Speaker 1: Welcome back to Colster's Corner. Recently I've been involved with several conversations regarding grading. So let's talk about grading for a minute. What is grading supposed to be? Essentially what grading is supposed to be is feedback for the teacher to determine where the students need help. What have you covered properly? What do you need to go back and refocus on? What do you need to address with the kids to get them to where they need to be with your subject matter? That's what grading is supposed to be. Somewhere along the way, colleges and universities decided that grading was going to be one of the criteria for admissions to their colleges. I get it. They need some kind of fair system to determine which students should get into their colleges through the selection process. And what has happened is that has really created a convoluted process between standardized test scores and grading. It puts a lot of pressure on students as to what colleges they want to get into and their parents. It's gotten to a point where if you follow current events, some people have even gone to jail for doing unethical things to increase their students' scores on some of the standardized tests that are out there. So there's a lot of pressure on students and grading and standardized tests are no longer being used for what they were created for. Unfortunately, they're being used to decide which students get to pursue which colleges they want to get into. So I always refocus my students and remind them, make sure in life that everything you do, that the means justifies the ends. You don't want to cut corners. You don't want to cheat. You don't want to do things that are unethical to achieve a goal because at the end, you've cheated yourself and you're not positioned in the right place. But long story short, back to grading. Grading is supposed to be feedback for the teacher so that they can go back and address areas of weakness with the students. It's not supposed to be being used as a selection criteria for colleges. Somewhere along the way, we've lost focus with that. And for your purposes, focus on the fact that it should be feedback. There are as many opinions on grading as there are parents and teachers out there. Everybody has a different idea of what grading should be and what it is. Here are a few best practices I can share with you. If you teach the same content areas other teachers in high school or middle school, you want to coordinate with those teachers and have the same grading system if possible, or systems that at least closely mirror each other so that you don't have students claiming one teacher is unfair and one teacher is awesome. You want to follow each other's grading system as close as you can. That helps reduce problems in the public. Second, I suggest you give a minimum of at least one grade a week, a bare minimum. So over the course of nine weeks, I will make sure I have at least nine grades in the gradebook. Typically, I give two to three grades a week, so I'll usually have 18 to 27 grades in the gradebook. A minimum of nine and certainly a maximum of probably about three a week. If you write essays, use a rubric to grade them. That way, if you have to justify a grade to anybody, it's fair. The students know it's fair. The parents know it's fair. Administration knows it's fair. Use a rubric. Typically, I always share my rubrics with the students so they know exactly what's in the rubric. That way, they know I'm being fair and it's not anything personal. Here are the things in the rubric. Here are the ways you earn the points. Again, another best practice that will serve you well. There may be teachers out there that disagree with me on this, but I don't believe you need to grade every single assignment. If you do grade every single assignment, which is not a bad thing, maybe it will help you look in the mirror and decide, do I really need to give the students this much work? I believe in practice. I believe in accountability. I believe in getting feedback for the students, but I don't believe in busy work. If it's something that they really don't need to do, I'm not going to assign it to them because that's going to create more work for me as far as grading goes. It's a good litmus test as to whether you really want to assign an assignment, but you don't have to grade every single assignment. If students figure out what you're not grading, they may not hold themselves accountable, so you may not want to tell them until the end of the week. I will typically assign a chapter, some note cards, some vocabulary words, some vocabulary drawings, and then I'll select two that I'm going to grade at the end of the week. I won't tell the students which two they are, and that way they're accountable for all of it. I've seen a lot of questions about test corrections. Here are my thoughts on test corrections. I don't always allow students to do test corrections. In my advanced placement classes, I typically don't do corrections, but as I'm thinking about it, I might start doing it this nine weeks and play around with that a little bit. When I do allow students to perform test corrections, what I will do is on a 50-question multiple-choice test, I will allow them to write out the question and the answer for each one that they got wrong, and they'll get half credit for it. That's if I allow them to do test corrections. Same thing with rubrics. If a student is writing a paragraph and I use a rubric to grade it, I will allow them to look at the rubric and write in the things they need to earn full credit, and I will give them half the credit for each of the points that they add into their essay. They could write it in the side margins in pen or pencil or something different than they originally did, and they will get half credit for that as well. Those are two things you can do as far as test corrections. You can give them half credit for each question and half credit for each rubric point, allowing them to pull their grades up if they want. That's a good practice for them. The purpose is not to get them with the grade. The purpose is to have them learn from it and correct their mistakes. Finally, I'm world-renowned for my extra credit policy. My extra credit policy is this. My first couple of years, what I found is that when students wrote articles, they would get five points for each article. At the end of every nine weeks, the students who had done nothing would come to my desk with 40 or 50 articles and dump them on my desk and say, here you go, I just saved my grade. The articles have to be handwritten. That way, they can't copy and paste it off of the internet. I came up with a new policy a couple of years after dealing with that where they're allowed to earn up to 100 points extra credit per nine weeks. If you look at my little breakdown on this slide, you can see they can earn up to 100 points if they have all of their assignments completed on time. For each assignment that they turn in late or that they are missing, I deduct 20 points from what they can earn that nine weeks. If they are missing one assignment, they can earn up to 80 points. If they're missing two assignments, they can earn up to 60 points. That way, they can't save their grade if they wait until the last minute and have done nothing for the nine weeks. The other thing I will do, and you can see on the little picture of me holding a lizard, is I allow them to go out into their neighborhoods and into nature and take pictures of Florida native animals and plants for extra credit. If they upload them to iNaturalist, they get five points per native animal and plant. That way, they're learning about iNaturalist. They are learning about Florida native lizards and frogs. They'll come up to my desk and ask me if something is extra credit. They're learning they're invasive and non-invasive species or the native species. That's what I do for extra credit. Hopefully, that serves you well. Hopefully, you've learned a few things from this presentation. If you have any questions, drop comments below in the comments box. If there's anything that I did not cover or you have a difference of opinion on, feel free to put it in the comments box. Thank you for your time and thanks for visiting Coastal Corridor.