Things like working well as a team or meeting deadlines often require a lot of practice. I believe that a grade is a summary of a student’s content skills, not behavior, so I learned some ways to teach soft skills without penalty. When we penalize a student’s grade for being late to class or turning something in late or not being prepared, we are not teaching them HOW to learn that behavior we are punishing them. This a practice that can have harmful effects on a student and their future. Here are 10 ways you can support soft skills (without interrupting your curriculum) so that students have many opportunities to…
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4 Simple Steps to Teach Soft Skills (Without Grades)!
The last several weeks, my posts have been all about getting rid of subjective grading practices, biased grading practices, and any kind of soft skills or executive functioning skills in our grade books. You can read more about my thoughts on this here. But just because we aren’t incorporating executive functioning/ soft skills into our grades doesn’t mean we cannot teach them to our students! Executive functioning and soft skills can mean different things to different people, but most often, these skills are included: Collaboration Ownership Problem solving Self advocacy Punctuality Respect for self and others Responding to adversity/ conflict Time management Perseverance Creative thinking And Joe Feldman, author of…
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How To: 5 Tips for Equitable and Meaningful Grading
After I read Grading For Equity and started my own research into the way we assign grades in the United States, I was eager to systematically evaluate each of my grading policies. Ultimately, I wanted to read every policy I have and be able to answer yes when I ask: does this policy support a final grade that provides a summary of student academic accomplishment in my course? Below are the steps I took along my journey to a more equitable and meaningful grading system. If you are interested in doing the same, I hope this helps you along the way! 1. Get to know the community in which you…
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It’s a Myth: Grades Don’t Motivate Students to Learn
Yep, me too. More times than I can count. Even my students who love reading and writing only do so if there’s a grade involved. It took me a too long to figure out that it’s because students are motivated to EARN POINTS, not to learn and grow as readers and writers. If that’s you too, it’s not your fault! It’s the system we’ve been taught to believe and participate in. The educational system in the United States begins assigning point values to learning as early as 5th grade – and sometimes even earlier. From that time on, students are conditioned to believe that they need to earn points to…
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Ditch These 5 Biased Grading Policies Now
What does a grade represent? In reality, grades don’t mean what we think they do. What we experienced as students and brought into our own class are largely biased grading policies that harm many of our students. In so many classrooms in schools across the country, a grade could represent any combination of the following: how many absences the student had the number of mistakes made early on in the quarter ( regardless of how much their skills grew toward the end) The student’s ability to get to class on time How often students turned in late work, regardless of their understanding of the material Teacher’s implicit biases toward students…
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The History of Grading in the US – What You Need to Know
In my quest to understand how I could make my grades have more meaning and be truly representative of my students’ success I had to ask – how did we get here? What does a grade “A” represent? Why does any number from 0-59 mean an F, but only 80 – 89 equal a B? The only answer I could come up with was “That’s the way it’s always been done.” Any rational human knows that is not usually a good enough reason to do something. So, if I couldn’t explain WHY I graded on an A-F scale, how could I justify ANY of the grades I gave to my…
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Grading in the Classroom: It’s Time for Change
It’s scary to talk about grading in the classroom I want to talk about something that teachers tend to be very territorial about: grading. Talking about grading is hard. Our grades are sacred – they are the final word on whether, in our professional opinion, our students demonstrated success in our classroom. The Grade Book is often the one aspect of our classrooms that teachers have total control over, and it also holds a lot of power – one 59% can change a students’ life in innumerable ways. So, teachers ( myself included) are naturally very defensive when asked to talk about or grading practices. Funnily enough, we are rarely,…
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Teacher How To: Scaffolding Socratic Seminar
Socratic Seminars are one of my all- time favorite teaching strategies. I love seeing a group of students engage in a collaborative discussion and think deeply about themes, texts, and ideas under their own guidance. This is a skill that is not natural for students, who are used to teacher- led discussion, so I started scaffolding Socratic Seminar to build the skills necessary to make my Seminars successful for all of my students. Seminars not only strengthen students’ ability to engage in dialogue with many differing beliefs, it also requires students to think deeply and critically, using evidence and logic to support their claims. While impromptu whole class discussions are…
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5 Lessons I Learned from a Year of Pandemic Teaching
I’m going to say something that is not being said enough: The pandemic did not create problems in education. It forced us to recognize and stop ignoring the ones that were already there. Before, there was no money to waste on 1:1 technology. Suddenly, students had access to wifi and laptops. Before, students had to sit in a chair for each class from 7-3. Suddenly, we could give independent, asynchronous options. The list goes on. Although this year of teaching has easily been the longest and most exhausting year of my career, I realize that in a lot of ways it has been a blessing, and not just because my…
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How I Declutter My Classroom!
Spring Cleaning for Teachers Series – Part 3 Click here for Parts 1 and 2 of this Series. Every year as my teaching duties start winding down, I begin the therapeutic process of decluttering all of the printed paper I have collected throughout the year. As a teacher, I feel like this is SO HARD. I always think to myself, “What if I need these 7 copies next year?” I don’t believe “Just in Case” is a good enough argument for cluttering up your classroom with a ton of paper. Here’s why: Cluttered classrooms are almost NEVER tidy, even if you think they are. This sends a message to EVERYONE…
