Friday Fragments, August 28th
More about grading & microlectures, interesting news about wastewater testing of campus dorms & a beautiful online student notebook template.
What I’m reading:
In Eight Essential Principles for Improving Grading (Susan Brookhart, Thomas Guskey, Jay McTighe and Dylan Wiliam) the authors offer some thoughts for how we can re-think and reform grading. I was most struck by their fourth suggestion:
Grades should be based on a synthesis of evidence reflecting students' current level of learning or accomplishment, not an average of performance over a period of time. Where students were at the beginning or halfway through a learning sequence doesn't matter. How many times they fell short during that sequence doesn't matter. What matters is what they have learned and are able to do currently or "at this time."
I don’t disagree with the authors; it’s quite logical that the student’s final grade in a course should reflect their final mastery of the learning outcomes. But, in practice, that puts an awful lot of weight on relatively few summative assessments. What should an instructor do when a student has been demonstrating progress, but comes in to the final exam and just does not perform well? Or, as is sometimes the case in writing-intensive courses such as mine, their performance is a mixed bag - some really strong work, some less successful work, some missing work…should an instructor rely on the “final product” in this case? And what would that final product be? Too, I feel that there’s a strong argument for including progress grades in the overall calculation, to acknowledge and reward the hard work a student has put in over the course of a semester, even if their final product ended up being “B” work instead of “A” work.
Teacher Meg Griswold shared how she breaks down larger blocks of class time (5 min class meeting + 20 min independent reading + 10-15 min minilesson + 30-40min independent work) and how she - and her students, as it turns out - prefer a recorded minilesson over a live one. I’m not surprised that she & her students have found this to be more effective; I’ve shared before about the benefits of recording microlectures and have long (pre-COVID) done this with my hybrid classes.
This thread by Charles Fishman explaining how the Univ. of Arizona is using wastewater testing to identify asymptomatic cases on campus was really interesting:
I came across this beautiful Student Notebook created in Google Slides by Isabel Morales (blank template here and an example, Exploring Race Notebook, she created). It’s designed for high school social studies, but I could see adapting the template to work with a college class, particularly one that uses a portfolio assessment model.
Thanks for reading!