Why I Resent The Common Core

About half of my students come to me as "readers", those who carry books with them through their daily lives, visit libraries, and escape into reading before bed. Many of them come to me as former "readers", those who enjoyed books as littles, but lost the bug once reading for recreation became more challenging than TV watching, video game playing, or just living out an overpacked schedule. 5 weeks into the school year the majority of my students are playing the part of "reader", choosing books that motivate them, reading every night, and writing and talking about that reading in and out of the classroom. They have wide and varied reading tastes, but for the most part they have one thing in common. They are lovers of stories. Most of them read fantasy fiction as their preferred genre, and when asked why they think fantasy is so popular, many write wistfully about loving to escape into impossible worlds. It is impossible to not encourage this love fest my students are having with reading.

A few years ago, this would have been an amazing testament to my teaching superpower, but in the past few years my job description has changed. I have been told quite clearly that these beloved stories (or "narratives" to use the domain specific vocabulary) must only be 1/3 of the puzzle. I am told that I must find an authentic and true balance between stories and more academic reading pursuits, as if stories are non-academic. While I understand the motivation behind the CCSS, and feel myself being pulled by the challenge of finding great informational and argumentative texts to support my teaching in an authentic way, I can not let go of the fact that I teach an English class, the one place where students have traditionally been encouraged to focus on narratives. The rule follower in me feels guilt that I have yet to be able to balance these three types of reading. In my classroom the narrative is still king because my students still revere it, and the fact that I am supposed to discourage that makes me resentful.

Putting aside motivation, and the dearth of high quality informative or argumentative text available for adolescents, there is the simple factor of time to consider. I see my students for 40 minutes a day. That works out to 72 hours a year. In Readicide, Kelly Gallagher shares a frightening statistic that the average 15-24 year old does 7 minutes of recreational reading. If you do that math that works out to 114 hours a year that have the potential to be filled with ANY reading, let alone a healthy mix of reading. When put through that lens one can see that we are fighting a losing battle with reading, a battle that I am trying to fight with any weapon I have. For now, the weapon of choice is stories, and I am not going to feel guilt over that.

A Grading Philosophy

Hi Danielle!

I know you've heard me brag about how much I love my team of teachers that I collaborate with. Working with them challenges me in the best possible ways. We may not always agree on everything, but we're always willing to talk, read, write, and research to try to find the best outcomes for kids. Today we had a pretty intense debate over grading philosophies, in an attempt to standardize our practice across curriculum areas. You know that developing a grading philosophy that matches my teaching philosophy has been a priority of mine for the past year, so I wanted to share some of what we were debating.

This whole discussion started as a result of one speaker at our school district's summer institute who presented an argument for grading based on achievement only. He had some convincing graphs and charts, and many of us bought his argument wholeheartedly. We came back to the school year ready to completely upend our grading system, though some levelheaded colleagues urged us to take a step back and really examine what that would mean. Through some discussion, my team came to an agreement that we wanted to try to start with smaller changes, and look at the way we report grades. What we decided was that at the end of each marking period we will report a traditional percentage grade, just as we always have, but then break down that grade into three areas in the comments section of the report card. We all agreed to try a system that codes all graded assignments under one of the following three reporting categories:

• Achievement- tests, quizzes, writing assignments, projects
• Effort- homework, notebook and material organization
• Participation- contributions to class and working on behaviors of successful students

I know that many might question the validity of having things like organization and participation contribute to a grade, especially with a national push towards measuring only achievement, but I have a few reasons why I strongly support developing a grade this way.

I teach a wide variety of students. Many are competently skilled and right on grade level. An achievement only grade would be fine for these students. But what about my other students, the smaller but extremely significant population of students who simply do not yet have the skills to succeed at grade level in my class? These students range from the newly immigrated ESOL student with enough skills to pass an entrance exam, but who does not actually speak, let alone read or write, in English to the classified inclusion student with a heavily modified curriculum, to the student who has difficult stuff going on outside of school that is a bigger priority in their life than studying for a test. An "achievement only" grade would hurt these students, and it would undermine the message that hard work is a major indicator of success.  

By explicitly including effort and participation in my grading plan, I am already starting to see a significant impact in my classroom. Students are motivated and making strides towards participation. Student distractions are minimal, and the reminder of weekly participation grades is enough to straighten out any stray distractions. More students are doing their nightly reading homework than ever before. The effect is simple to explain. Now that they are being held accountable for their effort and participation, they are working harder and participating more.

For me, one of the keys to successfully switching to a more holistic system of grading is having extremely clear expectations. My students were introduced to a weekly participation rubric in the first week of school. They complete weekly grading reports, where they log all of their assignments for the week on Friday and they receive their current average and a breakdown of all of their grades on Monday. They reflect on their learning at the end of every week, and set a new goal at the start of every new week. Does this take time? Yes. Does this create more work for me? Yes. It is worth it? Absolutely!

I want to communicate that student success is part of a whole package. It's not just about being smart and able to rock a test or write an amazing essay. Those things help, but for those students who struggle in those areas I want them to see that hard work and sustained effort to improve are also important. I want them to understand that when you take an active role in your own learning you learn more, and by default achieve more. I wish that kids could do that without the carrot of a grade, but the reality is that I work with middle schoolers who need carrots. In my opinion, a more well rounded grade earned through hard work, participation, and achievement is a better carrot than a jolly rancher, a shiny sticker, or a threat of lunch detention could ever be.

SLO What?!

Hey Danielle,

I've been thinking a lot lately about Student Learning Outcomes (SLOs) and the upcoming workshop we're leading on them. I feel awesome about the work you and I have been doing on creating teaching goals that really reflect on the needs of our students and reaching meaningful outcomes. I feel more prepared to start a school year than I ever have before. That's awesome!

But I went to a meeting yesterday where the topic of SLOs came up. We got notes from a powerpoint that tried to outline the percentages that each goal is related to and what the expectations are. I was thoroughly confused by all of the info presented and then a piece of info came out that made me pretty uncomfortable:

Every middle school teacher in my entire district is going to have the same SLO!    

Each department will have it's own version of the SLO, but they will all focus on ELA, and essentially the goal will be the same. The ELA will be the benchmark pre-assessment, and we should just "roll with it" (even the math teachers who don't get to have a math related goal should follow suit!). The argument for this is that the admins hope it will be "easier" and "more efficient" to get through writing SLOs if we do this. I questioned whether efficiency through standardization was really best practice, but I don't think I got too far with the idea.  

So this leaves me with so many questions. Maybe you can share what you know from your district to help me wrap my head around this.

1. What is the actual goal of a SLO? Is it about student learning or is it about checking boxes on an evaluation form? 
2. Are other districts approaching SLOs this way? Do all of the 3rd grade teachers at your school have to have the same SLO? Do all of the math teachers at your high school have the same SLO? Is it the same as the SLO the science, English, art, or foreign language teachers have?
3. Can content area teachers create a SLO related to their individual content? My principal is under the impression that any SLOs not focusing on ELA or math will be "rejected by the state".
4. Can the state really reject an SLO? Who is sitting in Albany checking every SLO for every teacher in the state?
5. How does our workshop goal of "developing an SLO that is meaningful to you" and "developing an assessment plan that works for your classroom" match up with a district wide mandated SLO? Did we miss the point?  
6. Have I stepped into crazy town?

You always seem to "get it" when we're talking about state mandates. Can you help me understand?

Your confused friend,

Kathryn

On Grading and Objectivity

I've been thinking about grading and assessment philosophy pretty much non-stop this summer. I think I've come upon a great plan to bring back to my classroom this fall that I will definitely share here once it's all together.

This morning I found this great post on grading objectively over at RAMS English. I'm definitely planning on printing out the reminders and keeping them in my gradebook as a constant reminder of the power of my purple pen.

Mile Marker #1

This year's research project has been unique in that I am not in the early stages of a new research path, but instead deeply into the journey I am on. I spent the entire spring semester researching writing to learn in a way that could make sense to the uninitiated, but what kept coming up was a point of my own struggle. I could not escape the nagging little voice that kept pointing out that in my own teaching my view of assessment was deeply misaligned with my instruction.

What the summer institute has afforded me is not a chance to dig in to research in the traditional sense, though I do want to spend some time in the NWP resources reading up on alternative assessments and portfolios as a way of developing some strategies, but instead has offered the time and place to work on the implementation of new strategies.

Perhaps the most important idea guiding this came from James, who challenged himself to find his nonnegotiables, the outside of the curriculum heart of what successful learning in his class looks like. I took an opportunity to do this for myself, and was able to identify specific student goals in the following four areas:

• Reading: 
• choosing, reading, and recording a large number of books, most self-chosen, though some books will be shared and assigned
• talking about reading through book talks and book clubs
• writing about reading through weekly responses that incorporate targeted skills, book reviews, and text analysis work
• Writing:
• writing a huge number of pieces (12-15 completed pieces by the end of the year) for a variety of purposes- making sure I support all three text types each quarter
• freewriting as a daily practice
• talking about our own writing through writers groups
• focusing on thoughtful, meaningful revision practices.
• Language Use
• Expanding vocabulary by working with SAT level words even though it is only 7th grade
• Working towards mastery on a series of tiered grammar concepts (like the one Kelly Gallagher presents in Teaching Adolescent Writers)
• Applying vocabulary and grammar lessons to writing 
• Class Participation
• attending class consistently and being prepared for any meetings or events 
• being willing to try new things and make an effort even when things are difficult (no shutting down, no checking out)
• listening and speaking during class or small group discussions
• being respectful and generous to everyone and everything in the room (classmates, teachers, teaching assistants, visitors, supplies, furniture, etc.) 

From here I feel confident that I can move on to the next steps of creating the templates needed for weekly recording of grades and reflection on learning, hammering out and creating/revising materials to meet my new grammar and vocabulary plans, and outlining an approach to work with students on creating a rubric that matches these four skill areas.

My research journey so far...

Research so far. I've asked a burning question and then I found a few more.  I have listed projects I'm interested in working on, and then I listed more.  I took time yesterday to really focus on what I want to accomplish and I categorized and organized those thoughts.  

All of this lead me to two projects I want to focus on for the next week and two days, regarding research that is.  I would like to focus on starting to form lesson plans, or answering the question of how to create a relationship based classroom at the beginning of the year.  I really want students to understand personal responsibility and encourage them to take charge of their own learning.  I know that they can do this in a writing to learn classroom.  I want to tease out the lessons and procedures that need to be in place for that to happen.  

My secondary focus is my resource room.  I want to create a writing to learn resource room, and I know these two notions are not mutually exclusive. I plan on using the writing to learn process and isearch process to help me answer these questions in my head.  I have a bunch of other things that will fall into place, but I really want to start there.  Gaining clarity is really exciting because I feel like I've been circling the airport for a few weeks and my plane has now landed.

What I learned from our discussion of Because Writing Matters

I learned a few things from our discussion of Because Writing Matters.  First of all, teach who you are. Second, writing to learn is essential, not that hard to implement and really important.  Showing is much better than telling.  I can show another teacher easily, but they don’t really “get it” if I “tell” them.  I’m inspired to write my curriculum guide, but I will show through teaching and strategies the HOW to implement writing to learn.  It’s really important to get other teachers on board. Also, don’t just close my door. Keep it open and start shouting from the rooftops to everyone, in a fun way of course!  Writing to learn is just or more important that learning to write.  The two go hand and hand, and gone are the days of writing as a product.  It’s a process, and when teachers can embrace that process, education will be a much different magical place.