Category: Standards-Based Learning
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The Struggle is Real
The students are starting a project this week that I am incredibly excited about. It’s a physics project where they identify a real-world problem and design a solution to it. I’ve done this project several times before, and it is so unbelievably cool, and I cannot wait for them to get started. Knowing this project…
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Be Together. Not the Same.
Ever looked at student work and thought it all looked the same? At some point last year, I remember flipping through something the students had worked on and thinking, “Man, that’s interesting. These are all the same thing”. I immediately went back and looked at the rubric. Of course it all looked the same, the rubric…
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Why Don’t Report Cards Look Like Social Media?
Imagine it for a second. What if report cards looked like Twitter? Or Facebook? Or Instagram? I’ve heard a few people toss this idea around recently. At first, I couldn’t wrap my mind around it. But the more I pondered the idea, the more it started to make sense. Think about it. It could be really…
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Students Owning the Assessment Process Through Rubric Creation
Ah, rubrics. The favored tool for assessment by teachers. Loved for their wonderful detail and their range of performance levels, rubrics are a great way to communicate expectations to students. Just like other teachers, I love a good rubric. There’s just one problem; I’m really horrible at making them. I’m so horrible, in fact, that I’ve stopped…
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Student Perspective on the Shift to Standards-Based Grading
Last week, I had a very enlightening conversation with my students. My district is transitioning to a standard-based report card next year, which includes the removal of letter grades from our system. I have been using standards-based learning and grading in all of my sixth grade science classes throughout this current year, so my students are…
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Random Acts of Awesome
I’ve always considered myself lucky to work with such incredible young people. Not a day goes by where they don’t do something that amazes me and really shows how phenomenal they are. However in the last few weeks, I experienced an onslaught of crazy cool things … it can only be described as a few weeks crammed…
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What it Felt Like to Have a Blank Gradebook
It was ten days until the end of the quarter, and my gradebook still did not have a single grade in it. The grades were coming, so I was starting to breathe a little easier, but still, eight weeks in and not a single published grade. At the start of the year, I…
Katie Budrow 