Castello_Oct_Assessment: What's in a grade?

• ompare and discuss the grading system for your class with those of your learning community and content area. What does a grade in your class reflect? (mastery, following procedures, responsibility, completion...). How well do grades in your classroom reflect student learning?

In watching the TED Talk featuring Sal Kahn, he talked about the gap in understanding as it relates to the pace in which subjects advance, and how students will not understand some material and the teacher might move on regardless. I have absolutely been guilty of this on occasion, but I think any teacher would be lying to him or herself to disagree that it had never occurred in his or her classroom.

I can think of my journalism class, in which we learn basic fundamentals like the First Amendment and the foundations of journalism (who, what, when, where, why, how), headlines and leads before we get going with more content that features those concepts. I have absolutely been guilty of advancing to those more inclusive topics, even while some of my students did not fully comprehend the material taught in the beginning of the course. However, I like to think that students then gain a better understand than previously understood as we work further with these ideas. For example, I gave students an assignment earlier this semester in which students created their own front page of a newspaper based on an event in their life, and that was without any instruction concerning headlines, polls, interviews, etc. Students were able to gain some knowledge of each of these things through the process and with my feedback as they went along. Now, we stand where students better understand headlines and interviews with more work with those topics after their initial introduction to the concepts.

In regards to the "not-yet" policy Blackburn mentions, I use this policy in a way in my classroom. What I will do for students is give them the grade that they have earned on that assignment or project up to that point in time. However, I will tell them that the grade will stand in the gradebook should they not put in the effort to change what they have done or complete the assignment. As long as they fix what needs to be fixed, they will have their grade changed. I have not been as strict on striking off late points this year as I have been in previous years. I believe my thinking with this is that I am not so concerned if a student submitted an assignment six hours late on Google Classroom or failed to hit the "submit" button at all, but rather that the individual student acquired the skill or knowledge from that assignment that was intended.

I like the concept of breaking down grading to cover the three questions of 1) purpose of assignment 2) type of grading 3) and whether there are options. Having said that, I definitely struggle with the second question. I believe that will come with time, and I have found that I have gotten better just this year already in developing rubrics for major projects. I could absolutely afford to treat the idea of assessment as a conversation between student and teacher as Lancaster mentions in the TeachThink article.

More often than not, grades in my classroom reflect student effort. My speech and debate and journalism classes frequently deal in conceptual thinking and therefore I want to see that they have thought about the concepts and ideas we discuss and they have worked with the assignments and projects given to them. To not have done either of these things would result in a lower grade in my class than simply giving one's best efforts and creating the best products that a student is capable of concerning the content.