Vignette 6: Don't Borrow Trouble!

I think the most important, and hardest, thing that I will need to do in my classroom will be to give up rigid control when it comes to assignments.  I do believe that students want to learn, afterall, almost every child I know complains when they feel they aren't learning anything from one of their teachers, no matter how young.  Because students really do have this desire to learn, as a teacher I need to learn to trust that students want to do the work, and if they haven't completed an assignment that they will be motivated to do so.  I don't think I need to offer motivation to students, as long as they know that if they haven't handed the assignment in by the reporting period they will recieve a zero.  I considered for a long time using a system in which a student will be docked 10% if the assignment is late, then they will have until the reporting period to hand it in, but ultimately I have decided against this.  It is important that students are graded on the learning outcomes, and only the learning outcomes, so taking marks off because it's late does not represent fairly what the student has learned.  In my opinion, the best thing to do would be to give each student a completely separate grade for work habits, that includes docking marks due to lates, that all teachers the student has would compile together, and a completely separate section, apart from any subject, would be created to report work habits.  This way, the student would still be accurately graded on their learning of the POS, but would still be held accountable for things such as late assignments.

Vignette 11: Mean or Median

It is a tough issue to debate when it comes to using math techniques to give students a final grade.  On one hand, it is traditionally reliable, and parents and students are less likely to fight grades you give them using traditional calculations, but on the other hand, there likely does need to be a change in how grades are given to students in an ever-changing school system.  There may be factors in the student's life that are affecting how they are able to perform in school, and these need to be accounted for when grading them.  Although I've never considered it before, using median instead of mean would be a fair way to grade students, and it would still be defendable if a grade is contested.  I think that parents  and students would be unlikely to feel any more hostile toward being graded using the median than they would toward using the mean to grade them.

Vignette 10: Mme. Wagner's Dilemma

I think that it is very important to accommodate extenuating circumstances that students are facing when determining their grades.  There are some things that students will face in their lives that will make concentrating on school very difficult, which obviously will affect their grades.  I don't believe that extenuating circumstances can completely excuse them from their responsibilities as a student, but it is definitely something to take into consideration when giving a student a grade.  At this point, I am unsure of how to give a student a grade by any means of judgement, and not relying on numbers.  At least if I give a student a grade based on marks that they have been given all year I have something to defend myself with when a student's parent inquires about why they got that grade.  I feel that although it may be easy to tell students that they are given different grades or treated differently because "fair is not always equal" to try to explain this to a parent would be much more difficult.  I would like to be able to give students grades based on more that just the marks they get throughout the year, and hope to learn how to do this in the future, but am unsure of how to do so at this point in my career/education.

Vignette 9: Ryan's Impending Doom!

It is definitely important to make sure that the student's grade at the end of the year is reflective of their meeting the criteria of the Program of Studies, as well as their improvement throughout the year.  I think the best way to do this is definitely throught the use of formative assessment.  If the school has a policy that all grades given must be recorded for the student's final mark, but I am sure that a student will work hard to improve on their knowledge and skills, then I think the best way is to give them feed back mostly, with a few informal grades if needed.  This way, at the end of the year when the student has improved and met the learning outcomes their grade will actually reflect it. 

It does seem that grading practices will have to change based on the subject that is being taught, because most of the subjects are set up in different ways.  Math, for example, is set up in separate units, and what the student achieves at the beginning of the year is likely unrelated to what they are achieving at the end of the year.  Language arts on the other hand, is a subject in which knowledge and skills are built upon and improved throughout the year, and are all related to each other.  In this case, the subjects like math will not reflect improvement like LA will, because a student generally only improves in that specific unit, before moving onto a new one.  So to counter for this, formative assessment will have to be done throughout each unit in math, not throughout the entire year like in english, with a summative assessment given at the end of the unit that will reflect the student's learning and improvement.