I am struggling with the role of participation in my classroom. Part of me believes that students should participate. My rationale is that as adults, they will be expected to participate in meetings and other job related duties that they may not want to do. The other part of me believes that students should practice as much as is necessary for them to master a concept or skill. My rationale, is that it's not worth the fight to get a student, who can already play the piece, to participate. Should I focus on my students learning or worry about how much they participate?
Right now in fourth grade we are working on the cup rhythm (made famous in the movie Pitch Perfect). We learn the rhythm as a class, we play it along with different songs and we finish by with students composing their own cup rhythm. We talk about form and use the original cup rhythm for the A section and their composition becomes the B section. In the past, I would down grade student's daily points if they refused to participate during class. Now I am leaning towards having my students complete a playing test: playing the cup rhythm alone and then playing it along with music.
I am starting to think that I need to include more playing tests and focusing more on the skills and concepts. I strongly believe that students need to participate in order to learn, but at times I focus more on the participation and less on the mastery of skills.
How do you balance grading, testing and making sure your students are actually learning? I would love to hear how to acomplish these goals in your classroom.
It depends on the goal: assess learning of the curriculum or assess student behavior that we impose as being what makes a good student? I am fast coming to adopt mindset and starting to form practice of standards-based assessment/"grading".
ReplyDeleteIf the behavior seems contrary to student's ability to demonstrate mastery of learning, then either we accept it as so or adjust expectations to further engage or challenge the learner.
With SBG, the feedback for behavior is separate from demonstrated mastery of learning which is separate from formative assessment/feedback along the way. Thus your playing tests would be the proficiency performance. Must meet standard or refine and return to demonstrate. Thus if not met, participation is not optional as must practice to meet it.
Behavior (participation) is separate; can give feedback on it, but it should not be in the grade. There is no getting out of demonstrating proficiency, though, so ultimately Ss learn and demonstrate it. You can clearly identify to what degree they learned it, and there is less question as to what a given grade means, whereas with participation as a grade, there is question how much was learned or not learned. I am not the best to articulate all this, yet. :-) But I'm working it out for myself and others on Twitter are driving great discussions about it at #SBGchat.
Shawn, I would like to eventually move towards SBG. Our school is slowly moving that direction. It is hard as an elementary specialist to find a "good" way to grade. I know that I am tired of grading behavior though. Thanks for taking the time to read and for your insights!
ReplyDeleteMarisa,
ReplyDeleteIt is a matter of time before we are all SBGing. The tide is coming, CCSS is bringing it in, and so much research and what we know of learning has proven traditional grading systems ineffective and non-informative. While I grow weary of the data-based movement, there is much merit in a grading system that is consistent, assess what has been learned, and allows room for repeated attempts, failures, and the end goal of mastery and learning for everyone.
Shawn,
ReplyDeleteI agree! My motto this year is, I don't care when you master it; I only care that you do. We need to give students freedom to make mistakes and teach them to learn and grow from their previous attempts.