Taking the Hassle Out of Grading
See the Grading page for ideas on making grading simpler.
Displaying Objectives
A lot of administrators require daily objectives to be posted for each subject. Here are some effective ways to do so:
These are photos from two first grade teachers at my school. They use the same signs that the team typed, laminated, and magnetized, but as you can see, they wrote their objectives differently according to their personality types and teaching styles.
(Left) Mrs. Rivera displayed very specific reading/language arts objectives when she taught 4th grade gifted. The bottom part is part of her center rotations. (Right) Mrs. Dreiss does something similar with her 3rd graders' reading objectives. The right side of the board is for tracking papers that students have turned in- each child has a number and erases it from the board when they turn their paper in. (More about that on The Paper Trap page).
This one is mine. I wrote out (on chart strips) each of our state content standards for third grade and display the current ones in a pocket chart. To me this is easier than writing out daily objectives and looks more professional. It was extremely time-consuming to do- maybe 20 hours to write and laminate and then I had kids and parent volunteers cut them out- but to me it was worth it.
Understanding By Design
I came across a great format for long-term planning called Understanding By Design. They offer extensive training in the method, but I think just utilizing the free templates they offer can be useful because it requires you to use 'the backwards design'. Often we as teachers plan activities and then the test rolls around and maybe the lessons prepared the kids, maybe they didn't. There isn't proper alignment between instruction and assessment. However, with the UBD method, you design the 'big idea' and essential questions first, then the ways to assess whether kids have mastered those key concepts, then design activities to prepare the kids for assessment. I did this for all of my first-quarter social studies and science units last summer and I'd like to do more. It's only been in recent years that I have moved towards this type of instruction; before I just followed the curriculum guide and hoped the kids did well on the test. Eventually I started looking at the test first and then designing the lessons; now I'm going to bring everything back to the key concepts daily and really keep things tightly-connected. It's probably too much for a first-year teacher to do- I know I wasn't ready back then- but I encourage more experienced teachers to experiment with this type of thinking. It will revolutionize the way you teach and how your kids learn.
Instead of just learning to locate places on a map and study random cultures in Social Studies, my kids are exploring the essential question: How does geography affect destiny? (Meaning, how does the place people are living in affect the way they will live their lives?). All of my lessons are tied directly to the state standards and my assessments were designed FIRST, so I know my lessons are aligned.
If you're interested in designing long-term lesson plans and curriculum mapping, check out the Planning page or the resources below.
Quick Ways To Tell If Students Understand
Benchmark students: Choose three students as your 'benchmark': either three on grade level kids or one above, one on, and one below grade level child. When those three children start to tune out or show significant difficulties, re-teach in a follow-up lesson.
Informal Assessment for the End of a Lesson/ Day
Informal reflection questions: When will you use this strategy again to help you as you __ (read, do math, etc.)? If we had a new student in our class, what would you tell them about __? When will you use this again when you're not in school?
3 Things Poster/Calendar: At the end of the day, brainstorm in teams the three most important things you learned that day and write them on sticky notes to attach to a poster (or write directly on the poster). You can also use a large desktop-style calendar. At the end of the month, talk about what you've learned. Bind the posters together to make a class book. You can also choose the 3 most important things for the week and circle them, and choose the 3 most important things from the month.
Do They Really Understand?
One of the hardest thing to gauge as a teacher is whether the kids are actually 'getting it'. Sometimes I teach a lesson and think I have everybody with them, and then give an assignment and realize it was the five brightest kids in the class who knew it all and the rest of the group just followed their lead.
I especially wanted to know if my kids were grasping math concepts, because I teach new skills in that subject more often than in other subjects, and so much of the content knowledge is cumulative. I can't move on to four digit subtraction if they still don't three digit subtraction, and I can't do three digit if they don't understand regrouping, and I can't do regrouping if they don't understand place value... and on and on.
I needed a simple and fast way to tell what kids could really do on their own, and a plan to re-teach the kids who weren't getting it. I designed the form below and used it as follows:
1) After teaching a lesson, I gave students an independent assignment, and told them to come up to my desk to show me when they were finished. The assignment was usually a workbook page that was closely aligned with the format I had just taught the students. Typically it was short, maybe 10-20 problems- just enough so I could tell what the kids could do.
2) I filled out the top of the form (skill, assignment, and date) for my records while I waited for the kids to complete their work. When they brought me their assignment, I circled the problems they missed, and either re-taught there on the spot, or gave them a bit of guidance and sent them back to their seats to try again, if I thought they were capable.
3) After I had seen the assignment, students worked on fun math practice packets they kept in their desks, and I wrote their names in the appropriate columns on my form. I based their placement on what they had first done independently, and not on whether they got it once I went over it with them.
4) Later that day or the following, I worked with the kids who just weren't getting it or needed re-teaching.
More Resources
Online reading and math assessment with printable score results from grades 3-8 in reading and math from Brainchild
