On-demand Performance Assessments vs. The Grading Load

One of the things I love about teaching writing with a Workshop approach is the opportunity to support students as they are in the midst of independent projects. This just-in-time teaching allows for differentiation, re-teaching, stretching, and confirming. There are often “ah ha!” moments. Workshop also allows the opportunity for creating a community of learners: peers helping each other, sharing with partners, small groups, or the whole class. Taking a risk in such a supported classroom feels do-able, and students make big growth. Often as I grade final projects, I can see the tracks of my teaching—both whole group and individual—reflected in student work. This is very satisfying as a teacher.

CC0 image from pixabay website

On the other hand, as I grade final projects, I wonder how much of the work is their own. How well can they actually do the things I am asking them to do without all the support they get? Where is the line between scaffolding the learning so students can grow, and expecting them to show their learning independently?

Our new units from the TCRWP staff recommend on-demand writing both before and after a unit is taught. Before-unit writing allows the teacher to see what skills students already have and areas for growth. After-unit writing shows what students have learned from the unit. In-between these on-demand writing pieces is the workshop: self-selected independent projects supported by directed teaching, individual conferring, and peer sharing.

Jay McTighe and Grant Wiggins advocate for performance assessments that show transfer of learning goals. In an Understanding by Design (UbD) white paper (ASCD, 2012), they explain the third of their seven key tenets: “Understanding is revealed when students autonomously make sense of and transfer their learning through authentic performance. Six facets of understanding—the capacity to explain, interpret, apply, shift perspective, empathize, and self-assess—can serve as indicators of understanding”.  The words “autonomously” and “apply” jump out at me. They seem to be agreeing with the TCRWP staff that on-demand performance is the only way to see true understanding and learning.

So what do those ideas mean for me as a teacher? And how does grading intersect with these ideas? Although ideally I’d like to teach and assess without putting a grade on a piece of work, I know that is not the reality of school. Grades are supposed to show how well students are achieving the learning standards. We are obligated to communicate a student’s achievement on report cards, and at our school, that means assigning a grade to their work.

If I take McTighe & Wiggins’ and TCRWP’s suggestions and meld them with my grading obligation, ideally my unit should look like this:

1. Before-unit on-demand writing to pre-assess student learning. This would be used by the teacher to inform upcoming teaching, as well as by students to set learning goals.
2. Three to four weeks of workshop during which students work on self-selected independent projects supported by teaching and feedback.  This would be filled with formative feedback as students practice their new skills within the supported environment.
3. After-unit on-demand writing to assess mastery of learning standards and transfer of understanding. This would be a summative grade that goes on the report card.

I have a few questions about this “ideal” unit assessment scenario. First and foremost, I wonder if students will put their full effort into their weeks-long processed workshop piece knowing that it doesn’t “count” toward their grade. Right now, most students will pour over their writing product with a fine-tooth comb, comparing their work to the rubric descriptors, asking questions of peers and me to fix it up to meet the standard. What’s the point in putting in all that effort if that piece of work doesn’t “count” toward a grade?

Second, what if the post-unit on-demand assessment falls on a bad day for the student? This is one of the big caveats to relying on standardized testing data to define student ability: it’s just a snapshot of one day, and maybe that was a bad day for that student. How can one day’s work define the learning of a whole unit? What if the students know more than the assessment allows them to show?

Third, who has time to score three pieces of writing for every unit? I spend hours evaluating student writing as it is, and I’m not doing all the on-demand pieces. I’ve asked this question in workshops, and get the answer that the on-demands (especially the pre-assessment) shouldn’t take all that long because the point is to just get a “sense” of where the student is, not examine it with a fine-tooth comb. Well, maybe that works in elementary where writing is brief, but give an 8th grader 45 minutes to write an on-demand piece and I get two pages typed—single spaced, size 12 font. Just reading the piece takes at least 5 minutes, and then another 5 minutes or so to score, multiplied times 45 students, and I’m looking at a minimum of 7.5 hours. If I’m assigning a summative grade, as I would for the post-unit on-demand assessment, I would probably double that because I do need to examine the writing with a fine-tooth comb.

Could there be a compromise? What if…

1. Only the student uses the pre-assessment on-demand piece to make goals for the unit? Once the student shares those goals with me, I can use them to guide my conferring, and possibly whole class instruction as well if enough students have the same goals. Once the unit gets rolling, I would focus on the work in front of us and not the on-demand anyway when I am conferring with students. This would take one of the 7.5-grading-hour commitments off my plate.
2. The processed piece and the post-unit on-demand each count 50% of the summative unit grade? This would give enough weight to the processed piece that students would want to work hard on it over the three-four week unit, and also show what students can do independently.  It would honor the long-term work as well as the one-day snapshot. I’m still looking at double the grading time, though. That’s still a problem.

It seems there is a disconnect between the “ideal” and the reality of the day-to-day life of a teacher. I’m not sure how to resolve this. Any thoughts out in the blogosphere? How do you handle on-demand assessments? How do you find time to evaluate multiple pieces of writing for the same set of learning standards?

Thoughts About Mentoring a Student Teacher

I hosted a grad student in my class last week. She is a second-career education student who is finishing her last course before her student teaching experience. She visited my class because she needed 10 hours of Observation and Participation. In her 10 hours with me, she observed four hours of my teaching and she taught two 55-minute lessons. The other four hours consisted of break, lunch, planning time and study hall. She was required to plan the lesson she taught (twice) and write a journal reflection on the 10-hour experience. I was required to sign off on the hours.

There were some outcomes from this experience that surprised me. First, she had never heard of the workshop approach to teaching literacy. Her undergrad major was English Literature and Composition, and she is majoring in secondary education, so I assumed she had taken a literacy education course along the way. I know there are many many ways to teach literacy, and workshop is not the usual method in secondary schools, but I would have thought she had at least heard about it. I gave her an everything-you-need-to-know-about-workshop-in-1-minute-or-less lesson so she could understand what she was observing.

Next, she didn't take notes during, or have any questions after, the observation. I wondered what she had gotten out of the lesson. Through our follow-up discussion, she seemed to be impressed with how well the students behaved and how nice the room was and how each student had their own computer to use. These were not the observations of someone about to take over a classroom, clued into the subtleties of classroom management, instructional technique, and creating classroom climate. Rather, they seemed to be those of someone in culture shock.

On the day that she taught, using my lesson objectives and a modified workshop structure, her passion for teaching came through. Like any substitute teacher, she was faced with a room full of students who's names she didn't know, who's personalities and learning levels she didn't know, and plopped into the middle of a unit she didn't know. However, I suggested the kids make simple name cards when they came in, and she used their names during the lesson to connect with the students. She was personable, and seemed to enjoy the content and the students.

We had a debrief between the first and the second lesson. We talked through what went well and where the rough spots were. I helped her consider things such as how to get students' attention back after releasing them to an activity, prioritizing lesson parts when things are dragging on too long, questioning techniques when kids are reluctant to share, and immediate application of learning. The second lesson went better.

When we debriefed the second lesson, she was amazed at how something as simple as an attention cue can make transitions go quickly and smoothly. She said that she was in her last week of her behavior management class, and never had they talked about cues. They talked about making rules and consequences. I shared with her other things I do that contribute to classroom management: seating choices, lesson variety with active engagement, walking around while kids are working and holding kids accountable.

This young woman is eager to get into the classroom and make a difference in children's lives. It was refreshing to see that passion. Sometimes I forget that I was the same way starting out. I was just as nervous and just as ill-prepared to step into a room full of kids. I wonder if teacher prep courses could up their game, however. The accountability piece for this particular Observation and Participation requirement seemed really weak. I've read articles advocating for a medical-student-like preparation course for teachers: classwork followed by internship followed by residency followed by full certification. It is the on-the-ground experience while being mentored by an expert that creates competent practitioners.

I don't think I want to be her mentor teacher for her student teaching experience next year. Not because I think she is hopeless, but because I already have a lot on my plate. I will recommend her to another teacher who would be willing to take on that responsibility. And I wish her well on her journey into the joys of teaching.

Questioning the Labels for the Units of Study in Argument, Information, and Narrative Writing

Last week we had a professional development day that was dedicated to writing curriculum. This was a much needed pause from the day-to-day hustle of the classroom, especially as we are trying to understand and implement the CCSS and the new Units of Study in Argument, Information, and Narrative Writing (Heinemann, 2014). As a department, we agreed to tackle our final writing unit of the year. At the 8th grade level, this was the Position Paper unit, which the TCRWP authors labeled as our "Informational" writing unit.

Since we use the Understanding by Design (UbD) unit planning process (Wiggins & McTighe), we started by unpacking the CCSS informational writing standard, examining what it looked like for the years before and after us as well as what is new and unique to our grade. As is the case with Narrative and Argument writing, there are only a few new things in 8th grade compared to 7th, usually bumping up the level of abstraction or depth of support. The implication, though, is that the grades before us must do their job in order for students to be ready to add the new piece at our grade. This is the only way the spiral will work.

We then went to our Rubicon Atlas mapping site to continue our UbD work: identifying enduring understandings and essential questions, including knowledge and skill objectives based on the demands of the standards, revising assessments and rubrics. All this was done fairly quickly, as the unit focus wasn't changing much from what we'd taught before.

Finally, we were ready to tackle the Learning Activities. We opened the "Informational" unit, Position Papers, and double-checked our list of standards against the list provided in the back of the book. Wait, what? The only genre-specific standards listed in the book were argument standards. I thought this was our "Informational" unit, so where were the informational standards?

Next we started digging into the lessons. Indeed, the focus of this whole unit was arguing one side of an issue and backing it up with evidence and explanation. It is a great unit, full of focused strategies and engaging topics, but it sits firmly in the argument arena, not informational. Yes, there is a component of research to find evidence to back up your side of the argument, and to find counterarguments, and yes, that research would have to be explained  in an informational way to readers who may not have the same background knowledge. But the thrust is still to argue one side. How am I supposed to assess the informational standards?

This is not the first time I have questioned the labeling of the TCRWP units. The 8th grade "Narrative" unit is Investigative Journalism. As I taught that unit earlier in the year, the teaching points were mostly about getting your information across in an interesting way-- AKA Informational writing. We taught fantasy short story writing as our Narrative writing in English Language Arts, so I felt solid about meeting those standards through that unit.

My 7th grade colleagues also ran into a labeling question. The 7th grade Literary Essay unit is considered their Informational unit; they also have Realistic Fiction for Narrative, and The Art of Argument for Argument units. Our Literary Essay unit is labeled as our Argument unit. What makes a Literary Essay more informational vs. more argumentative?

Perhaps we should rearrange the labels of the 8th grade English Language Arts writing units this way:

• Literary Essay: Informational (work with 7th grade to see how they did it as an informational piece and add our 8th grade bits onto it)
• Fantasy Short Story: Narrative
• Position Paper: Argument

I suppose we could leave the Literary Essay unit as an argument unit, knowing we are covering informational writing in our Week Without Walls Investigative Journalism unit in Social Studies. As long as the students receive the teaching, it is not so important that it happens during ELA. Besides the Week Without Walls project is outside the Social Studies curriculum, so it's already in a gray area.

I respect the Teachers College Reading and Writing Project staff and the work they do with curriculum. The units are demanding and full and vertically articulated. My colleague thinks the middle school units were thrown together hastily to get something out on the coat tail of the elementary units of study. I don't see that within the content of the units themselves, but perhaps she's right when it came to labeling the units to meet the CCSS modes of writing.

At the end of the day, as long as the students are being taught how to write in those various modes of writing, does it really matter how the units are labeled? Now I've got to go back into my Atlas Rubicon unit plans and adjust the standards. I don't think Jay McTighe would approve.

Merging CCSS Social Studies/History Standards with Reciprocal Teaching

In my January post, Using Close Reading of Multiple Sources to Get Away from the "Single Story" of US History, I shared a scaffold I learned from Stevi Quate called Reciprocal Teaching. This scaffold assigns roles to students in groups of four: Summarizer, Clarifier, Questioner, and Predictor, as a way to help everyone in the group unpack complex texts. I used it with a packet of primary source materials about The Great Awakening, and noticed that students were getting a lot more out of the texts than previous classes had. 

Along the way, I added some minilessons aligned to the CCSS Literacy in Social Studies/History standards from the Teacher's College Reading and Writing Project as a way to build students' skills for reading informational texts. I connected those reading skill lessons to the Reciprocal Teaching roles: 

• Clarifier (This role goes first after a chunk of text has been read): READING FOR KEY IDEAS AND DETAILS: Standard 1: Reading Closely and Making Logical Inferences: "Readers know that informational texts are conveying ideas, facts and examples. Our first job, then, is to make sure we read informational texts in a way that we can really “get” the information without veering off into personal connections or response. If we’ve done our job well, we should be able to turn around and teach someone else everything we’ve learned so far. We can do this by reading a short chunk of text, pausing, covering or looking away from the text, and trying to say back everything we’ve learned so far." 
• Questioner (This role goes third): READING TO INTEGRATE KNOWLEDGE AND IDEAS AND THINK ACROSS INFORMATIONAL TEXTS: Standard 8: Evaluate Text Evidence, Weighing the Validity of Author's Claims: "Readers of informational texts consider how well an author has made his/her claim by taking a close look at the evidence used to support it. Readers ask ourselves questions like, 'How valid are the author’s claims? Is there enough evidence? Is the evidence good? Does it fit the claim and seem reasonable? Can I trust the source of the evidence? Has the author laid out the evidence in a logical manner that makes sense?”' 
• Summarizer (This role goes last): READING FOR KEY IDEAS AND DETAILS: Standard 2: Determining Central Ideas or Themes: "Once readers really “get” the information in an informational text, their next job is to try to find the central, or big idea of the text. We do this by asking ourselves, “What is this text starting to be about?” We can think about all the details we’ve read about so far, and put them together to find the central idea. We remember to hold ourselves to what the text actually says and suggests, and not veer off into personal connections and response. This way we stay close to the text."   

These minilessons and the practice students had while using the skills during their roles kept their reading (and behavior) focused on the text in front of them.  Students felt much more comfortable digging through the complexity of 18th century writing than they did before.

Fast forward several weeks. We completed a series of "Town Hall Meetings" in which students took on the role of a Patriot, Loyalist, or Neutralist and debated whether the colonists should rebel against Great Britain (see my previous post "Practicing Argument Strategies During Socratic Smackdown". It was time to dig deeper into the issue and come back to primary source texts.

Using another set of Debating the Documents materials, Loyalists and Patriots (MindSparks, 2006), Reciprocal Roles were revived. I wanted to keep the structure from the last round, and also build more informational reading skills. I kept the Clarifier and Summarizer roles the same; students really needed the Clarifier to help them understand the difficult language of the written texts. Summarizing skills were not where they needed to be yet, so I wanted them to have more practice.

However, I changed the Predictor and Questioner roles. I noticed during the first round that the Predictor was floundering around trying to figure out what to do. When confronted with a visual document, what is there to predict? And although I liked the direction the Questioner was going, it seemed like students were ready to dig a little deeper into the idea of bias. I changed these two roles into new ones:

• Schema Connector (Goes after Clarifier): READING TO INTEGRATE KNOWLEDGE AND IDEAS AND THINK ACROSS TEXTS: Standard 7: Integrate and Evaluate Content in Different Media: "Readers of informational texts are always thinking about how new information connects to information from other sources. We do this by comparing what we already know to new information and asking, “Does this fit with what I know? If so, does it add something new or change it slightly? If not, should I change what I thought I knew to this new information? If so, why?”  
• Bias Detector (Goes after Schema Connector): READING FOR CRAFT AND STRUCTURE: Standard 4: Reading to Interpret the Language Used in the Text: "Readers know that even the most factual informational text is written by a person that has a personal perspective. Readers can determine the author’s point of  view and consider how that point of shapes the meaning of the text. We do this analysis by looking back on the language choices in the text. Ask yourself, 'How does the choice of words, the tone of the language, reveal the author’s point of view on the topic?' 'How does the visual style (angle, light, composition, etc.) reveal the author's point of view on the topic?'”  

Here is the new card that students used while discussing the Loyalists and Patriots packet:

These roles worked out well with the second packet. They seemed to fit the information a bit better, and helped students to understand not just what the text was saying, but to think through other important elements such as bias and validity. I liked bringing in the CCSS Social Studies/History standards and finding a way for students to practice the reading skills in a meaningful way. 

If anyone has any other creative ways to teach informational reading and/or strategies for tackling complex texts like primary source documents, I'd love to hear about it in the comments.

"Is this graded?"

After three heavy weekends of grading and reporting, I can finally come up for air. Oh yeah, of course I still have some work to do-- it's never ending-- but this weekend it's about feedback and not about grading, and it's only about 3 hours' worth instead of 10 hours' worth.

Our middle school faculty is doing a book study of Thomas Guskey's Answers to Essential Questions about Standards, Assessments, Grading, and Reporting (Corwin, 2012). We have been having a lot of discussion about formative assessment: what it is, what it looks like, what to do with it once we have it. We are not new to the concepts of formative and summative assessments. We did a lot of work around those ideas about 5 years ago and have been working with it since. It's pretty surprising, then, how much variety we have as a faculty in our understanding and use of formative assessments.

Five years ago, our middle school made a decision to make our grade books consistent by having two categories of grades: formative (weighted as 15% of the whole grade) and summative (weighted at 85%). This change definitely made a big difference in helping our students and parents understand how grades were being calculated. Before this change, some teachers were counting homework as 85% and tests as 15%, others had standards-based categories (for example, world language teachers had categories for Speaking, Listening, Reading, and Writing-- each weighted as 25% of the total grade), and others had categories that included participation and collaboration. The 85%/15% weighting keeps us teachers focused on using grades to show achievement of standards, rather than behaviors (like participation), and keeps the grade reflective of how well the student can achieve on his/her own (summative assessments like tests and performance tasks and in-class projects) rather than practice opportunities (like homework).

This system has been good for teachers and parents, but we are starting to question the value for students. Students have become "trained" to ask, "Is it formative or summative?" when an assignment is given. Teachers infer that students use the answer to gauge how much effort they should put into completing the assignment: not much if it's formative, quite a bit if it's summative. It makes sense, considering the weighting categories, and our students are not fools. They do what they need to do when playing the game of school. (You can tell I am in the midst of a poetry unit! I may be a poet and not even know it!)

According to Guskey, formative assessments are supposed to give feedback to students about how well they are meeting the standard (and hopefully some information about how to get closer) as well as giving feedback to teachers about how to adjust instruction based on where students are in their learning. Bottom line, formatives shouldn't be graded because their purpose is practice and feedback. 

So our conversations about formative assessments have two sides to them: we understand and agree to the concept that they shouldn't be graded, yet we wonder if students will take them seriously if we don't slap a grade on them (even a small one like 15%). 

I think we can get away from grading formative assessments if we do more work re-training our students to view them as learning opportunities in which they get to practice a skill or strategy and get feedback about how well they are doing before the summative assessment. To that end, I have been watching my language when I make assignments and get the inevitable question, "Is this graded?" I am using the phrases "learning opportunity" and "get feedback" more and more often. 

It's been interesting to see how this response affects students. The students who "get it" really do use the feedback to improve their work. I saw this very clearly when I was grading fantasy stories last weekend (one of the 10-hour work weekends I've been having): students who used the rubric to self-assess and make goals asked for help from peers and me when they got into trouble spots, and made improvements based on that feedback. Their summative assessment results placed them squarely in the A-B range. Those students who went off on their own and disregarded my feedback, did not get help from peers, and didn't see the rubric as a tool to improve their writing, sat squarely in the C-D range. 

I have a selfish interest in the "no grades for formative" debates too-- less grading for me to do! I still need to hold students accountable for doing the practice pieces (homework, in-class activities), but a complete/incomplete designation in the grade book can take care of that. As for "formative feedback", that is work I am glad to take on as long as students use it to make improvements before their summative. 

Now I have to get back to giving feedback on poetry analysis annotations. They will want to use it when they write it up for their summative poetry anthology project.