FIAE+B1+Chapter+9

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Seth
One huge “duh moment” that stuck out to me in this chapter is the section that advised us to avoid withholding assistance. Yes it is different than what the book refers to as “scaffolding and differentiating” but why would a teacher ever //not// help a student? That’s always the sign of a good teacher, one who is willing to go out of his/her way to help their students. The types of teachers that don’t leave the school as soon as the bell rings or will give up their lunch to help a struggling student, schools need more of those. For students to achieve their full potential we have to make sure that nothing stands in their way. Not doing so can lead to false results and the students won’t have the potential to “master” the subject because they will have been relying on the “scaffolding” too much.

**Mike**
This chapter talks about the don't for teachers for when they are grading and assessing their students. The chapter offered different advice to avoid when differentiating assessment and grading while also talking about real life situations that teachers face and how to solve them. What I thought was important was that the author basically talked about how important homework is. Basically the purpose of homework is that you practice what you have learned and been taught that day in class so you can immediately use the skills you have learned in class that day at home. Hopefully if a student gets the concept of what they have learned then they will receive good grades. The major don't for me is that teachers should never give a student a good grade just because they have completed the assignment. Teachers need to go through all assignments to make sure students understand what is going on. If students are making mistakes on homework and teachers are just grading based on complete work then students will never learn and grow from their mistakes. I will also make sure that all work is not only completed but completed correctly when I am a teacher.

Jasmyn
This chapter is about “ten approaches to avoid”. There are things that a teacher should try not to do as they assess students. This idea says that a student’s behavior shouldn’t be considered in their final grade. This is a fair, yet considerably difficult approach for a teacher to think about. Good teachers need to be able to separate a student’s bad behavior from their grade from level of understanding. Many students and teachers have bad days and often sometimes these days are never forgotten, but all should move on and no one should use those days against one another. The teacher may remember when assessing the final grade that the child has had situations of bad behavior and may have had a really hard time with them, so while thinking about weither the student deserves a B- or a C+, the teacher grade must solely reflect on the content of the work.

**Lily**
Chapter 9 gives 10 approaches to avoid during differentiating assessment and grading! 1. Avoid incorporating nonacademic factors, (behavior, attendance, and effort) into the final grade. 2. Avoid penalizing students' multiple attempts at mastery. 3. Avoid grading homework. 4. Avoid withholding assistance with learning when it is needed. 5. Avoid assessing students in ways that do not accurately indicate their mastery. 6. Avoid allowing extra credit and bonus points. 7. Avoid groups grades. 8. Avoid grading on a curve. 9. Avoid recording zeros on work not done. 10. Avoid using norm-referenced terms to describe criterion-references attributes. I do not agree with all of these but mostly I disagree with not allowing extra credit points. I do not think that it is unfair when students work for extra points. There are always going to be situations where something happened to render the outcome of an assignment and if a student is willing to do more work or get points back then I see no problem with this.

**Casey**
In chapter nine, the third point says “avoid grading practice (homework).” I completely 100% agree! I believe that the only grade that should be counted for dealing with homework is grading whether or not it was passed in, not the actual content. Homework is for practicing the content that you learned in the lesson that day or week. Unless it is a paper that was assigned in advance, a homework assignment due the next day after it was being assigned, is not exactly fair, because what if the student doesn’t understand the material? Then it will not be fair to be graded.

Brittany
This chapter was all about what not to do while grading. The two things that stuck out to me are to allow students to retake tests as many times as they want and to avoid extra credit assignments. As far as the retaking test thing goes, I am not one hundred percent sure that it is a great idea. The point of a test is the after you have taught your students and they have indicated that they have learned you give them a test to see how much of the information they still have tucked away in their brains somewhere. Of course there will be exceptions as a student may be having an awful day or their mind just goes blank all of a sudden. Then there is the extra credit. As a student, most of the extra credit that was available seemed like busy work that you could do in a very short amount of time to boost your grade. I think real extra credit should encourage a student to go deeper into or add to the learning or not be given at all.

Jen
Grades are expected to emphasize a students mastery so it's hard to think about the concept of full credit versus half credit in terms of mastery. Does the student only understand half of the content so they only get half the credit? No, in our education system it's whether or not they do it fully correctly the first time is what gets them the full credit. Even if the student does it perfectly the second time around because of their flaws the first time they won't receive full credit it. Is that fair? Well before reading all of this and being in practicum I would have had a different opinion and would have said they should've known the answer but that's unfair to expect that from them because they are humans to and it's completely unfair to expect that from them. If school is about the learning process then how correct is it for us to expect students to get it right the first time? If they did they wouldn't need to be at school and our profession would die.

The idea of avoiding grading practice work such as homework seems like a ridiculous concept, because why would we have students do something were not going to grade but at the same time if it's practice and students need clarification on the assignment it's unfair to grade them over their uncertainty. Another idea of teachers saying that students should just be able to look at the assignment and the students will understand after they look at it. As a student that was always really frustrating because it distracted me the whole rest of class worrying whether or not I would understand the assignment. I never understood why the teachers just couldn't explain the directions because it is their job.

The idea if teachers don't grade the students homework they are more likely not to do it seems like a double sided issue. I kind of agree that if they don't grade it the students are going to say it's not worth their time but my other opinion is let the student not do the work and if they do poorly on a test then its their own fault for not doing the homework. However, the down fall to that is if there are students who know the material well enough to not have to do the homework than they will do just fine on the test and it is unfair to the other students who do do the homework.

Brody
In the ninth chapter of //Fair Isn’t Always Equal,// Rick Wormeli provides ten approaches to avoid when differentiating assessment and grading. One of the more interesting approaches was to avoid allowing extra credit. Before reading this chapter, I felt that extra credit was a fair approach for students. After all, if they took the time out to complete the extra assignment, then why shouldn’t they be given bonus points? Wormeli’s arguments against extra credit are sound, however. It doesn’t hold the student accountable for the same levels of mastery as the original assignment according to standards and learning results. After all, if the extra credit is based off of the same standards, then why couldn’t the student understand those standards in the original assignment? Bonus points don’t do anything for mastery of the content- they solely act as easy grade boosters. Another interesting approach offered in this chapter is avoiding penalizing student’s multiple attempts at mastery. Wormeli poses a tough question: does it matter how quickly a student attains mastery? I am torn on this issue. By putting a time frame on mastery, we use the student’s natural development against them. We tell them they haven’t learned quickly enough so they shouldn’t bother trying. In another sense however, I don’t see how separate time frames for different students can be achieved. Wormeli himself says that teachers “teach the masses” (115). How would a teacher further develop student understanding when the rest of the class is on an entirely new lesson?

Kim
This chapter had a good list of things to avoid when grading in a differentiated classroom, and one of the points that seemed to stick out to me was allowing students to make revisions or retake tests for full credit. We’ve all had classes where the teacher allowed us to redo work if we scored lower than a passing grade, but our two grades would be averaged. This chapter argues against that policy, saying that everyone learns at different rates and cannot be expected to master the material at the same time as everyone else in the classroom. Some students just need an additional day or two in order to fully understand the material, but we should not penalize them because they don’t learn through the same methods as everyone else. If a student needs a second or third opportunity to show mastery of a concept, then they should be able to take those opportunities and not have to worry about how it will affect their grade. We don’t want students to feel as though they are not capable of learning the material at all and refusing to let them receive full credit for something that they should have gotten right on their first try sends this message. As teachers, it is our job to educate the students and to create comfortable learning environments, but we often do just the opposite when we tell students that they can’t have a second chance at proving their mastery. Another point that this chapter made was to avoid grading homework that is simply students practicing a concept. Certainly, students should receive credit for doing the work, but teachers should not give it a letter or numerical grade. A lot of students think that this means that homework doesn’t count at all, but that is not the case. Homework does count, but it only counts for a very small percentage of the grade. These two points will help me as a teacher because I feel that students should have the option to redo and revise work as necessary to show mastery of the content, and I don’t think homework should be graded like an assessment would. Homework should be used mostly to give students feedback and help them to understand the concepts being taught.

Kaitlyn Bartlett
In chapter 9 of Fair Isn’t Always Equal, Wormeli provides a list of 10 things to avoid. The 3 major ideas that caught my attention were: avoid grading practice (homework), avoid allowing extra credit and bonus points, and avoid recording zeros for work not done. I don’t feel as though homework should not be graded; if students are doing to the work and I feel like it is very important for their success in the classroom, then it should receive some percentage, even if it is slim. I feel as though extra credit and bonus points should be offered to groups of students, not individual based. As a teacher, I will give an extra credit project at the beginning of the quarter or semester and allow every student the opportunity if needed. Lastly, as schools are incorporating more technology into classrooms, online grade books are being used for better accessibility for the student and parents. I feel as though if you put a zero into the grade book for work not done, the work will be completed in a more timely manner than if a teacher excuses that grade.

Leighlan
It struck me that among the things mentioned on this list were penalizing students for making more than one attempt, homework, and extra credit. I never really questioned these practices; I’ve thought they were unfair at times, but never really thought of alternatives before this class. The first one is very clearly unfair, it has made me cry many times in school. Homework has never bothered me too much, mostly because I can get concepts quickly, but when I could not get the concept prior to doing the home work it caused me quite a deal of stress. The teachers that treated the homework like the book suggests, only giving it a check mark, then going over it, usually had more success with their students. I never understood extra credit, there did not seem much point to me. If one gets rid of punishing students for not understanding the first time the need for extra credit is no longer there. I know that a teacher could do thing differently in these areas but I don’t know what a student could do to help themselves.