How I teach
Everything counts
In my short experience in a NSW school, I have learned that we’ve created a system of assessment that tells students that the only thing that matters is the formal summative assessment task. There are two big reasons for this:
- Grades are determined only on the basis of formal summative assessments.
- Daily classwork is generally ignored. (I mean this very literally: worksheets or other tasks are handed to students and collected at the end of the period to be thrown in the bin when students aren’t looking).
The result is that even motivated students won’t put any effort into their daily learning activities. Then, of course, they don’t learn much and their performance is low.
Additionally many formal assessment tasks that I am familiar with are actually invalid. For example:
- Tasks that assess students on skills that they have not been taught in the term, so every student is at an equal disadvantage.
- Research tasks that can be completed successfully with basic generic websearching skills.
- High-performing students are able to avoid classwork all term, safe in they knowledge that they can achieve an easy B or A on the formal assessment. (I had a student explicitly tell me this).
- Low-performing students, learn that there’s no point trying hard all term because it will not help them in the assessment task.
My approach is to make everything count.
- Every classroom activity is checked.
- Students receive their marked work back.
- Every activity is used in determining grades.
The last point is significant. NESA (the government body in NSW that is responsible for setting the rules) states here and here that grades are allocated based on
- teacher observations,
- student work samples, and
- assessment data
in order to make an on-balance jugement.
In many subject areas, students learn content and skills. When assessing content, I consider all learning activities, because missed activities represent missed content knowledge. When assessing skills, I assess on the best work that students have produced, because skills are expected to develop over time, and missing skills activities does not represent gaps in skill development.
Differentiation
Traditionally, all students get the same (or similar) activity to work on, and they complete it with varying levels of performance. Thus some students regularly experience success, while others regularly experience failure.
Over time I have developed a system for differentiating activities by ability. I grade all my activities I (for introductory), E, D, C, B and A. Each term’s learning is divided into topics, and each topic contains the full range of activities. Students begin at I and work their way up toward A. In order to move up to the next differentiated level, students must demonstrate satisfactory completion of the previous level.
In this system, everybody succeeds. If an activity is not completed to a satisfactory standard, it needs to be worked on until it does meet the standard. This is in contrast to assigning work that is completed to whatever standard the student achieves, with no possibility of improvement. In that situation, many students simply fall short again and again and rarely experience success.
Lower ability students generally take longer to complete activities for a variety of reasons, so when the allocated time for a topic runs out, these students reach lower levels of activity than higher-achieving students. One might argue that these students are not being given the opportunity to learn all of the course content, but a better interpretation is that they have learned some things well, rather than being presented with all the content and learning it poorly or not at all.
My system also allows for different students in the same room to work independently at their own rate. Students who are more motivated or more capable are able to work ahead of students who are slower. I have observed on many occasions how capable students are able to perform at a high level because they are not waiting for the rest of the class to complete lower-level work.