Reflecting on Grades and Improvement

This week, I decided to focus on students and grades on Language Arts related assignments.  When reading the article “Fostering Lifelong Spellers Through Meaningful Experiences”, I liked how the authors reflected on students reactions to grades and how they compare themselves to others in the class.  Alderman and Green mention that some students are very grade oriented, meaning that they are only focused on their grade (numeric or letter) and how they did in comparison to the rest of the class.  I actually observed a student becoming very grade and performance oriented the other day in my practicum classroom.  My cooperating teacher was meeting with students to discuss their writing thus far in the marking period, which has not been a lot.  When she called one student up, she explained what his strengths were and what he needed to work on.  He then witnessed her writing his grade in the grade book as 2 out of 3.  She then explained to the student that a “2” was a great grade and that the student still needed to work on some minor things.  She also explained that the majority of the class was in the same boat.  She later told me that she saw a sad look came over the student’s face and which is why she gave the student a confidence boost.

It is interesting to reflect on this because as a teacher I want to promote improvement and not necessarily grades.  I however, have found myself at times being very GPA and grade driven.  I remember when I was growing up, my father would ask me what I got wrong when I brought back an assignment that was anything less than 100%.  I understand why he was asking me these questions, but also a part of me thought he should lighten up.  What if I worked extremely hard on an assignment and only got a B or B+ and I thought, for that assignment, that the grade was excellent?  My father did not seem to recognize that.  I also find that now in college, when I do not get a perfect score on an assignment, I come down very hard on myself.  It is interesting to compare the standards that I hold myself to and those which I will hold my students to.

Unpacking Standards and Translating into Rubrics

This week, we have been focusing on standards and rubrics.  I enjoyed the class where we unpacked the standards and really got to dive into what the standard actually meant.  This helped me make sense of my rubric that I created and what it meant.  It hit me that the rubric was picking apart the standards and that was one thing.  The next step is to unpack the standard to determine the order in which a teacher should teach concepts, which would then outline the path to developing a unit.  I used to think that developing yearly plans and units was extremely stressful, which it still can be, but I know now that it is really just a matter of unpacking standards.
With this in mind, I skimmed over the writing samples that my cooperating teacher gave me to get a rough idea of where the students in my class fell on my rubric.  I knew before this, that my class is the low flyers out of the entire second grade, but I honestly did not realize how low they were.  My cooperating teacher suggested a few students who would be great for me to work with, so I glanced at their work especially close.  Working with the students that were suggested will definitely be interesting, but I am up for the challenge and it will be a great learning experience.