October PD - Assessment - Isner

The article posed some good thoughts and questions, but to me she is working in an ideal world.  Yes, I agree that we should be moving on to analyzing information and not just summarizing in the middle school area, but when we have students who come to us (in 8th grade) and they cannot independently read and understand what they've read or draw a simple bar chart graph to show information, then we must focus on helping these students to summarize and understand the information before moving on to the analyzing phase.

I like the policy of "not yet", but I don't see students caring enough about their grades to keep redoing assignments for better grades.  Some students, yes, they do care and would keep working until they earned the grade they think they deserve, but the majority of the students do not care about how well they do on an assignment or if they turn it in at all.  By giving them a 50 on anything that they don't actual complete or that they don't actually understand, I feel that we are falsifying their grades because it's showing that they know more than they actually do.  Lazy students can do really well on a few assignments and not turn in anything for the remainder of the quarter and still pass the class because of this policy.  To me, this is teaching them how to work the grading system and not helping them in the long run.

The points that were brought up in the "6 Common Misunderstandings" article were interesting and it made a lot of good points.  I think that all good teachers would agree that it would be nice to have assessment be a true dialogue with the students or to evaluate and give feedback without actually counting it toward a grade.  The problem with this is again, what we are mandated to do.  By forcing teachers to have 12 minor grades and 3 major grade assignments each quarter we end up not having enough time to have those quality conversations with kids.  The kids receive the feedback and if they have questions, then they can come and talk to us.  With so many minor assignments needed, sometimes I find myself grading for completion rather than mastery or counting every single formative assessment I give, simply because I need more grades in the grade book.  This is not ideal to me and definitely not how I would prefer to assess my students, but unfortunately it is where I am at right now because of the number of grades we are required to have.