Tag: sbg
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The Plan is Not to Plan
The school year is off and running, and I couldn’t be happier with my new batch of scientists. They are an eager bunch with a lot of great skills, and I cannot wait to see where they go. One of the things I find most fun about being a teacher is having to adapt to…
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Creating a Culture
I often catch myself looking around my room and thinking, “This is awesome. This is exactly what it should be.” Granted, I don’t feel this way every day. There are definitely some rough patches and some whirlwind hours. The wonderful adolescents that I work with are bound to have a few not-so-wonderful days (both individually…
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The Struggle is Real
My 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 if for the past for years, it is so unbelievably cool, and I cannot wait for them to get started. Knowing this…
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Feedback FOR Learning
My students are starting to wrap up their first project of the school year, which is to create a model of a food web. They are doing some amazing work … and I couldn’t be happier with all they have accomplished so far. At this point in the process, we start peer reviewing to get…
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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…
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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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What It Felt Like to Have a Blank Grade Book
It was ten days until the end of the quarter, and my grade book 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…
Katie Budrow 