Last week my students completed an end of quarter math review. In collecting the papers in, I glanced at 2 or 3 and immediately my heart sank. It seemed on first glance that they hadn't done very well at all. I was dismayed. So much so that I kept procrastinating over marking the papers. Fortunately, the pressure of reports and 3-way conferences forced me out of my lethargy and I finally got down to marking. It slowly dawned on my as I worked through paper after paper that actually I was putting a lot of positive ticks on the pages and I started to take courage that all had not been a waste after all.
I only just managed to resist analyzing the results and scoring the sheets. This year I have turned all rubric work, analysis and scoring over to the students. My job is simply to mark, then to collect and respond to their reflections. When the students received their tests back they went through them question by question, marking up their rubric and comparing their results from 12 weeks previously. There was a very excited buzz in the room as the realization of their progress hit home. As a final step, I got the students to score the work and convert it to a percentage, and to my surprise many students had actually doubled their scores or even more.
There was a good professional rebuke in this for me. I should have greater faith in my effect as a teacher and more importantly these students deserve my faith in them as learners with growing minds. Building a growth mindset in the grade has been an important driving goal of the year. It is my responsibility to action this first in my beliefs about my students.
I only just managed to resist analyzing the results and scoring the sheets. This year I have turned all rubric work, analysis and scoring over to the students. My job is simply to mark, then to collect and respond to their reflections. When the students received their tests back they went through them question by question, marking up their rubric and comparing their results from 12 weeks previously. There was a very excited buzz in the room as the realization of their progress hit home. As a final step, I got the students to score the work and convert it to a percentage, and to my surprise many students had actually doubled their scores or even more.
There was a good professional rebuke in this for me. I should have greater faith in my effect as a teacher and more importantly these students deserve my faith in them as learners with growing minds. Building a growth mindset in the grade has been an important driving goal of the year. It is my responsibility to action this first in my beliefs about my students.
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