I knew when I published an article in The Edmonton Journal, I’d receive some feedback. There were two letters from teachers to today’s Edmonton Journal that I’d like to address. If I understand the letters correctly, both teachers are grading things that I would make entirely formative. In a previous post, I did my best to describe the difference between formative and summative assessment.
Bonnie Vallevand from Edmonton writes:
Wow! I want some of John Scammell’s magic power in “making” students do their assignments.
Yes, if one teaches a class filled with university-bound kids, one will have “only a handful” of students to chase down for missing assignments. But a teacher might have a class of 35 where most of the students have learned attendance and assignments are optional. Or a class where the parents couldn’t care less or find it difficult to “make” an 18-year-old do anything he chooses not to do no matter how much they “insist.”
Bonnie, the only way to teach a class that assignments are optional is to give them zeros when they opt out. I don’t let kids opt out of the summative assessments, and I’m not a magician. I think I just give far fewer summative assessments than most teachers.
I taught all kinds of students when I was in the classroom. I taught was University bound students and I taught real strugglers. I taught everything from Math 14 up to AP Calculus.
University bound students are motivated by grades (unfortunately at the expense of learning, in some cases). They might respond to a zero. I should point out that I have seen some top students try to strategically take a zero on a math assignment so that they can study for a Physics test they think is more important. They’ll work out the math of the effect of the zero grade and know exactly how it will affect their average. I’d rather show some flexibility in my deadline so as not to interfere with the Physics test, and get the math done too. Sometimes, in the real world, we have to juggle our responsibilities like that. A better lesson than letting them take the zero is teaching them how to be responsible and communicate with their teachers in advance of the deadline.
I also taught many, many Math 14 and Math 24 classes. These are our non-motivated students,many of whom exhibit behavioural problems and math deficiencies. I know exactly what these kids are like, and I love them. They are some of my favorite to teach. I can assure you that these poor students are not motivated by zeros. They are beaten down by the system and looking for an excuse to quit. They want to get by doing the least amount of work possible. They’ll gladly take a string of zeros, as long as their average stays above 50%. They aren’t shooting for honors. They are shooting for the absolute minimum amount of work they can do and still pass the class. My system is better. I have a small number of summative assessments that I insist they do. If they miss it, I do chase them to get it done, even if it means at lunch or after school. My boss does the same thing with my (always late) professional growth plan. She makes me stay late to get it done.
I don’t chase students for small stuff. I make them show me evidence of learning on summative assessments. Which brings me to…
Russ Purdy of Edmonton, who describes himself as a “High School Teacher and University Lecturer”, and writes:
Scammell says the deadline is an “arbitrary standard of behaviour and accountability.” Then why give students a deadline at all? Why not just say, “Solve the following four math problems. Sometime. Pretty please?”
Deadlines, gentlemen, are an integral part of the assignment. Of course deadlines are “arbitrary.” Society pays serious money to teachers to be arbitrary. It is a critical part of our job, what separates us from babysitters. It is based on society’s belief that we know more than the students and that we’ll act as though we do.
If we lack the courage and knowledge to set reasonable deadlines for assignments and then even-handedly evaluate students on what they can produce in the time allotted, then we are in the wrong occupation and an embarrassment to those who call teaching a profession.
I suspect Russ and Bonnie are both chasing kids to hand in things I would never bother chasing them for. In my class, the four problems Russ describes would be formative. If a student didn’t do the four problems, It would affect his grade only in that he would have wasted an opportunity to receive feedback about his learning before the summative assessment. I suspect far too many teachers still think everything has to be “for marks” so that students will do it. It’s not the case at all. Even my Math 14 and Math 24 students do things that aren’t for marks.
We need to break away from the mindset that we need tons of evidence recorded in our grade books. Get your courses down to 5-10 high quality summative assessments. You don’t have to be a magician to get kids to do those. All you need is the flexibility that Bonnie refers to, and a supportive administration.
The biggest change I made in my practice over the past few years is the number of summative assessments I was giving students. I used to be proud to have 40 marks in my grade book. I thought it meant I was doing a great job of assessing. All it really meant was I was spending a lot of time chasing students to do small things that should have been formative. Now my evidence gathering is built around a small number of high quality summative assessments. The little things are formative. Not doing a formative assessment has a natural consequence for a student. He loses the chance to learn and improve his performance on the summative, when we get there.
Reducing the number of summative assessments made it so much easier for me to get the evidence I needed from my class. Instead of chasing 4o students for 8 things each, I only had a handful who had missed a summative assessment. It made my life a whole lot easier. It wasn’t magic at all.
I can’t tell from his letter whether Russ still teaches high school. If he does, he really needs to check his curriculum. He says we need to “evaluate students on what they can produce in the time allotted.” There is so much that is so wrong with that statement. I’m only going to address the deadline aspect of it. Nowhere in my curriculum do deadlines appear. The only hard and fast deadline in my curriculum is the end of the course when I have to submit my grades to Alberta Education. My curriculum says kids need to be able to solve exponential equations. It doesn’t tell me they have to do it on a certain day. It really doesn’t. Honest.
Consider three students writing an exponents unit exam in September.
Student A – Writes the test and gets 80%
Student B – Writes the test and gets 12%
Student C – Skips the test.
Later on that year, I reassess exponents.
Student A – Writes the test and gets 92%.
Student B – Writes the test and gets 92%.
Student C – Writes the test and gets 92%.
Who gets the higher grade in my class? If you answered A, your belief is a reflection of what I believe to be the single biggest problem with high school assessment in Alberta. I have a post coming up on that one.
The correct answer is “none of the above”. There is no deadline on learning written into my curriculum. All three students have shown mastery of exponents. Their grades are the same.
Teachers, read this blog. Every single word on it. It will change your life.
OK, John. I have the curriculum broken up into 7 summative assessments. I also have a student who has shown up approximately a dozen times over the course of the semester. Said student still hasn’t completed 2 of those assessments. I’ve had to hound student to do 4 of the 5 completed. I’ve called home, e-mailed home, and spoken to student in hallway. Yes, this is only about 1% of the students out there … but it makes for a bunch of work for teacher. Student has passed summative assessments completed so far. I wonder how much time I’ll spend getting student in to write the final so student can pass the course and become a headache in the next level.
Oh, and if you want more background on student … hangs out in hallways during class time (all classes of the day). I think this student has figured out how to get by in the most non productive way possible. Side note: Not sure if student is passing any of the other courses.
These are the students we would like help with. I know I would. Writing them off just isn’t in my vocabulary but staying at school until 6 pm calling home is getting old and wearing on my own home life. This is one student out of a couple handfuls I’ve been dealing with over the last 5 months. I’ve just given you the one passing …
CT, I know the kind of kid you describe. I’ve had them, and they can be a lot of work. I totally understand your frustration with this kid.
In reading what you have written there, I can tell you have worked really hard on this one. I’m getting the sense that you have actually worked harder on him than I would have. You should have passed him along to your administration long ago.
I explain the plan in the post that followed this one, but an accurate assessment plan can only work if administration is 100% behind you.
My play with kids like this was to take the missing assessments to my vice principal with the kid’s name on it. I would tell the vice principal that I couldn’t give the kid a final grade unless he wrote those things. If the assessments didn’t get done, I was going to put an “incomplete” for his final grade. In our system, that means no government funding for the kid, despite how hard we worked to get the kid through. Every single time I did that (which wasn’t often, as you say), the vice principal came through. I’d like to believe they did it for the kid, but I suspect it might have been for the funding. Either way, I got what I needed from the kid.
Admin has to back me up on this. I work too hard to spend hours and hours chasing kids.
I just dealt with the following situation and would like to hear your comments: a student is meant to write a summative unit exam in mid-May, but playing off of the school’s No Zero policy, decides to skip on that day. To accommodate students with conflicts on exam days, the department has an alternative writing date in late May, which the student also skips. Department protocol is to forward the situation to admin at this point. The exam is placed in an envelope and sent to admin to be dealt with. Sounds fair so far…
The exam envelope is littered with postponements as the student delays the inevitable. May 30. MONDAY LAST CHANCE (June 4). June 5 lunch. After that, verbal agreements to write on June 8 and June 11 were ignored. The student wrote on June 12 at 1 pm and completed the exam 1 hour before Diploma course marks were due.
Did ZAP get the student to finish the exam? Yes, the cooperation of many professionals ensured that all essential assessments were complete. At what expense? The students who were supposed to be receiving review for their Diploma exam were left to themselves while I completed grading the exam and assigning a final mark for this student and 3 others like them. This is compounded with dozens of late essential assessments handed in within 72 hours of the aforementioned deadline.
I want you to understand that I try to give ZAP a fair shot, but there are so many variables in the implementation that are not amenable to every situation. Right idea, wrong technique? I agree that a student should not be “punished” with zeroes, but should the teacher, or their students, be “punished” by the malicious behaviour of a handful of people?
Squinty,
It’s that time of year, isn’t it? I know you’re tired and frustrated and I can tell you are doing your best to make this work. I’ve been there.
You did everything I would have, with one difference. Like you, I had an alternative writing day shared among my department members. Like you, if a student missed that alternative day, I would have sent it to my administration. Unlike you, that exam would have been back to me within two or three days at the most. The administration at the last school I taught in would bring those kids in. The kids would be given in-school suspensions (which they absolutely hate) and left there until the missed assessments were done.
Once, I had a situation like you describe, where one girl left it to the last minute. My diploma marks were due Monday, and she wrote Friday after school. My vice principal supervised her so I could go home. He offered to mark it and enter the mark if I left him the key. That’s the kind of support it takes to make this thing work.
I’m not criticizing your administration, and I have no idea where you work. I can tell you that this worked for us only because the administration went to those kind of lengths.
Thanks for asking the question, and thanks for trying to get your head around some of the trickier aspects of this practice. I don’t pretend to have it all figured out either. You got those kids assessed and on to the diploma exam. You’ve earned a break. Why don’t you take the next couple months off?
Have a great summer.
John, I’ve been reading with great interest a number of your blogs on this issue and I’m impressed with your thoughtfulness and insight. Like you, over the course of a teaching career my assessment practice has changed dramatically. As a teacher I began experimenting with a no zero policy almost 20 years ago, and let me tell you and your readers, it was extremely difficult when I was the only teacher in the school doing it and school admin did not understand why. So I agree with you that we need the support of a well informed school admin team to support good assessment practice. An important part of that practice is the need to do a great deal more formative assessment in high school classrooms. If this were the standard, students would have enough practice that most summative assessments would simply be a formality where students demonstrate their learning.
However, in this age of high accountability, we also need informed and morally strong high school teachers and school administrators that are prepared to let insufficient (INS) grades stand even though we will receive no funding from Alberta Education (at least until AE changes it’s high school funding policy – and I’m optimistic that this will happen some day). But if I have anything to add to the conversation it is that we need other structural changes as well. When students are unable to get summative assignments submitted, or even if they are submitted, but done poorly, then schools need supports in place to help these students. It should not just be the teacher’s responsibility. Many suggest that the punishment of zeros is an important lesson for students, but we know it doesn’t work. Whether it is considered punishment or not schools need places for students to go outside of class time, on their own time, to get the work done at a sufficiently competent level. This may include physical presence in a work room within the school, though we need to explore support through technological structures as well. If we as a society are serious that learning is what schools are truly about and that all children can learn, then these ‘places to go’ must be supported with teachers who can help students complete the tasks that were assigned. This fits very nicely with inclusive education, because these would be supports for students who need this help and not ‘pull outs’ from class time. This, of course, requires not only pedagogical change at most high schools, but, as I mentioned above, structural change as well. And this means funding models must change.
‘hate mail’? I think you may have been taught exactly what that term means…and you are long winded and boring. I agree with Russ and Bonnie.