FIAE+B1+Chapter+13

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Lily
Grade books can be different? This chapter talks about some different ways that a grade book can be set up! Rather then just having the assignment and the grades for it, the teacher could see it up to asses learning goals. This is such a great idea! It does not just have to be a tool that keeps track of assignments, the teacher can be organized and tackle many things at once. Other examples are listing assignments by date or having a topics based grade book. This does not seem like the best way to go about grading, it could be messed up easily and may take more time to figure out where you want to place the assignment then actually grading the work.

Casey
Chapter thirteen discusses using different types of grading books for different types of classrooms. I like this idea a lot; I do not think that teachers should be limited to one specific grade book. This chapter is also very helpful because it gives actual examples of certain grading pages that you can use for different types of assignments. A good example is listing assignments in a grading book by the date that they were assigned. This is good way to know when these assignments are due for those students that have not passed them in yet. Along with that it is in an organized manner. I would definitely put the dates next to all of my assignments to stay organized with specific students, especially the ones who consistently miss work.

Max
Grade books are a topic that has not come up in our practicum experience so far. As a math teacher grading and tables are very alike. I figure that I would just keep a list of the graded work and then get the average at the end for the final grade. The book gives many different options on how to use grade books effectively to understand how the students can improve. It helps with ideas on how to organize the grade book by dates or assignments or even standards. My mentor teacher showed me and online grade book that keeps everything so neat and easy to use. It is like an excel spreadsheet but automatically computes the grades however you would want it to and takes scaling and topics into consideration.

Brody
This chapter of //Fair Isn’t Always Equal// made me think of a subject that I haven’t thought about to a great extent before- gradebooks. In my field experience, my mentor teacher and I used an online gradebook known as PowerSchool. Much like conventional gradebooks, we simply put the assignment name at the top and the grade that corresponded to each student below. As shown by this chapter however, gradebooks don’t have to be this traditional. One idea Wormeli put forth that I would test out in my classroom is using standards as headers for columns instead of assignment names. This would allow me to reflect on student understanding more efficiently by clearly showing what a student needs to improve. The standard based headings would shift the focus from “Susie Q is not good at making timelines on Webspiration” to “Susie Q is not understanding the sequential order of the events that led up to World War II.” Another idea I would be interested in using is focusing on the median and mode of a grade set instead of the average. Giving more weight to more current assignments than earlier ones makes sense to me. Not everyone will enter the class mastering the material. We should not punish those who graded worse earlier on when they were still a work in progress. Listing assignments by date can help teachers look at student growth over time so they can grade on a trend.

Mike
This chapter talked about how a gradebook can be used for the differentiated classroom when appropriate. Gradebooks I believe bring structure to not only the way you teach and access learning but also for the content that you will be teaching. You see a lot of school districts now use an online gradebook for their students rather than using a traditional gradebook. My high school used a program called Edline where you could always view your grade online. While I think this computer program is very beneficial to a student and their parents teacher should still keep a gradebook. Computers do not always work the way that we would like them too so having a gradebook could guarantee that you will always have some sort of record for your students. As a future teacher, I feel that setting out guidelines and expectations for my students in a syllabus will give them a better idea of how to receive a certain grade rather than using grades as a way to group certain assignments.

Kaitlyn Bartlett
After reading chapter 13 of Fair Isn’t Always equal, I feel like it helped show us an optimistic view on different ways to keep grade books. Although this aspect of teaching has not come up or really been modeled for us yet, it was nice to think about. My mentor’s grade book seemed to be black and white after reading over the author’s ideas. I really liked how the grade book in this chapter was set up in terms of assessing learning goals. By doing this, I feel like as a teacher you will be able to better asses student on their learning. This will affect my classroom because I have never thought of different ways to keep a grade book other than just recording grades. It will allow me to help asses my students understands better rather than just giving them a black or white grade like tradition.

Jen
In this chapter Wormelli seems to focus on having the gradebook illustrate mastery and differentiated instruction. In terms of my own personal formatting of a grade book I like when all the assignments are listed in boxes at the top and the number or the grade goes in the single box below. A major thing that I don't seem to agree with is when Wormelli says that it is ok to change the weight of indidivdal students assignments for the quarter. I understand the title of this book is Fair isn't always equal, but in schools giving certain students different weights because of their individual learning styles is not fair to all the other students. Maybe I just misunderstand what he is saying, but in this chapter as well as chapter 11 I feel like he focuses too much on helping the students on the one end of the spectrum and not the other. I don't think it's fair to all the other kids just as I didn't think it was fair to give a student who did absolutely nothing a 60. I am focused on the students who are engaged who it seems that teachers don't need to focus on because they have the concept of school down.

Brittany
So something has been presented to me that I have never seen before: having grades show how much a student knows about a topic rather than how well they can complete a project or take a test. I would equate it to a light bulb moment. As a teacher, I would much rather have a parent call and wonder why there child does not understand the Declaration of Independence rather than have them complaining that their child did not pass the test on the American Revolution. Okay, I will probably never get that first call, but hopefully that will be because they will also be able to see how much their child knows about all the other stuff that is being taught in the class. From the student’s view point, I do not see how they would ever be able to look at the grade book and say that they were failures in my class (unless they really are failing). Anyway, it just seems so much better for everyone if they can see what subject matter that student is doing well with rather than just some number/letter that defines their entire journey through a specific class.

Kim
Color coding the gradebook is a fantastic way to organize student assessment scores. Selecting different colors for different topics or standards or whatever is being assessed is really helpful in making sure that there is a balance in the way you are assessing students. Making sure that you provide students with plenty of opportunities to demonstrate mastery in one area is good, but you want to make sure that you allow enough time for other areas as well. I also like the idea of setting up the gradebook by content or topic. This doesn’t affect the way grades are weighted or anything, although it could easily be set up to, but it allows the teacher a comprehensive look at how a student is performing in each of the assessment areas. I don’t think it matters how a gradebook is set up, but how the teacher uses the gradebook. If it is only used to store or hold grades until the end of the marking period, then it is not useful. If it is a tool that allows a teacher to see how a student is doing and what the teacher needs to do to help students make progress, then it is an effective use of the gradebook. Because online gradebooks are so much easier to work with, they tend to be favored, and I know that I would prefer an online gradebook. You can make changes and then make more changes and then revert to the previous setup without having to worry about rewriting every single grade.

Jasmyn Chapter 13 focuses on grade books. I not sure we needed a whole chapter on it, but what I gathered is that the are many types of grade books and some grade books will work for some teachers and some may not. The teacher may find that they need different styles of grade books for different classes. I think that my style of grade book would consist on the assignment, date and grade that reflect the rubrics. Each of the lessons I have created have a rubric so it is not necessary for me to create a grad book that represents understanding levels as well, the rubric will always cover that and it will be formulated into the grade.