EKU Writing Project

I like being in my father-in-law’s Sunday school class. Now I teach a class for adults, so I’m not in his class often, but on those few occasions when I am I always learn something and am always impressed at his knowledge of the Bible and his enthusiasm for his topic, no matter what lesson he’s sharing. My favorite part, though, every single time, is when he pauses, looks up from his Bible and very self-consciously adds his own perspective. I like this because he always prefaces whatever wisdom is about to come by saying, “This is Donnie talking; I’m not giving you what the Bible says, this is Donnie talking.”

I thought about that a couple of days ago during my last day with the teachers at Farristown Middle School. We have already finished our study of Cris Tovani’s So What Do they Really Know? and spent this final meeting looking at teachers’ application of Tovani’s ideas. Every teacher brought a set of student work with feedback on it and walked the group through their feedback practice. The rest of us had the chance to ask questions about the feedback we saw and find opportunities to strengthen our own feedback practice by “recycling” what works. Importantly, we used Tovani’s instruction, especially from her chapter “Feedback that Fortifies,” as a lens for our observations and a filter for our language.

We took from Tovani the following “truisms”:

- Feedback should be timely (we struggled with how to quantify that - it's always daunting)
- Feedback should occur regularly
- Feedback should be given in student-friendly terms (a Farristown math teacher handles this well by using students’ names as she writes to them)
- Feedback should promote revision in the work students are doing and/or the thinking they need to do going forward
- Feedback should connect to (and inspire) minilessons
- Feedback should occur throughout the work process (only at the end, in response to summative work, is too late to do students any real good)
- Feedback should balance positive comments and statements suggesting areas for growth
- Grades are not feedback

By the time we met on Friday, teachers had heard these ideas several times. But the deliberate move from theory to practice clearly resonated with teachers. They took a risk by exposing themselves to their colleagues. The ideas they shared were their own, things that worked with their students. The questions they asked of each other were prompted by real concerns and a shared desire to engage ever-more effectively with their own students. It was clear that they had been influenced by Tovani, and equally clear that they had adapted her ideas to the needs, learning styles, experiences and voices of their students. When they shared the work students had done, their responses to that work, and the difference it made to student learning, they showed that they owned the practice of feedback. By that ultimate moment in our time together, it wasn’t Tovani talking any longer, the wisdom we gained from each other on Friday is theirs.

I’m excited to link this blog post to another one today, because today my writing appears somewhere other than here. A couple of weeks ago I seized the opportunity to write on one of my passions – and I couldn’t recommend it more.

I follow Sherry Gick (@libraryfanatic) and Franki Sibberson (@frankisibberson) on twitter and noticed a few weeks a call for guest posters on the blog they share, “Reading Teachers Running.” I took the bait, and took advantage of writing about two things I love to talk about: teaching and running.

It occurred to me as I spent of part of spring break working on the piece I agreed to submit that I was excited about seeing it in print, eager to know what people think, imagining that people would read it. I found myself editing based on my imagined – and very real – audience. I had a very real reason for writing too, and was entering a conversation that had been going on for a while, even on that very blog. It influenced the way I wrote, the details I wanted to include, the tone I tried to maintain, and when I decided to end the thing.

One of the first things I did, even before I started writing (I kind of knew what I wanted to say but had no idea how to say it), was to spend some time on Reading Teachers Running so I could see how they talked on there. I wanted to know the kinds of things they wrote about, the language they used, how long each piece was – really practical things that would make a difference to the piece that was taking shape in my mind. In short, I took full advantage of the readily-available mentor texts the blog presented.

I have taught my college students to use mentor texts, but mostly just in theory. I read the Writing Project’s Content Area Learning Task Force’s newsletter on Mentor Texts just a couple months ago, but mostly just as an admiring onlooker. Suddenly, though, I needed them myself. So I found them, and I used them. This will only help me connect students with the kinds of mentor texts that will help them think through and do the kind of writing they plan in my classes in semesters to come. And I hope readers of this blog will think seriously about the role mentor texts play in their thinking and writing process and find ways to communicate this to their own students.

I’m glad I dove in and wrote the piece for Reading Teachers Running. It would have been easy to dismiss it – it wasn’t the most pressing thing I had to do on my spring break (read: taxes). But I knew I could do it, and I felt like I should. We ask students to do writing all the time that we don’t want to do, writing that we don’t even try to do. The two lessons, then, are these: first, we need to be trying the writing we ask students to do; doing so will give us great opportunity to think about the process writers (us) really engage in to get writing work done. That’s valuable information for students struggling to figure out how to approach a writing task. Second, we need to find opportunities for students to do the kind of writing they want to do. We can’t stress the importance of those real-world purposes enough. I found out that it really does change everything.

Check out Reading Teachers Running. Follow Sherry and Franki (and me) on twitter. If you’re not on twitter, join. I can give you a whole list of education leaders to follow and learn from. And, if you’re interested, I can recommend a bunch of runners to follow too.

Finally, thanks for reading this blog when you do. I hope you continue to do so; I’d love to have comments from you about issues I raise here; and I’d like to think that, when the offer goes out, you’ll volunteer to write a guest post for this blog. It doesn’t hurt, and it can definitely help... a lot.

Cris Tovani ends her book on assessment, So What Do They Really Know?, by taking a hard look at grading. Her premise in the chapter is given away by the title: “Grading is Killing Me.” I couldn’t say it better myself and, through my conversations on Friday with the faculty at Farristown Middle School, I discovered that Tovani and I have very good company. Some of Farristown’s teachers identified grading as the worst part of their job; others, though, joined me in declaring their disdain with greater force: for many of us, it’s the worst part of our lives. That’s right: our lives.

So what is it that creates such animosity, builds up resentment, causes angst, turmoil, even anger? Farristown’s teachers and I engaged in the same debate I’ve been having internally for years – and it feels great to know I’m not alone – and each session finished in some useful problem solving: we all want the same thing Tovani wants for her students, and for herself. We want our attention to student work to be manageable, to be relevant, to be authentic, and to contribute to student growth. When our time spent grading takes over our lives, when the stack seems insurmountable, when the hours we put into our feedback and the precision with which we assign a score or a percent or a letter is ignored by students and reveals “mistakes” or “errors” that show up again and again we lose it. In response, we search for a method that means something, a practice that makes a difference. Tovani offers direction. As I talked with Farristown’s faculty, I listened for ways to put into words the things I’m still in the process of figuring out. What solutions do you have? How do you make it work? How does your assessment, grading included, help students grow?

1.      Grades should reflect both what students learn and what teachers value (Tovani 130). Ideally, those are the same thing. Our priorities should be clear to students before and as they work and they should be clearly and consistently communicated to students. Standards based assessment makes this easier when the standards become the language of learning not just the language of assessment. When we start with learning targets and provide targeted feedback that helps students grow toward achievement (or mastery) of the standard, then assessing or grading in that same way is neither a surprise nor unfair.

2.      Students suffer when they are forced to make decisions about what is important in a class and what is not (131). When students are paying attention to points they are shifting their priorities away from their learning and onto their attainment. This leads to all those things teachers hate: groveling, asking for extra credit, asking for make-up work, submitting work in week nine that somehow disappeared in week two. Tovani talks about students “playing the game of school.” When we encourage such “play” we are suggesting that school is artificial and arbitrary. Instead, assessment should be a natural outgrowth of the learning, work and performance that happens as students grow in their knowledge and ability. They should not have to guess at the rules and they should not strive only to “win.”

3.      Grades cannot ignore what really matters, even when figuring out how to assess such things is difficult (132). Standardized tests offering multiple choice and constructed response questions are convenient, efficient, and useful for broad comparisons. Their model, the ACT, is supposed to suggest college readiness. As numerous studies have shown, it doesn’t. And the “career” part of the CCR Common Core Standards has no connection to such forms of assessment at all. Tovani references the article “Rigor Redefined” as emblematic of the kind of thinking required in the professional world and, thus, the kind of scaffolded learning students should be engaged in. How well do End-of-Course assessments and K-Prep measure students’ ability to “collaborate with colleagues, ask the right questions, and problem solve” (132)? Those things are impossible to quantify, slippery, even, to qualify. But they’re what matter, and we must find ways to teach them and ways to assess them.

4.      We don’t grade practice. And there should be more practice than “game time.” But we can’t wait until the end, the “game time,” to offer a grade (136). We don’t live in a vacuum. Students don’t come to us knowing everything they need to know to be successful in our class. We have to meet them where they are, give them what they need to be successful, let them figure things out, then determine how well they fare. The other day I heard someone say, “Of course they can’t do it right the first time; they’ve never done it before.” This thought should drive our feedback. It should give us pause when giving students only one chance to demonstrate understanding and when thinking we need to grade every single thing students do.

5.      Maximizing standards-based instruction is going to require a culture shift. GPA’s will have to go away. Colleges will have to find measures other than grades for admissions. Scholarships will have to use criteria other than grades for awards. Parents will have to evaluate their children’s success in ways other than honor roll and traditional report cards. Report cards will have to change. They already have in elementary schools. Recently the Kentucky Association of School Councils advertised its “Student Mastery Gradebooks” for purchase. Standards can communicate real information to students about their learning, their progress, and their success. They can communicate this same information to parents and to universities, but thinking must change. If the result is that we stop comparing students with each other and instead compare individuals to established competencies, all the better.

6.      Every teacher needs a grading philosophy. Tovani writes: “we need to know why we grade the way we do and be able to communicate it clearly to students, parents, and administrators” (148). For many of us, if we grade the way were graded when we were students we do our students a disservice. By doing so we give them too little information, draw their attention to weaknesses much more than strengths, and force them to work for a grade rather than the learning that happens when students are engaged in their work and teachers are assured that the work really matters.

What’s your philosophy? How do you make grading decisions? What matters to you? And what difference does it make? Let us know. We look forward to hearing from you.