Report Card Writing

Report card writing has always seemed pretty daunting to me. It's one of those things that we talk about a lot, but don't get a ton of practice in. Don't get me wrong, it's difficult when every board uses a slightly different program for their report cards. However, it seems like a pretty large gap in my education as a teacher candidate.

Luckily for me... webinars to the rescue! This week's webinar was on report card writing, and was possibly one of the most helpful 45 minutes I've had in a while! Not only was it explained well, but we got time to practice.

Let me explain further.

First we got to practice how to determine a student's grade based on a number of assessments that we had theoretically collected. The great part about this exercise was that some of the assessments were on the organization of the student's notes and on how many times they had completed homework. Trying to trick us eh? Thankfully, we all pointed out that these marks shouldn't be taken into account for the mark of the student, as they are a greater reflection of his learning skills and work habits, and not his understanding of the content. The next interesting thing about the marks we had "collected" were that there was a huge jump in marks from the first assessment to the last few assessments. We all decided that the student had made great progress, and that the first quiz was more of a diagnostic assessment. It allowed us to see that over the course of the unit, the student's understanding of the concepts had increased, and by the end of the unit, the student had grasped considerable knowledge of the subject matter. Therefore, as a group throughout the webinar, we were able to discuss what mark we would give the students and rationalize why we would give that mark. The following photo is the activity that we participated in, along with our notes.

Elizabeth O'Brien. (October 2017). Activity 1: What Would You Do? [Screen Shot].

Then we were taken through some activities with writing report card comments. First, we were shown some of the different strategies that should be used when writing effective report card comments. These strategies were clearly laid out for us, and were super helpful when we came to the practice section. We were given ineffective report card comments, and tasked with rewriting them. I think this was a great way to do it, because it allowed us the opportunity to see what to do and what not to do. We were able to work from something that we knew needed to be change, and add our own flavour to the comment.

Overall, I think that this webinar was one of the most helpful ones we've had. I think the topic is extremely important and often overlooked in our classes. Luckily for us, our presenter also provided us with so many opportunities to practice and learn, that we all took a lot out of it. And just like that, I feel a little more confident in writing report cards!

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The A Word (Assessment)

CBC (Dec. 16, 2011). Mr. D | Mr. D | CBC. Video. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0fn_vAhu_Lw.

Mr. D clearly knows what he's doing. Just scribble some numbers and words on a page, maybe circle a few things, and throw a number on the top. Marking is so easy, am I right?!

Hmmm... not quite....
Assessment is a whole lot more than just throwing some numbers and words on a page for students. Assessment is how students learn, and how students grown. So how exactly are they going to develop if we just give them a 75%? Like I said, there's way more to it.

The most important part about assessment is descriptive feedback. Giving students the tools to learn from what they have completed is possible only if you tell them how and where to improve. Descriptive feedback incorporates a couple of different key components. There are a number of important factors for assessment that are outlined in the Growing Success document. First, outline what the students have done well. Make some direct links to what students have succeeded in. Not only will it help to develop their confidence, but you're also telling them what to keep doing in the future. Second, let them know where they can improve. This doesn't mean tearing their work to shreds and outlining every single detail they got incorrect. Show the students that there are always things to work on, and help them see what they need to keep working on. One of the most important things we always talk about in math is the ability to make mistakes and struggle - this means that you're learning. So if students are guided on how to improve their work in the future, they will also continue to learn.

No, descriptive feedback is not as easy as throwing a number on everything. But you don't have to do it for every little thing your students hand in. It's about quality, not quantity.

While I was in my placement last year, my students were working on graphing. I got them to create some bar graphs and hand them in to me. I took some time to go over the graphs and provide descriptive feedback based on the success criteria we had co-created. Don't get me wrong... this took a fair chunk of time. However, I wanted to see how the students were doing, and where they needed to go. So, after writing what seemed like a novel (not actually of course!) for each student, I handed them back their graphs so that they could read the feedback. The next day in class, we continued to work on creating graphs. At the end of the class, I got the students to hand their bar graphs in again, and what happened was magic. Almost every single student had made a perfect bar graph!

After this experience with my students, I talked to them to see how they had improved so much, so quickly. Every single one of them said that it helped to have had me look closely at their graphs, and go through what they succeeded in and what needed to be improved on. Essentially, the students used my feedback as another checklist help them through their work.

So, to wrap it all up, don't be a lazy marker. Give your students assessments that will help them grow as learners. If you put the effort in to marking and caring about your student's success, then they will be successful. It's (almost) as simple as that!

The Trouble With Unit Planning

It's been a while since our last math class, nearly 2 weeks to be exact! Just because I haven't been in class, doesn't mean I haven't been thinking about it. I want to dedicate this post to some of the ups and downs I've had with unit planning in math.

When we we tasked with creating a unit plan for math, we were allowed to choose whatever grade and strand that we liked. Now, when I'm usually faced with this position, I tend to choose something that I'm familiar with because I know better how to complete the task successfully. However, in this case, my group and myself decided to challenge ourselves with a grade that we weren't as comfortable with. All of us agreed that the idea of intermediate math seemed a little bit more daunting, so we went ahead and chose Grade 7 measurement.

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Grade 7 measurement definitely seemed like it had possibilities to be a successful unit, but having no experience of creating a math unit plan, the process seemed difficult. So we started like I start every unit plan, and came up with a theme and big idea for the unit. We came up with the idea of having the students create their own buildings for a green space; an idea that we were extremely proud of! But the concept of the unit was just the beginning, and there were definitely some hurdles to come.

First up was the length of the unit. How long should the unit be? How do we make sure that we teach enough in the unit given the time frame? How do we know how much time to give to each lesson? Ahh and the questions continued. Luckily for us some of these questions already had answers. Based on our outlines, we were to make our unit plan for up to 15 days. However, the next questions of how much time to give the students on topics within the lesson still remained. I think that in the classroom, this might be easier to judge because you know your students and their capabilities. However, it is still difficult to gage how much time will be needed to get through certain topics, and we didn't want to give too much/too little time. Despite having been able to come up with a good sequence of lessons, it is an ongoing struggle of unit planning.

Next up we had the trouble of making sure that the unit actually followed the expectations. This seemed like an easy task, but was actually trickier than we expected. We had this great idea of creating the buildings, but we had to make sure that the lessons all fell in to the curriculum. We had to make sure that the students were actually learning what they needed to learn and developing the new skills necessary for Grade 7. It's easy to get wrapped up in the excitement of a lesson or unit plan, but it's important to make sure not to stray so far from the curriculum. At some point, as we found out, you have to dial back on the extravagancies and make sure the students are fully understanding the actual concepts.

Needless to say, these few struggles that we went through were worth it, because now our group definitely feels like we have a successful unit plan. It was not an easy journey to get to where we are. I can definitely see how it would be easy to fall into the routine of just following a textbook. We were able to create a unit that we thought ties in a lot of good concepts of math with real life application. A unit that, after some hurdles, we are proud of.