changed. Let's say a student gets a C on an assignment on their final. That C shall be stuck there and it will be a grind to get the grade back up. Now lets same come finals that student reaches a 3 in their standards based grade. We can grow that three to a four or five and the students doesn't have to worry about making up for that three like they do the C. Standards based grading removes a lot of stress from the students, which they desperately need since students are becoming busier and busier creating more stress.

Standards based grades are easily to analyze on a student to student basis. Most of my students are at a 2 with this objective lets you know that you can get them up to a five. It helps us build what we need to work on and what we can move on to. It builds a mastery focused classroom, rather than a grade focused classroom. This builds for an environment focused on learning and achieving goals, which makes for better students and better teachers.

Assessing and Evaluating Student Learning Response

Two of my greatest downfalls currently in my learning to become  a teacher are wait time and creating assessment. Creating assessment is an incredibly difficult and a daunting task. I also do not get much practice when it comes to creating assessment. I have only created assessment a handful of times and it wasn't too difficult. I am not sure if I am good at it or not, but every time I have created it it has been the most difficult part of my lesson plan. This article has been pretty helpful for creating assessment for me. I like the idea of making it relevant to the students. As we have been saying, this is the most important thing we most keep coming back to. Making students learning relevant to themselves and helping them find out how they learned it is arguably one of the best skills to teach them, not only to keep them interested in learning, but to make them better at it. I love her ideas on all of them being response based and written out to assess students understanding of not only simple terms, but also bigger concepts like tackling major ideas from novels. However, I find one issue with this that maybe I do not understand. The amount of time it would take to create, read, properly asses, give useful feedback, and understand each student’s ability enough to change instruction to help them would be incredibly time consuming. I know that this is the best way to help our students and that is what we should always be striving for, but I feel like the amount of work that would be spent going into evaluation could hinder time building dynamic, engaging, and relevant lessons for our students. This would be a great task for teachers who are well set in and understand their unit and lesson plans to a T, but to someone like me, a new teacher still developing strategies, developing myself, and trying to maintain a relationship with my students this amount of assessment would take up a lot of time I spend doing those activities. I will however keep this in mind in my future assessment creation. I will learn a lot more from my students writing than responses to multiple choice or fill in the blank. It will be a great resource to help build my assessment tool belt. 

Readicide

A lot of what Kelly Gallagher was saying in Readicide really struck close to what is currently going on within my district. Deer Park is going through a lot of SBAC preparation with their students, so that is basically all the English Department has been preparing for. We are making a lot of students read informational text over and over and drilling them with continuous note taking strategies and response development. It has become so bad that the moment I tell students we will be doing circle charts their is an audible grown heard around the room. I am sure the English department is committing Readicide with their students and that the students a growing a hatred for reading. We definitely aren't making "expert citizens" a concept I really liked on page 13. I find it really hard to teach students like this. They immediately become disinterested in the articles I give them and no matter what I seem to do to try to make it exciting the either 1. don't do the work or 2. go through the motion and don't synthesize anything they are reading. We have also phased out a lot of our literature instruction, which is something much easier to get the students into reading. Although many claim to hate reading literature they often enjoy the stories we read and are way more engaged when it comes to these texts. We were about to begin moving into a new novel, but students are not doing SBAC prep and we have to either push our novels back or completely remove them. My master teacher was going to allow me to teach the unit of Of Mice and Men (Steinbeck is my favorite American author),  and let me know a few days ago it may have to be cut for test prep. I understood, but was sad I'd miss the opportunity to teach one of my favorite authors to my students. This brings me to my final point on Readicide. The practice of teaching to the test, or test prep, not only negatively effects students, but also negatively effects good teachers. A lot of the passion we had coming into the subject gets taken away for test prep, which we can be passionate for for our students, but it often feels false or disingenuous. A lot of our love for reading and literature gets pushed out for writing and preparing for tests day to day to try to make some higher power happy, meanwhile students are frustrated, disengaged, and left behind. Students that display these struggles make us as teachers feel like we are not doing our job correctly leading people like me to be less confident in my instruction, lesson planning, and student interaction. In short, a student that passes a state test frustrated, annoyed, and hating English, is less valuable to me than a student who fails that same test, but loves reading and writing and comes from an environment where they want to work on those skills to improve and do better next time.

edTPA response

Every time the edTPA is talked about in any of our classes they make it seem like a daunting and terrifying task upcoming in our schooling. I am not the sort of person to get riled up until I get to the task itself, so I often wonder why they are making such a big deal out of it. If anything I am more worried about the NES than the edTPA simply because it is closer. Many of my colleagues are very worried about the edTPA even though we have been told it has a 90% pass rate from this university. I think a lot of the confusion comes from the ambiguity and how unclear it is. After being given these two handouts I have found that it is not as scary and daunting as every has been making it out to be. It is incredibly straight forward what they want from you and what they want you to show, with very little ambiguity to be seen. They ask and make clear everything they want you to give them to evaluate your performance as a teacher. Although I am not without my worry on some things, there are so many things that go into the paper and video for the edTPA I am worried I will not meet all of their needs. This will easily be one of the longest papers I have ever written and they ask so much I am worried I can’t hit it all. I am also worried about technical issues with the video. I want to make sure I get a good enough clips, audio, and visuals to help my evaluator best evaluate my teaching. I am not so worried about the process of doing the edTPA, but the mechanical issues that could come along with it. I have been working a long time in college to get to this point and I am excited to continue on. Like all majors I have to face some difficult task to finish my degree, but as long as I keep viewing it as another hurdle and not a major road bump I am confident I’ll make it out just fine. 

I Read It But I Don't Get It

Cris Trovani's "I Read It But I Don't Get It" was an incredibly insightful read for me. With her use of real classroom stories, in-depth descriptions on the reading process, giving tools on how to model that reading process, and keeping it both instructor and student focused the book was interesting as well as informative. A lot of the difficulty I face with my students is helping them understand why we are reading what we are reading. I try to inform them that we are reading for enjoyment, information, and to become better readers, but generally they feel as though they have been at the same reading level all of their lives. A lot of my students are restive readers, and word callers as she calls them.

I love a lot of the activities she poses to students throughout the book. They will certainly be used in my own classroom. I especially liked her ice breakers that involved reading. Generally we get the carbon copy ice breakers (stand up say name, favorite _____, dream job, etc. or some name game) in her English class she opens up with the books that affected her the most and then tells her students to bring in theirs. I would love to use this in a classroom; it not only allows for students to voice their own love/hate for reading, but it opens a collaborative classroom environment to the student and teacher, and makes the students more comfortable with sharing in class.

Her focus on modeling was also quite in depth and gave me a fresher view on modeling than I had previously held. I knew how important modeling was, and I use it with a lot of my lessons, as a good teacher should. I, however, did not see modeling in such a broad spectrum. Trovani states that we should even model our thought process whilst reading to students. Until I had read this I didn't not realize how useful it could be for my students to see an instructor working their way through a story and coming to conclusions audibly with the ability for them to see the thought process unfolding right in front of them. Although it may seem goofy to the students at first they will see you modeling good reading habits and be able to incorporate it into their own reading.

There are so many more incredible tools in the text as well. I will certainly be coming back and borrowing many ideas from it as I go on teaching. Sprinkling some of these activities into my lessons and helping my students craft a stronger reading toolkit will prepare them for states tests, college, and their future life that lies ahead of them.

Social Justice

The article I chose to read on social justice was “Social Justice, Educators, and Schooling: Some Philosophical Issues,” done by the British Journal of educational studies. They explained in great detail the true meaning of social justice. They found that the fundamental problem with the social justice was a blanket term that many people used, but that there was no fundamental definition for. Policy makes would often make new rules or laws for education that were focused on improving social justice in the classroom, but that often meant simply changing diversity, or effecting low socio-economic status. They made a clear distinction that one or the other was not the case. The researchers stated that social justice did not involve diversity or the status of one’s material wealth. Social justice involves the individual’s quality of life. Social justice needs to occur in a community where an individual or multiple individuals are have serious or negative impacts in various aspects of their life. This may include their overall happiness, quality or life, or standard of living. Social justice is not just difference in diversity or income, but it is when these facets negatively impact their life that we then need a call for social justice. The issue then becomes how we teach students the true meaning of social justice. There are many different ways we can teach social justice in the classroom. One of the ways these educators used was to use the context of other countries to make analogies in their classroom. They should students New Zealand’s goals for positively effecting social justice by encouraging their citizens become active members in government. They made sure that the underprivileged were aware of injustice and could articulate ways to change it. Giving students this example then bringing it back to the injustices in their community could be a great way to bring social justice to their classroom. Using this knowledge of a strong definition for social justice and having a way to present to your classroom is a good way to get students interested in social justice and social change.

Critical Pedagogy in an Urban High School English Classroom

The paper “Critical Pedagogy in an Urban High School English Classroom” was an excellent read for, and my favorite out of all of our readings so far. It was nice to read some classroom based observation of the new skill we are learning about and real puts into context how to use it effectively and how beneficial it is for students and for teachers alike. I love the idea of this type of classroom. The students working together to develop discussion, working toward effective and meaningful life skills, and being passionate in the classroom sounded fantastic and highly desirable. The section that meant the most to me was involving pop culture in the classroom and the ideas on pop culture as a whole. While reading about elite culture effecting pop culture, I saw it leading to counter culture. The paper then mentioned that pop culture was both for and against elite culture. I found the entire aspect of the culture sections amazing. As for my current placement, many of my students are involved in pop culture and they often feel that school is disconnected from their own lives. I place they are forced to go that is not their “style” and is actively against it. Some of my best lessons have involved students and pop culture they were interested in. (Speaking on movie posters after going over the To Kill a Mockingbird posters from around the world the students questioned why movie posters were so bad now, we then went through posters and talked about art.) My students also are very into hip-hop culture. I had once mentioned I liked Kendrick Lamar and students were very excited and wanted to know more. If I could do something like their poetry unit, which used both rap and classic poems, I think my students would be much more interested in that than a regular lesson. I plan on using the things I learned about pop culture and its effectiveness in including students’ lives into the classroom. Having a connection exponentially will increase the otherwise vehement disinterest.