During my last visit to Beacon Academy, I had the pleasure of being introduced to what I am told teachers love best: grading.
Well, okay, I am actually told that this is one of the least favorite of all activities required of teachers. I am starting to see why.
The students are currently working on the concept of rational discourse - analyzing arguments that they are presented with and responding in a logical, justifiable way. They are reading a book about the aftermath of September 11, which includes articles and papers that discuss the validity and implications of our nation's response to September 11th. The students are required to read and respond to each chapter. They must post a response which includes their inital response to the arguments presented within the chapter and then post in response to at least one other student's original post. Mrs. Walsh told me that I could grade their posts and quickly told me some of the requirements she had for them, included a minimum length of 250 words, correct grammar and punctiation usage, and at least one properly cited reference to the text. She showed me an example of a rubric she had used for a Socratic Circle that the students were required to participate in, and she also showed me a diagram with "Bloom's Taxonomy" to explain the standards to which the students are held. I was told to make my own rubric for the blog posts, but Mrs. Walsh encouraged me to go ahead and start reading and grading them so that I could get a better idea of what I wanted to include in the rubric.
It proved to be much harder than I thought. First of all, I was told to delete posts which did not fulfill the requirements, after explaining to the students what they needed to change. It was very difficult to summarize and clearly explain to the students what they had done wrong and how they could improve. Most of them seemed to listen and respond well to my suggestions, but one student blantantly told me he didn't care about his grade. The other hard thing was the fact that the students range in age from 14 to 18, and yet they all seem to be held to the same standards, at least as far as this assignment was concerned. That did not seem quite right to me.
This made me think a lot about what I will do in my future teaching when it comes to grading. Will I make a rubric for every assignment, and what happens if there are loopholes in my rubric? I tried to think through the different possibilities, based on my initial readings of the blog posts, as I put my own rubric together. I had to think about what kinds of things I saw the students doing well and what things I saw as weaknesses.
Another question I have is will I hold all of my students to the same standard, even if I teach in a traditional classroom where all of the students are roughly the same age? What happens if I have students who are struggling or are non-native English speakers? In one of my teaching observations, I had a conversation with one of my teachers about it. She had several Hispanic students in her class, and she explained to me how she had to look for things in their writing other than strictly following proper grammar rules. When I teach, I want to learn how to look at the content before I look at the mistakes. It was hard to do that with these blog posts because so many of them had such glaring mistakes.
I'd like to ask Mrs. Walsh next time about her justification in having all of the students complete the same assignment and grading them according to a single standard. I'd also like to ask her how and why the students are expected to know the concepts behind correct grammar usage, since, as far as I can see, there is no formal instruction. It reminds me of my homeschooling experience in which my mother required all of my siblings and me to write at least a one-page essay every day. She would mainly check for spelling and grammar errors when she graded them, and I had a vague concept of how to write but no formal instruction on grammar rules. When I attended a Christian school in 7th and 8th grade, I felt like I was behind the other students when it came to knowing about the mechanics of sentence structure. I could write a proper sentence, but I did not necessarily know why it was considered correct.
This charter school is proving to be even more different than I thought! I look forward to future visits and hope I can have the opportunity to attend for at least one full day, to get a broader idea of how the school works.
There are some enjoyable things about evaluating student work (honestly) but it is still a difficult task. As you point out, there are so many variables at play, however you approach the task. One factor to keep in mind is assessing exactly what you asked students to provide. Much of grading often comes to guesswork and that's difficult for teachers and students.
ReplyDeleteYou ask some very good questions here, particularly about the viability of grading all students against the same standard. Why do you think it isn't right to grade the students by the same assignment standards? If they are all completing the same assignment, don't the same standards apply? Do the standards - and the resulting rubric - allow any flexibility to the teacher in assessing students' development?
You also link your questions to your future teaching, which demonstrates your willingness to develop as a practitioner. It's a process, and you're making a nice start.
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