Author: Stephanie Hather

I found this week’s reading on the “Case Against Grades” very interesting but I don’t really agree with all the points that were made.  I found it ironic that the article suggests “replacing letter and number grades with narrative assessments or conferences.”  Isn’t this just another form of grading students without giving them a specific letter grade?  Although a letter grade wouldn’t be used, wouldn’t the narrative assessments still define a student as either strong or weak?  If entrance to university was based on narrative assessments, students will “better” assessments would still be granted entrance over students with “weaker” assessments.  I understand what the article is trying to say but I personally don’t see anything wrong with giving students grades based on a set of criteria (ie. a rubric), as long as these criteria are clearly stated and fair.  And if grades are based on fair criteria that shows proof of students’ learning, isn’t this a positive way of assessing students?  I do not agree with arbitrarily assigning students a letter or number grade for assignments, but if such a grade corresponds to a set of criteria then I don’t see a problem.  We can also incorporate written and narrative assessments to go along with the letter grade we have assigned a student as a way of justifying it.  Also, the way our education system is structured requires us to give letter grades to students, so as it stands right now we don’t have the option to assess students in a different way.  This is why I think it is important to make sure that the grades we are giving students are as accurate an assessment of their learning as possible.  If we didn’t actually HAVE to give letter grades, then it would be a whole other story.

I especially appreciated this week’s reading on assessment because I have found this to be one of the more difficult aspects of lesson planning and teaching.  What type of assessment to use, how frequently, and in what forms are issues that I have been struggling with when it comes to unit planning as well.  One tool of assessment that I have seen being used not only in my practicum school but here at UBC is a rubric.  I believe that rubrics are helpful for teachers and students alike, because they give the teacher a specific set of criteria to use when marking which is not only efficient but fair, and they ensure that students know exactly what is expected of them before they hand in an assignment.  I have heard some teachers say that they don’t want to give out a rubric or specific criteria about what is expected of students because it is like giving away the “answers.”  I don’t agree with this at all; if we let students know exactly what they should be doing and learning, and they are able to produce the desired criteria, isn’t that exactly what we want our students to be doing? Why hide our expectations or make them a guessing game?  I think rubrics can be especially helpful for ELLs by providing clear and explicit criteria for assignments.

This week’s chapter on academic writing made me think about how difficult academic writing must be for some students who are ELLs.  When thinking about the types of academic writing that high school students have to undertake, a few things come to mind such as science lab reports, English essays, or short answer questions on tests.  Each of these examples represents a very different style of academic writing.  I think that many of the writing strategies provided in this chapter would be very useful for ELLs and are strategies that we as teachers must use in our classrooms.   During my practicum I saw some writing strategies in use by some of the teachers I observed.  One of these strategies was used in a Social Studies 11 classroom, where students were put into groups and given a question.  In their group, students were then asked to come up with a thesis statement based on their question, as well as three supporting points and a concluding sentence.  The next day, the groups presented their arguments to the rest of the class.  After, students were then asked to choose a partner who was not in their group, and pick one of the group topics to write a paragraph on.  The partners then wrote a “proper” paragraph with a topic sentence, supporting points, and concluding sentence.  The teacher told me that she would repeat this activity for every unit this year as she was trying to get students to learn to write proper paragraphs before even writing proper essays, both skills that her classes needed to work on.  Something else the teacher did to help students was to intervene in their partnerships.  For example, two ELL students who were struggling in the class paired up with each other because they were friends. However, the teacher split them up and paired them each with a non-ELL student because she knew by their writing level that they would not be successful together, but could be scaffolded by another student who could write at a higher level.  The teacher also paired other weaker writers with stronger writers in the class for this reason.  I thought this was a good strategy because she did not single out the ELL students or other students who were weak writers in the class by telling them what she was doing.  Overall I found the strategy to be a very good exercise in writing a proper paragraph and I could see myself using a similar strategy in the future.

Chapter 5 on academic classroom discussions made me think about what I feel a productive classroom discussion should look like.  To me this would be a discussion which is guided but not dominated by the teacher and I think asking appropriate questions is a key to this. I especially found the section on asking questions to be helpful as I have never really thought about the various types of questions in such detail before. But in thinking about my university experience, for example, we always had the best discussions in our classroom when the teacher provided some guiding questions that made us think about the major issues we should be focusing on, versus teachers who said “so who wants to say something?” and expected this to lead to an in-depth discussion. (I actually had one teacher who did this every week, and then got mad when no one really knew what to say).  I can also see how the over-use of display questions leads to discussions that follow the IRF model, which tend to be dominated by the teacher, and I remember most of my own high school “discussions” to be modeled this way. These discussions were always surface-level and we were looking for the teacher’s approval that we gave the right answer, afraid to say something wrong and look stupid. I think that the best types of questions for fostering classroom discussion would be open-ended questions which allow students to analyze, interpret and take on other perspectives. They also don’t have “wrong” answers that can make students feel inadequate.  I find open-ended questions helpful in my own learning for this reason. Also, it can be difficult to expand on display questions which are not really intended for deep thinking.  In my discipline, social studies, open-ended questions are regularly used to get students to engage in critical thinking and interpretation which is a major aspect of the discipline and I know I will be using them as a teacher for my own class discussions and activities.

I thought that Chapter 4, “Content-Area Variations of Academic Language” was a good way to get us thinking about the differences in language use across disciplines. Also, thinking about the use of language in our own disciplines is important, as so many of the terms or phrases we may use do not seem complicated or confusing to us since we are so accustomed to hearing and using them ourselves.  The idea of “expert blind spots” was a good reminder of how we need to be aware of our use of language in the classroom, especially when considering our ELLs.  We need to remember that ELL students are facing language challenges in all of their classes, not just ours, which means they are trying to make sense of and learn a variety of types of language that may not always cross disciplines. As a social studies teacher, I enjoyed reading the section on history and it really made me think about the range of opportunity within the social studies discipline for students to learn and use academic language.  For example, a major focus of history is analyzing and interpreting a variety of sources to put together the full picture of a historical event, a process that will give students the opportunity to think critically and find new meanings in academic language.

In this week’s article, A Focus on Vocabulary, the statistic that “no more than 8 to 10 words can be taught effectively each week” stood out to me.  When I first read this I thought it seemed unreal, but then I thought about the use of the word effectively in the sentence.  I’m sure that in the classroom, students are introduced to a lot more than 8 to 10 words per week, but this doesn’t mean that they necessarily learn their meanings as a result.  The article went on to discuss incidental learning and the fact that students must learn vocabulary from other sources than the classroom, specifically through “oral language and wide reading.”  It also mentioned that research supports the idea that the amount of time a student spends reading is “one of the best predictors of their vocabulary size.” This led me to think about the importance of reading for children, and reflect on my own experiences.  When I was growing up we had no cable TV, no video games, but we had a mountain of books in our house. My mom started reading to me before I could even talk, and as I got older I spent all my free time at home reading. I would ask my mom what new words meant, or would look them up in the dictionary myself. I excelled at spelling and vocabulary tests at school, and I can honestly say that I have never struggled with reading comprehension.  Given the important link between reading, vocabulary, and comprehension discussed in this article, I think my own experience highlights the importance of encouraging students to pick up a book on their own time.