Summer Teacher Book Club

This summer a small group of teachers and myself read and discussed two educational books.  The first was Larry Rosen's Rewired: Understanding the IGeneration and the way they learn.  I hope to post on this book later but in a nutshell we can summarize the message of the book as we need to teach the way students will be most receptive to our content....not the way that works best for us as teachers.  Kids are extremely bored when we do not make the content meaningful and engaging to them and one way we can do that is allow multitasking of learning in our classroom and encourage student to use creative technologies where we can to enhance interest and thus learning.

The second book was Wormeli's Fair Isn't Always Equal. Couldn't help but notice that as start of the school year is looming just around the corner that posting on the Wormeli book has pretty much stopped.  As I finish the book today I came to the conclusion that our school (and probably many others) have faulty grading practices.  Too often we use grades to reward or sadly punish students for their efforts or lack of efforts.  Yes, hard work is important as is dedication to the task at hand but when we grade based on effort we muddy the waters.  Hard work and dedication or lack of it should be reported in comments since parents need to know while the actual grade for the course should be reflective of content mastery.  Parents count on us to report their child's learning and if we inflate our grades with other information we are doing a disservice.  Our report card, perhaps the most visible and weighty form of parent communication we have at our disposal may give a parent a misrepresentation of where their child is in relation to where they should be or at least where the average student is.  The average grade of a student not passing the OAA in building (meaning basic or limited) was a B+.  That creates quite a disconnect for the parent who sees a B+ on the report card and what equates to a "fail" on the report of progress created by the state.  We just need to clean it up.  I'm not saying it is an easy fix but there is no question that it needs to be done.  Do we have the intestinal fortitude to do it?