Building Positive School Culture
Essential Question:
How can we foster a loving and supportive environment
that enables our students to thrive academically, socially and emotionally?
Student Self-Grading: “Is this good enough?”
A Put-It-To-Practice for Student Voice and School Culture
The Idea
English teachers everywhere struggle to keep up with grading and last year I was in over my head. Out of desperation, I started to train my students to grade themselves. Although my original goal was self-preservation, the ultimate result was better work and engagement from my students. It was one of those diamond-in-the-rough moments that I was happy to revisit more formally this year as part of my GSE coursework. Our challenge was to increase student voice in our classrooms or on our campus.
To prepare us for this challenge, we read Fires in their Minds: What Kids Can Tell Us About Motivation and Mastery, by Kathleen Cushman. True to her message, Cushman’s book is filled with feedback and suggestions from students who worked with her to examine what makes one an “expert” at something and how that understanding can be applied to classroom learning. Several important concepts were emphasized by students when it came to practicing their work that I felt I could use with my own students:
“You share with us exemplary work by other students.” p. 115
“You write with us a clear rubric describing the qualities of good work.” p. 115
You “teach us to critique and revise everything we do.’ p. 105
It was the second week of school with my 7th grade Language Arts classes. My thought was that it would be great to launch our first novel unit by training the students to grade their own notes. Although, this time, I was more interested in the benefits for my students.
The Theory
My theory was that I would see improved:
Confidence and Independence: Students like Emma, who works extremely hard to over come several learning disabilities, would be able to answer the “Is this good enough?” question themselves, thus building their confidence and freeing them from my apron-strings.
Quality: Students might transition from a focus on “What grade will the teacher give me?” to “How can I do better quality work?”
Equity: We all struggle to be “fair” in our grading but, unlike a math problem, or clear date in history, or exact part of speech, grading someone’s thinking about a novel is horribly subjective. Allowing students to evaluate their efforts spreads the burden of responsibility for “fair” grading.
I felt that, should it go well, I could increase the involvement of students in determining rubrics, creating work, and evaluating progress as the year continued. Trying to guess what students need and how challenging to make an assignment pales in comparison to giving them to the tools to design and evaluate the work themselves. I certainly wouldn’t complain if it saved me some time and energy along the way too....
The Plan:
I looked at note journals I had saved from last year’s students. What did I want this year’s students to do? How was I going to communicate that with them and help them define the role and quality of notes with me? I referred back to the points from Fires in their Minds.
“You share with us exemplary work by other students.” p. 115
I spoke about the novel we would be starting in class and the differences between relaxed reading and thinking reading. We would be taking “thinking” notes while we read. I use T-chart or dialogue-style note journals. On the left half of the paper, students record important notes about plot, characters, and settings and on the right, their “metacognition” about the text such as predictions, connections, wonderings etc.
My first lesson was reviewing story structure and terminology and introducing the concept of metacognition. Metacognition is what takes reading from relaxed to “thinking” reading, where you are able to share and analyze your reactions to the text.
For the second lesson, I showed students sample notes from last year, ranging from poor to high quality notes. Students looked at 12 sample notes and assigned each a letter grade along with an explanation of why they gave that grade. Many exclamations of “What! This is 7th grade work?” and “I would give this a Z-!!” were heard as students struggled to read sloppy handwriting, poor spelling, and incomplete notes. In all four of my classes, I had to direct students to focus on how well the notetaker had tried to meet the purpose of the notes (as shown above) and not to grade them just on handwriting, spelling or grammar, as those weren’t the focus of the assignment. I had included some excellent journals that were hard to understand due to grammatical errors and some that had shallow ideas but the most lovely handwriting so that students experienced the subjectivity of grading. Their discomfort enabled me to explain why I felt self-grading was so important: they were the best ones to grade the quality of their own thinking.
(insert sample journals here--not able to upload today)
Looking back, I wish I had taken a second day to have students focus more on the notes that met and exceeded requirements. I had intended to include students in developing descriptors for each level: “A” grades exceed requirements, “B” grades meet requirements, and “C” grades are below requirements, but I needed to get to the novel as we would be interviewing the author at the end of the month. Ideally, and in the future, I would like to have students identify and compare samples that “meet” and “exceed” requirements and use them to define what those requirements are. This would meet the suggestion:
“You write with us a clear rubric describing the qualities of good work.” p. 115
In this case, I shared my own rubric descriptors for each level. I posted them on the board, where they have stayed throughout the unit, and they copied them into their own journals as a reference.
As part of my GSE assignment, I shared this project idea with peers before I launched it in class. One of the students I invited to my project tuning had suggested that I build in a chance for peer feedback before students turned in their notes to me. Aaron felt that this would give students a chance to see strengths and weaknesses in their notes or in their grading accuracy. This seemed an obvious way to include student voice in this process so, after our third day of notetaking together, I had students get peer feedback from each other. Students chose their best page of notes to leave on their desk along with a paper split into two columns: one for warm feedback and one for cool suggestions. Students rotated desks, leaving each other written feedback about what they had done that matched the descriptors and suggestions where they could push themselves if they chose to. Students got feedback from 2 peers. I wanted to give them time to revise or add on to their notes if they found a suggestion they wanted to use on their feedback, but we ran out of class time and I told them they could do it at home (I don’t think many did). Again, I would plan more time for this crucial step next time around as I believe it is one way to develop the habit:
You “teach us to critique and revise everything we do.’ p. 105
To me, this is the epitome of student voice with this project: growing the skills for students to evaluate and improve their own work as active participants rather than subjects of my whim.
The Result
My impressions from those first graded notes, and the notes they have continued to do, are that students almost always grade themselves the same as I would. For those students who grade a little high or low, I comment in writing why I disagree or ask them directly to share their thinking about their grade. I love that I can refer clearly to the descriptors to explain why I am thinking differently than them--where they failed to meet a requirement or where they had actually gone above and beyond. The process feels less teacher-driven and far less subjective.
The feedback I received from my second GSE project tuning was positive, with many recommendations to continue to use this self-grading process with work throughout the year. Using the sample notes was an obvious positive as was the chance for students to give each other peer feedback. Many teachers were pleased with the win-win that students had more voice and the teacher had less grading. I asked for ideas to expand what I have started and improve the level of student voice in my classroom.
Looking Forward
There are many areas I would like to improve or address:
Commit to more student voice. I haven’t had a chance to get feedback from students on how the process is working for them or how I might do better next time. We are on a timeline, but I would like to hear from them--perhaps after we have interviewed the author and before we move on to our next unit. This is part of “closing the loop” of student voice--not just including them in the initial process, but reflecting with them on how their voice mattered throughout the process and where things can go from here.
More time for developing descriptors together. This was my biggest disappointment with this project: I missed a major chance to get student voice. However, maybe it was okay to model my descriptors this time as it will give students a sample to think about as we build descriptors together for our next unit. When this step is missing, I feel like I’m just manipulating my students to agree with my own ideas.
More time for peer feedback. Again, it was hard to have the author interview as a looming deadline. Our next unit is informational text and persuasive writing and I am already organizing more time for peer feedback on their essays than I had originally allotted. This should produce better quality writing and (yay!) less grading on my part as students learn to accurately evaluate their own and others’ writing processes.
This was a small first step. Fires in Their Minds, and the other materials we read and discussed in the GSE, outline so many additional avenues for including student voice. I feel I am still playing puppet master too much. I also feel like students are new to having their voices heard and increasing their voice will be a learning process for both parties. I am certainly planning to continue to use student self-grading in my classroom. One area I want to push myself is in including better student voice in the design and assessment of homework.... because what other practice is more frustrating to teachers and students than the development, assignment, and completion of homework?