So I'm taking these two college-level courses...

Today in our PD meeting I was given the opportunity to share with some of my colleagues the scoring system that I use with my classes. In general the reception seemed positive, and I really appreciated how open they were to trying proficiency whaaaa? (Proficiency scales.) Other teachers are half of what I think about when I think about teaching, so I was tickled pink that they tried it.

Then I started teaching my students. I one class a breakdown of their class grades. Probably not one of my stronger "we-are-doing-criteria-referenced-not-norm-referenced" decisions. Someone decided to defend the helpless. "I'm taking two college-level classes right now and the average grade in those classes is a B. So this data suggests that there is something wrong with the teaching in this class."  I said, "So what do you think that is?" He said, "Well, I don't know, but that's what the data suggests."

Other students pointed out the multiple opportunities they have on every standard. They pointed out that they do have choices around whether they accept their grades as they stand or work up to something better. They said that they'd rather meet the performance criteria than have me change it. Bless them, they know that learning can be better. (We still have too much in the curriculum, but I'll cry about it another day.)

About that data...

Some of my students told me last week that they have no opportunity to take statistics at our school because colleges value calculus more. These particular students all wanted to take statistics. I'm with them.

It just so happens that our class grades follow a pretty beautifully modeled normal distribution, with most of the grades clustered around "C". This is at least partially due to the fact that we usually massage a concept until the class average is around a 2.3-2.4, which, mixed with other factors, yields a large number of C grades. That's not the end of the road. Students then have the opportunity to reassess, as many times as they want or need to, to reach the grade that they want. Somewhere along this process they have to take an honest look at their current progress and develop a plan for getting what they want. Choice. That precious, dangerous freedom.

But that's not important right now. I came here to bust some myths.

Myth #1 - A college-level course is a rigorous course. Not really. They come in all flavors. More to the point, I've taken upper-division and graduate-level courses that never came close to kicking my ass the way that the online intro to stats course I took last summer did. I battled that course. I'm no math whiz, and I had to work hard. For a long time. For what I thought was going to be a C. I was really happy to get an A, but I was ready to work for a C.

Myth #2 - A typical high-school grade reflects the performance of the student. Not really. They're terrifically inflated. Categories like "Homework" and "Participation" that are generally marked for completion are inflation instruments. See the ASCD's seven reasons to change here.

Myth #3 - If you don't have an A or a B, the teacher is doing something wrong.  Reminds me of:

Doing something wrong like, using clearly defined performance criteria and being really stubborn about you meeting the objectives of this class? Yeah, okay, I am doing that.

So we had a look at the quiz. The big issue was pretty obvious. Students couldn't identify the inexplicit subject of a sentence when we threw in object pronouns. So we reviewed how to find that and how to execute a game plan when looking at that type of task. The rematch is Friday.

The Accelerated Integrative Method - Year One

At the end of the summer of 2012, I went with a group of my colleagues to Victoria, BC, to learn about the Accelerated Integrative method. I was not enthused, as I'd seen demonstrations of the method and to me it seemed rather infantile, controlling and difficult to orchestrate.

By way of description, the AIM utilizes what it describes as "pared-down language", "pleasant repetition" (the sound of that still smacks of mind-control to me) and inductive gestural markers for parts of speech. Students will learn around 400 words during the first quarter, each of which has a gesture that is marked as a part of speech. 

I made these videos for my students so that they could practice, but most of their practice occurs in the classroom. Some of them got really gung-ho about practicing, and they have consistently had amazing results. I don't know if you can see the advantage of this, but just imagine having a kinesthetic prompt that enables you to elicit the desired language from a student without explaining what it is that he/she is doing. All of a sudden, you're able to teach a student to say all kinds of things. My students are often making jokes in the class, and catching the punchlines only as they're finishing their sentences. 

Giving instructions in the target language is also much easier, because instead of just listening to the instructions, all of the students are, in some sense, giving them. The same thing can be done through reading, of course, but the sticky bit is that students already have a logic for pronouncing the roman alphabet, and re-coding that is not a simple thing. However, once students have learned the language orally, they are able to map it onto the written words without much difficulty.

These are some of the strengths of this method. It also has its weaknesses, especially articulated in the current educational climate. Next up: an argument for teaching all students grammar in their native language.