I let Chuck, Shelley, and Robert skip the final exam. We logged fifteen concepts in the first semester of Algebra 1 and those students studied them, practiced them, and demonstrated mastery on all of them. Take a break, kids.

But what if I had given them all fifteen of those concepts again. How accurate is my ranking not just of those three kids but of all of my kids? I have ranked everyone on a four point scale on each of those concepts. Will a student ranked at 2 (“major conceptual errors”) again score a 2?

In lieu of a 50 question scantron final, I re-assessed every student on every concept, entered the current ranking into Excel alongside the student’s old ranking, and took the difference.

Should’ve left well enough alone, right?

How Accurate Were The Old Rankings?

• Okay, so big sigh of relief that, in 313 instances, my old ranking was an accurate assessment of a student’s current knowledge. Could’ve been worse.
• Could’ve been a lot better. That’s only 47% accuracy. And in 43 instances, my old ranking was three levels too high. That would be putting a student at a 3 (“minor mechanical errors”) and watching the student stare totally blankly at the question on the final forty-three times.

What Does Mastery Mean?

If I have a student ranked at mastery, would she master the same concept on the final exam?

• This isn’t awful. This isn’t great. I don’t know at what point I should be unhappy.

Enduring Questions

• What do we mean when we say “mastery”? Does that mean a student will score perfectly on the same concept every time? Should I be unhappy that the correct/incorrect balance wasn’t 100/0?
• What do we mean when we say “retention”? This is a common question of my assessment strategies. “Don’t kids forget?” Obviously, I can now answer that question, “yes, sometimes.”
• What do we mean when we say “grades”? I don’t know what kind of results here would prompt me to pack up the shop and dole out monthly, summative unit exams (“Chapter 6 Test”) with the rest of my department. The fact is that this kind of precision analysis isn’t even possible under a unit exam model, which puts other teachers in an enviable position; the question “do these assessment scores represent my students’ current knowledge?” cannot be answered so it goes unasked. The answer, I’m afraid, is that their assessment scores underestimate student knowledge since Chapter 7 clarified many of Chapter 6’s concepts but these teachers have no mechanism for class-wide re-assessment. So they lower assessment’s grade weight beneath that of homework, instead, and inflate their grades with a few extra credit assignments. Look, I’m open to absolutely anything. I just want my grades to mean something. And I need to respect what few guiding principles for assessment make sense to me.

I wrote some commentary recently to the effect that I have never been prouder of any school’s administration or of any department than I am of mine. We are collaborating efficiently on the macro- and microscopic levels. Our six math teachers have made great use of our weekly department meetings while, on the school level, 30% of our staff volunteered an unpaid Saturday to attend professional learning community training out of town.

Weird stuff, and a credit to our principal, who wisely spent his first year mending fences and generating goodwill before encouraging this scary collaboration stuff.

Personally, through this blog-as-self-study thing I’m running here, I’m proud that I was able to nail down some of my largest failings as an educator last year in time to remediate them for this year. In large part because I’m so uncertain how long I’ll be a classroom teacher, I have taken a sledgehammer to these failings. No innovation left on the table once this is finishedOf course, it’s really impossible to measure how much this pace of innovation has contributed to my flagging job satisfaction. Out on a limb, though, I’m guessing not much. and all that.

Here are the big efforts:

Launching Laser-Guided Remediation Missiles

We assess three of our skills every week. I keep detailed records of our progress along those skills (nothing new) but whereas I used those data reactively last year, waiting for students to come see me before I’d use my records to target their remediation, nowadays:

1. I take notes as I grade, marking everything from class-wide trends to individual errors.
   
2. I put those same three skill questions on the next day’s opener.
3. I pick my jaw up off the floor after I realize that no one notices these are the exact same questions from two days ago.
4. I pass back tests to the students I’ve flagged for individual remediation. (“Hey check this out: you came so close here but to undo that positive 4x you don’t divide by 4, you subtract 4x.”)
5. The students who made small errors generally start smacking their foreheads repeatedly at which point I say something, like, “Hey, come in today at lunch and show me you know what you’re doing and we’ll fix your gradeI could write a book of poetry describing the satisfaction I get out of this process. My kids are motivated to remediate their own skills! Their grades have meaning! I can recommend meaningful solutions for improving their grades! (None of this “write me an essay on Euclid for extra credit” nonsense.) My job is so much easier when kids have mastered our early skills! I mean, it’d be really lame poetry, but poetry nonetheless..”

I also assess mid-week rather than at week’s end. The grading of those assessments (undesirably) boosts my mid-week workload (obviously) but (desirably) frees my weekend up for luxuries like blogging and puts only two days between assessment and remediation instead of four.

Harassing My Students Into Success

I poked at this idea half-heartedly two years ago, giving kids an “Incomplete” grade at semester’s end instead of “Failing” and contracting with them to remediate all their unmastered skills. This was stupid. Math is too much a progression of skills and student motivation is too much an exponential variable to decide after half a school year that we’re going to turn the whole aircraft carrier around.

So the day a kid’s grade drops below 70%, I assign her an appointment to see me during her free time at which point we remediate her skills (from weakest to strongest) until her grade is passing. This has been awesome because it makes the appeal of my assessment strategy obvious to the kids I want my assessment strategy to appeal to most. (Which is to say that these kids keep coming in even after I stop making them come inThe concept of “making” my students give up their free time is, admittedly, tricky. Usually, they’re so pumped that their teacher isn’t dogging them for their low grades, that instead he believes they can get their grades up and he’ll help them get their grades up, they come in on their own accord. Several times, however, they’ve blown off their appointments, at which point I have called home and hoped for good, coercive parenting. These interventions have caught every student on my roster but two. (Which isn’t to say that every student but two is now passing, just that every student is either passing or making a concerted effort at passing.) For those two students, I’m going to hold my nose and issue an official after-school detention, citing “defiance” (ugh … I know … I know) and force them to accept my help..)

Fixing A Common Objection To My Assessments

“But don’t the kids just keep hacking away at a concept until, finally, they nail it once, forget it, and move on.”

I vary the structure of the problems to the extent that this is really, really rare. (Students who pass concepts tend to pass them again on subsequent assessments.) But now, if a student misses a problem in our one-on-one remediation, I send home two problems for practice. (Putting their nightly total at three!)

Assigning One Homework Problem Per Night

I already wrote up my motivations for this one. Just an update, then, that it’s really, really easy for me check for understanding, to have a quick conversation about a problem that a student gave 100% of her attention, when there’s only one problem. I like this.

Celebrating

As I pass back assessments, I make a big deal about students who pulled down one or more perfect scores. (“Jessica, three out of three! Bringing the hammer down on Algebra!”) It’s a challenge slipping tests to kids who didn’t get anything right without embarrassing them (though really, really possible) but you should see those kids light up like Christmas trees when they start pulling down perfect scores.

Competing

I track the percent of my students proficient or advanced on a given concept in each class and publicize it weekly.

Competition isn’t exactly the bedrock of great instruction, I realize, but it ain’t bad landscaping. Students talk each other up, encourage each other to do better, to come in on their own time, all without incriminating anybody. It’s pretty awesome.

I also heaved a sigh last week and told them that, yes, what your older classmates have told you is true: I have a secret past as a rapper and, yes, there is a music video and, yes, I will show it to you but only if we rise to 80% proficiency on each concept by semester’s end.

Commence ambivalence, enthusiasm, depending.

Building The Data Wall

I update those data weekly on a wall chart, which looks kinda cute and colorful. Kids crowd around it after each update, comparing classes and scores.

This process was originally time-consuming and annoying, counting up the perfect scores for each concept for each class, calculating the averages, then making colored Post-Its, but I invested an extra hour last week into some conditional formatting and Boolean logic in Excel. Now I just paste the assessment scores in from my grading program and hand a color print-out to my TA, who makes the Post-Its.

Outsourced! Just 54 hours away from a 4-hour work week!

Students also track their own progress on a separate poster (template right cheer: Excel and PDF) marking half a box for proficiency and a full box for mastery.

Observing Other Classes

I wrote about this briefly last week and I’ll only add that if (heaven forbid) I ran my own school I would do everything I could to fund a regular release day (every two months, lets say) for individual departments to migrate between classrooms, learning and leaving feedback. This has been some of the best professional development of my career.

Sitting On The Site Council

My staff elected me to our site council. It helped, somewhat, that I ran unopposed. (“What? No takers? Hey, why’s everybody grinning?”) I’m looking for a challenge, for a different, broader view of how education works in this system we’ve set up. Jury’s still out on this one.

Writing Grants

I signaled interest in participating in a grant-writing team, of which I am now the leader and sole member. (Kind of a trend here.) This has been a good opportunity for me to reach out to my faculty, across party lines content areas.

Attending Conferences

I resolved at the end of last year to attend more conferences. This has been a mixed-to-negative experience so far but I’m looking to bring my average up with the dependable CMC-North conference in December and I’m trying to formulate a pitch for district funds to attend EduCon 2.1 next January. Not sure, exactly, how I’ll sell that one.

As the school year opened, our principal asked us to consider a hypothetical kid who bungled her way through a composition class only to ace the final exam – an essay final which assessed every skill from the year. He asked us to indicate what grade we’d give her with a show of hands.

Mine was the only hand for “A,” which, whatever, I suppose I should admit my biases more often. One teacher indicated an “F” and the rest spread themselves out pretty uniformly across the other passing grades. My philosophy is that it doesn’t matter how hard you try, it matters what you can doIt is also my duty to establish a class where how hard you try correlates directly to what you can do. and it doesn’t matter when in the semester you prove what you can do.

I can accept conflicting opinions on this to an extent, especially when the consequences only involve my principal’s hypothetical unicorn-student, but I get really, really bothered when you assign real, flesh-and-blood students to my remedial algebra class who, by all anecdotal accounts, know algebra backward, forward, left, and right, who scored proficient or higher on their state assessments, but who didn’t feel like completing your tear-out cookie-cutter homework assignments.

For which you failed them and assigned them to my remedial class, where they are now bored, unchallenged, and where – believe me – they really resent you.

What is your homework worth?

I fail the potential of my assessments continuously.

I disaggregate them to such an extent that I can recall, even months down the line, that Alex confused adjacent with opposite in trigonometry, that Suzanne added before she multiplied in the order of operations, and that Derek thought 2x + 3 was 5x.

Several students came within an inch of mastering “sine/cosine/tangent” last week. I had a list. I knew how to remediate their weaknesses but I carried that list into class with me last week and I carried it out again having done nothing.

I don’t know how to make time for this, how to structure my class so that our momentum is forward-going, so that every student has something challenging on her desk, so that I can take some time to remediate the right skills with the right students.

I am a pretty-good marksman too hurried to load his rifle.

[BTW: I post the test questions on the next opener. Most kids run through the problem like it’s the first time they’ve seen ’em. I know which students to talk to and about which concepts. Halfway through I pass back their tests and they compare their work on the openers to the work on their tests. This will do for a start.]

I’m back off a five-day trip attending my fiancée’s graduation in Los Angeles. I’m back, wishing I had more May, and wondering what you do here:

A student wanders dazed into your class on [x, where x is some second semester date] with a failing grade, wondering if passing is even possible.

Under typical assessment – comprehensive, tight-fisted, chapter-based stuff – if [x] is anything later than Cinco de Mayo, the student is screwed. And so are you. Because if you tell that student no, sorry, friend, we’ll see you next year, that kid has no other purpose in your class except self-amusement, which will almost certainly conflict with your purpose. Enjoy the seventh circle of classroom management hell.

I don’t know how to fully control for synthesis. I don’t know how to fully control for rote memorization. I don’t know how to fully integrate this into the humanities.

But if my career spun a wacky, cinematic 180° and I found myself teaching (eg.) English comp, I’d build my assessment strategy around three unshakable convictions, convictions which conventional assessment fails at most turns, convictions which aren’t exclusive to mathematics.

1. It doesn’t matter when you learn it, so long as you learn it. A student’s grade should reflect her current understanding of the course, not last month’s, not her understanding when it was convenient for me to assess her. Keep a loose grip on your students’ grades.
2. My assessment policy needs to direct my remediation of your skills. My comprehensive test on “Twelfth Night” won’t do much for us two months down the road when you come in looking to patch yourself up. Assign separate scores to “Twelfth Night Themes,” “Twelfth Night Vocabulary,” and “Twelfth Night [whatever else it is you English teachers do],” scores which can be targeted and remediated individually.
3. My assessment policy needs to incentivize your own remediation. How many students will put in the effort to remediate their skills if the reward isn’t tangible and immediate? Traditionally, what do you have? The promise that your studying here at lunch is really gonna pay off on the next test? Which is in three weeks. The student’s like, awesome, glad I came in.

That’s everything.

I can’t fully answer the question “how does this work in [x, where x is some course which isn’t math]?” but I promise you that if I was drafted into the service of [x], I’d fight with as much creativity as I could muster to keep those principles intact.