Standards Love

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After reading about standards started off fairly small with it, and even now I know I'm not implementing it as fully as many other people are.  I expect though that like anything else, it will continue to develop the longer I stick with it.  Baby steps.
based grading since summer I finally drank the kool-aid in January and got hooked.

So although it hasn't been all that long, I have noticed some changes already.  I've also noticed some things that I was doing that needed to be changed.

For starters, assessments have become WAY less stressful.  I don't think it's that kids are taking them less seriously, it's just that they know I'm not trying to "get them."  If they mess up or just need some extra time to learn something, it's ok.  Scores are flexible...more of a work in progress instead of concrete.

A couple times I've had kids absent a day or two before a quiz and typically I'd let them wait to take the quiz until they were ready.  Instead now I tell them to try the quiz to see where they're at and we'll go from there.  So far none of them have objected in the slightest.  Often students are actually asking me for more topics on their quizzes sometimes when they feel like they've improved on something.  Last week I had planned to do a quiz on only two topics, but ended up including two older ones as well because they asked for it.

My favorite thing by far is that slowly but surely, my kids are learning the importance of practice.  A couple weeks ago I gave a homework assignment that was to do 6 out of 13 problems on a worksheet.  It was a puzzle type one that I like because it's kinda self-checking without actually giving them an answer key.  If they get an answer that isn't one of the possibilities they know something went wrong.  So I hand it out (on a Friday) and tell them they only have to do 6 problems.  Upon handing it out I heard comments like:

• Can we just do all of them?
• I'm just going to do them all because I really need to practice this a lot
• I'm gonna do them all because I need to know what the joke is

It was awesome.  Some of them were voluntarily choosing to do additional "homework"...on a Friday no less.  And I say "homework" because at that point it wasn't really homework per-se, they were opting to do more work because they knew it could help them to improve.  I told them that they were only required to do the original 6, but if they personally felt they needed more then of course they were welcome to.

I've also given a couple of homework assignments that are for them to do whatever they want.  Anything at all, but the stipulations are that they need to choose problems (usually from the review sections in our book) where they can check their own answers.  All I check is that they have something done.  They are to use their SBG skill list to help them choose where to focus their efforts.

Along those lines, I've realized that I haven't been doing nearly enough to help them out.  Yes I am always willing to help them before or after school, but often it just isn't all that feasible.  It really got me to thinking and led to a revamped website and a class Livebinder (more on that later).

My goal is to create a resource that is crazy helpful and jam packed full of good and helpful stuff.  I showed it to my kids today and they were pretty excited about some of the stuff.  As I was showing them one girl said that she didn't really need to practice what we're doing right now, but she wanted to go on just to play with some of the stuff that looks fun.

All year I've been struggling with this class and and a seeming lack of motivation so I'm thrilled to find something that seems to be working.