Article: Inconsistencies in teachers' grading practices

Hey, English Teachers,

A new article from the San Diego Union Tribune by Kristin Taketa draws attention to inconsistencies in teachers' grading practices. Link:
sandiegouniontribune.com/news/education…

This is NOT for the flex learning day tomorrow.  I just thought you’d like to see that the topic that we’re dealing with is common across the country – and being dealt with in the popular press.  Our new friend Thomas Guskey is one of the “experts” in the article.

from Marshall Memo

Two English Professors Debate the Literary Canon

            In this article in Kappa Delta Pi Record, Katherine Landau Wright (Boise State University) and Matthew Thomas (University of Central Missouri) discuss whether students should be required to read “classic” books, versus choosing among more-contemporary books. At the beginning of their dialogue, Wright described a moment when she was in tenth grade: students were reading The Grapes of Wrath and she raised her hand and confidently answered a question the teacher had posed. “The teacher said no, I was wrong, and provided the correct answer,” says Wright. “Then I stopped reading.” She never did finish The Grapes of Wrath, and despite teaching middle-school English, earning a PhD in reading education, and being a university professor, she hasn’t read a number of classics and is against requiring students to read such books.

When Wright shared this view with Thomas, who has had a similar teaching career, he was “gobsmacked” and they began a lively debate about how to help students become lifelong readers while also exposing them to a variety of literature and building their knowledge and understanding of a diverse world. Some excerpts:

Thomas – Clearly not all books that have been written are of equal value to K-12 students. “Life is too short for bad books,” he says. “Let’s not throw out great books because they can be challenging to read and difficult to teach… Don’t let choice be more powerful than a good teacher.”

Wright – Sure, some books are more important than others and teachers should steer students toward better literature, but in many middle- and high-school classrooms, there’s zero choice. Even with a few recent additions, the canon is decidedly Eurocentric, mostly books by white authors about white characters.

Thomas – True, students need to see themselves in what they read, but we also need to stretch students beyond their current horizons. “Nobody alive today in our schools can lay claim to completely identifying with Julius Caesar or Othello,” he says. “However, the themes and wisdom in these two works are nearly universally applicable to all of us, no matter who we are, what language we speak, what nationality we are.”

Wright – Maybe what’s needed is first, providing students with more-diverse authors and characters, and second, supporting teachers to help their students “identify the global themes in literature that allow them to connect to any character, regardless of who wrote the story.”

Thomas – Agreed! But there’s something to be said for reading the original classic. “Is teaching Macbeth-like themes through student reading choice an acceptable substitution whereby students never study Macbeth itself?... Students should not miss out on those powerful and poignant whole-class discussions that come when wrestling through important literature together. It becomes a shared, and often high-impact, experience.”
            Wright – She’s skeptical about the value of discussing Macbeth for many of the students she’s taught. Yes, it’s possible to make connections between The Grapes of Wrath and immigrant students’ experiences, but a more-contemporary novel might work better with increasingly diverse students. Surely the canon needs to be mixed with newer works.

Thomas – “Maybe we need a kind of canon-review rubric,” he says, “with the realization that some works need to drop out; there are only so many books that can be read.”

Wright – The question is why students need to read certain books. How many students really understand and appreciate Shakespeare’s deeper themes – or are they just getting the plot-lines from the Spark Notes? Wouldn’t it be better to choose “more accessible, relatable texts that can hit those same targets?”

Thomas – Isn’t the problem the varied quality of teaching? “Before I substitute Twilight (Meyer, 2005) for Hamlet,” he says, “let’s figure out whether the teacher or the text is the problem.”

Wright – Good point: “The text itself is neutral; it’s how you use the text that is problematic. I do not think The Grapes of Wrath is inherently evil, but requiring students to read it without considering why is misguided and can have long-term consequences… We want kids to read many genres to become truly mature readers; however, if our classroom practices turn them off to reading, we have done more harm than good.”

Thomas – True, but let’s focus on teacher preparation and PD rather than losing Shakespeare and Steinbeck “from our shared knowledge base and our cultural treasure box.”

Wright – Yes to teacher training and support, but “until that point, I would rather err on the side of developing and preserving their love of reading.”

Thomas – “I am more and more convinced that we need both,” he says. “We need very rich choices that go beyond the canon; you have made this clearer to me. We should also simultaneously adore, defend, prune, revise, and find good ways to teach our literary canon. We need times for the whole-class novel, and it needs to be very carefully chosen and very well-taught. And, I will admit that in some settings, The Grapes of Wrath might not make the cut. But it needs to be looked at long and hard.”

Wright – She began this debate opposed to assigning “so-called classic novels,” and now sees that the way books are presented is critical. A good mix of contemporary books matters, but classics are sometimes “the right book for the right situation.”

Thomas – He concedes that the debate “has exposed several of my blind spots… To insensitively foist Great Books on today’s students smacks of being stodgy, narrow, and tone deaf, and perhaps even bigoted. But to dismiss the Great Books as only ‘dead white male’ tools of oppression is too simplistic and, I believe, is a mistake; these issues deserve deeper analyses than that.” After all, To Kill a Mockingbird was once regarded as pop culture and is now part of the canon – and part of building cultural literacy in all students.

In this debate, Wright and Thomas clearly influenced each other’s thinking, and they ended up agreeing on several suggestions for classroom practice:

• Students should be offered a choice from a wide array of books tailored to different interests and achievement levels. Teachers should have well-stocked classroom libraries, and should provide the support students need to experience success.

• All students need to be exposed to great literature that makes up the “DNA of our culture,” say the authors, with an eye to including social-justice themes that touch on diverse students’ voices and values.

• “We must provide opportunities for deep discussions about the global human themes presented in both classic and modern literature,” they say. Perhaps The Grapes of Wrath could be paired with A Long Walk to Water (Park, 2010), a contemporary story of refugees and displacement.

• “Any time difficult books are taught,” say Wright and Thomas, “they need to be well-taught” – which means better training and support for teachers to explore with their students each book’s underlying themes and engage in “deep conversations about power and injustice.”

• The Reading Workshop model should be used in secondary as well as elementary classrooms, giving students the chance to choose some of what they read and engage in frequent small- and large-group discussions about texts.

“Who Cares About The Grapes of Wrath? Arguments for Balancing Choice and Classical Literature” by Katherine Landau Wright and Matthew Thomas in Kappa Delta Pi Record, October-December 2019 (Vol. 55, #4, pp. 148-153), https://bit.ly/2JvpRNM; the authors can be reached at katherinewright@boisestate.edu and mthomas@ucmo.edu.

Research into how teachers implement grade reform at the secondary level

(from Marhsall Memo 806 - Oct 7, 2019)

An Uphill Battle Implementing Grading Reforms in High Schools

            In this American Educational Research Journal article, Brad Olsen (University of California/Santa Cruz) and Rebecca Buchanan (University of Maine/Orono) say that grading began when North American students were first grouped by age in the mid-1800s. Today, student grades serve a variety of purposes:

-    An objective measure of a student’s academic achievement or mastery;

-    A teacher’s subjective estimation of the quality of a student’s work;

-    A teacher’s appraisal of a student’s effort, ability, or willingness to follow directions;

-    A way of comparing students with one another;

-    A tool to inspire;

-    A tool to control;

-    A source of power for teachers;

-    A way to handle student disrespect;

-    An area in which teachers required to use a scripted curriculum still have some autonomy.

“Grading is, depending on whom you ask or what day you ask it, all these things,” say Olsen and Buchanan, “and, yet, it cannot do all this work simultaneously.” They lament the lack of systematic, consistent practices in schools – and the unfortunate consequences this can produce for students.

            The authors report on their work with teachers in two New York high schools implementing new grading practices. The reforms:

-    Giving a clear description of what students need to do to get a specific grade;

-    Including only evidence of achievement in students’ grades;

-    Not penalizing late work by reducing grades;

-    Not giving points for extra work;

-    Not punishing copying or cheating with lower grades;

-    Not including group scores in students’ grades;

-    Using a four-or-five point scale in place of 100 points;

-    Not giving zeroes for missed work;

-    Not giving points for homework, pretests, and classroom activities that don’t show achievement;

-    Not assigning grades based on comparisons with other students;

-    Not using information from formative assessments or practice to determine grades;

-    Including students in the grading process.

Most of these changes were new to teachers who volunteered to take part, and implementation was uneven. Olsen and Buchanan report that “productive teacher change” did occur in both schools, with teachers developing new views and practices about grading. But change “was not straightforward [and] it was recursive, partial, tentative, and contingent on schoolwide support.” The authors have the following recommendations for schools promoting grading reform:

            • First, they believe it’s important to offer teachers “some kind of mock setting or low-stakes practice with grading fixes before they implement them in classroom settings.” Otherwise inevitable glitches can have negative consequences for vulnerable students.

            • Second, teachers should be given some flexibility implementing reforms. “It is better for a stick to bend than break,” say Olsen and Buchanan, noting that most of the teachers would have pulled out of the pilot if implementation had been all-or-nothing. “Incremental learning, seed-planting, and raising provocative questions seem to have worked better than imposing a rigid system on teachers to accept or reject in toto,” they say.

            • Third, one year of professional development and support was not enough to overcome teachers’ prior beliefs and practices. Contacted a year later, some of the teachers had abandoned or scaled back many of the reform practices. Why? Student resistance, the fact that implementing the new ideas took additional teacher time, lack of support from school administrators, and teachers not being fully convinced of the need for change.

            • Fourth, there must be whole-school support for changes like these to take hold. “We recommend that schools wishing to reform their grading approaches find ways to incentivize all teachers to participate,” say Olsen and Buchanan, “offer substantial release-time for this difficult work, and make it part of an extended commitment to whole-school improvement.”

            • Finally, the authors believe grading reform must be front and center in schools, districts, and teacher training programs. This is the only way schools will “finally retire inaccurate, inequitable, antiquated paradigms of student assessment.”

“An Investigation of Teachers Encouraged to Reform Grading Practices in Secondary Schools” by Brad Olsen and Rebecca Buchanan in American Educational Research Journal, October 2019 (Vol. 56, #5, pp. 2004-2039), available for AERA members or for purchase at

https://bit.ly/31XtwLM; Olsen can be reached at bolsen@ucsc.edu, Buchanan at

rebecca.buchanan@maine.edu.

Teaching doesn't get easier

from Marshall Memo #806, Oct 7 2019

Teaching Doesn’t Get Easier, But You Get Better At It

            In this Education Week article, Arkansas second-grade teacher Justin Minkel says he used to think the job would get easier “at some point on a shimmering horizon – five or 15 or 25 years into teaching… Once that distant day arrived, my face would no longer flush with awkwardness and self-doubt each time my principal walked into my room to observe a lesson. I would never again see glazed boredom settle over each student’s face like a limp rubber mask. I wouldn’t once lose my temper, no matter how many times my students refused to listen or work quietly at their desks.”

            Now he realizes that teaching doesn’t get easier for anyone; these and other struggles persist. But he knows the job gets better, because teachers keep learning and growing. How?

-    Looking at your class and seeing each individual;

-    Balancing responsibility with delight, with students working hard every day but also laughing;

-    Learning when to follow your instincts and when to question long-held beliefs, “when to trust yourself and when to ask for help, when to give your methods time to work and when to try something different;”

-    Bringing your hard-earned experience to bear on each new dilemma, “whether it’s a child who still can’t read or a child who won’t stop crying and come out from under her desk;”

-    Being less negative about tests, rubrics, and standards, seeing them as important tools for teaching and learning;

-    Teaching little brothers and sisters of former students and reconnecting with families that love you.

-    Learning, “like Odysseus does in Homer’s Odyssey, that the trials of a day, year, or an entire career can become sweet in the telling – that the absurd situation that made you gnash your teeth this morning is kind of hilarious as you tell your loved ones about it over a glass of wine tonight.”

“A new school year will arrive in your fifth or 15th or 25th year,” concludes Minkel, “when you realize that the answer is not to try to make the job any easier, but to open your heart even wider.”

“Teaching Never Gets Easier. But It Does Get Better” by Justin Minkel in Education Week, September 25, 2019 (Vol. 39, #6, p. 17), https://bit.ly/2Iw7PdO