Write It

Self-Assessment

Lately, I've been pretty hard on myself as I assess my progress in my second year at Purdue. It was nice to get the following message from a former student who was in my "Teaching Literature" class at Western Michigan University a couple of years ago. He just accepted a high school teaching position last January (in Ft. Wayne, actually). He sent an e-mail, saying:

"So I was sitting with the assistant principal brainstorming ideas over language
arts teaching methods and we start talking about reading. So she drops
this book on me, "I Read it But I Just Don't Get It" Hmm... sounds
familiar. She was impressed as hell that I had read that book so I have
you to thank."

Hope you don't mind that I shared his feedback. I think it's a good "heads up" for methods students as well; teaching secondary comprehension, whether you want to call it reading or interpretation (depending upon the politics of wherever you are when you're discussing the issue) is pretty big right now.

Standards-Based Education

One thing I didn't consider about standards-based education is how the traditional letter grades don't fit into the new models of assessment. This post by a junior high school teacher talks about the resistance of parents to the new system of +, success in meeting standards, and N, not meeting standards, the new pass and fail.

He says,

Many schools in our district have met with fierce opposition to our new standards based report cards, chiefly from parents. Why? Well, for one thing our report cards will no longer have A’s or B’s but rather simply a check, if the child is meeting the standard, an “N” if they are not, and a rare “+” if they exceed the standards. Parental opposition to this new system is understandable. Parents want to know what the hell they are looking at when they review their child’s report card. Everyone is familiar with the old A,B,C,D,F system, and a standards based system is foreign to them.

What is a standards based system? Well, despite the fears of our parents that we are dumbing down our grading or moving away from a traditional system of performance assessment, standards based education is spreading nationwide, largely as a result of the No Child Left Behind Act.

He's much more optimistic about the new system than I am, however, as he says, I'm open to anything that helps our students learn. My only question is how to recognize significant achievement and significant failure under the new system.

Thoughts?