Hello Everyone!
I just finished reading A Repair Kit to Grading by Ken O'Connor. It has been a very rewarding book study for me. These are the big things I've taken away from it:
1.) Always accept late work and don't take off points. Kids that are behind easily get into "give up mode" when they know they aren't going to receive much credit for late assignments. While you need deadlines, if students talk to me and continue to show they understand the content, I will reward them with full credit.
2.) Don't grade participation, aesthetic concerns, or behavior. That doesn't show what they know! And some kids don't let grades control their behavior.
3.) Make good assessments. Make sure they are balanced and show what students know. This is tough, but the makes grading a more accurate indicator of what they know.
4.) Don't grade formative assessments. These are practice. In the future, any vocab quizzes I give will be graded but won't calculate into their final grade for the quarter.
My question to all of you... what are your grading practices like? What concerns do you have about grading?
Thanks for the post!
ReplyDeleteSince I am an EL teacher, I come to the grading process with that perspective. I agree about students being penalized for late work. If students are still struggling about being able to do work, I think a more powerful motivator is accepting late work for full credit. I don't see the 60% of grade for finished assignments that are late as being a motivator.
For language classes, I gain leverage by giving weekly classwork grades for doing conversation and participation in our speaking lessons. This HAS worked as a motivator for low language students to have high participation. I can see how this can penalize students in larger content classes, so I see how this doesn't work so much there.
I give grades for quizzes as formative assessments--but I find this is important in small classes, otherwise they don't think it is important.
It seems analogous to giving puppies away--it's better to charge a higher price, then the owner values the puppy more! Students DO seem to place value on something that is graded--even minimally--so I use that to keep them focused!
That's my 2 cents--thanks for the great post!