FIAE+B1+Chapter+13

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Amy
CH. 13 The purpose of a Gradebook is to document student progress and make note of places where students struggle. They are one way of keeping records that report achievement. There are many different formats for setting up gradebooks, one commonly used format is grouping assignments by standard, objective, or benchmark, however, the problem with this format is that teachers can’t really use it to determine exactly which standards the students are struggling to understand. The format that I like the most, and find to be most appropriate for teaching in a differentiated classroom is the “Summary of Evidence” format. This type of format shows exactly what standards align with which assignments, and furthermore, it allows teachers the chance to track the standards that students struggle with the most. It is an excellent format for highlighting the mastery attained be each individual student. This causes teachers to, “think in terms of levels of performance in the declarative and procedural knowledge specific to her subject area” (163). This is the best option for recording growth and progress, and it identifies what things the teacher is doing well based on each standard and essential goal of the unit.

Andy
On page 165 the author discusses the topic of providing two grades for the students for certain assignments is just ridiculous. Throughout the book the author has been telling us that we should differentiate our assessment to make them the most useful both for us, the students, administrators, and parents when it comes to feedback, so if we have done this correctly why would we need another grade if the first should cover all the bases? The author does say that it is more work, so why do it if the first grade is sufficient enough? Seems a bit redundant to me.

Brian
Continuing the theme of grading, chapter 13 delves into the enthralling world of grade books. The book suggests a few different ways to keep and organize grades, some of which they consider to be more accurate than others. To be honest, I just helped my mentor organize her grade book, and honestly I would have rather sawed my toe off. There’s got to be a way to organize and record grades in a more exciting engaging way. Not to mention the quintessential sigh that all students give when they see that old green book come to the teacher’s hand. There’s got to be a better way.

Cassandra
Whoa! Grade books are a mess. I peered at my mentor's grade book and cringed. There were so many scribbles and percentage change and MATH. I am not against math, but no wonder teachers make mistakes with their grades! We become so consumed with the points, the grade book does not say "THIS STUDENT UNDERSTANDS: BLAH, BLAH!" This form of grading is messy, and it pushes the teachers to throw out lesson grades to support the overall student's grade. Teachers will end up making something weigh more just because it was harder for students, leading to it being more important to the easier assignment. Eh. The summary is odd, but it's more useful. If a parent calls to ask what a students grade is, instead of quickly doing the math, the teacher could inform the parent something meaningful about the student's knowledge. This would upset students with their needs to check up on their grades 24/7, especially with the new computers in their laps. Teachers are less likely to do anything like this with the new quick computer grade books.

Dan
GRADE BOOKS! I have always wanted one. I believe after reading this chapter I just liked the idea of math and power. I had all the information, and I would be able to find averages. Sounds like a perfect situation. By using grade books we can make mistakes which can throw off tons of information, not to mention little Billy most likely doesn't have his paper to show me that has the correct grade on it. We are trusting that this book doesn't ever get lost or stolen. That is just general thoughts, but with how it connects to education, there are so many ways to set up your grade book. What way is the best? I don't think any way is best. You need to be able to measure mastery. In my mind mastery means atleast a low A in our current grading scale. How many of our students have a low A or higher during our semester? Crazy to think about. But we are just keeping track of how bad a job we are doing as teachers. Solution: Build more exciting lessons, with all students learning styles. In a perfect world grade books would not be needed because as a teacher you would feel confident your students mastered the material for the sememster.

Ethan
This chapter deals with possibly the most confusing thing I have run into so far during practicum, grade books. When I was reading this chapter and looking at the different models for a grade book my head began to spin. The only way that made any sense to me was the listing assignments by date format. Maybe it’s just the way my mind thinks, but I feel it is easiest to organize a grade book by the date of the assignment. In my own classroom I think this would be the way I would do thinks, still grouping tests, quizzes, and homework together for a final grade. When it comes to the recording of the grades, however, I would like to list them in order in my grade book not only for organizational reasons but also to see the student’s growth over time in a particular unit.

Sean
Grade books. The predecessor to the now wonderfully helpful Powerschool. This made me think back to my time in the field and how it has shown that Powerschool easily overrules grade books. Grade books get messy, confusing to read, and are nothing more than glorified notebooks anyway. Powerschool on the other hand gives percentages for all the grades and shows the final score, updating it after each new score put in. It helps a lot more with figuring out the final score of the student, and it allows them and their parents to see their scores from home.

Darren
The best part about grade books is that they are becoming obsolete. This chapter discusses various ways of keeping them organized, from basing the entries around standards to organizing the entries by the determination of the benchmark. However, what I like about grade books the most is that we won't have to do them. If a teacher keeps a grade book at this stage in the game (if the school has technology like PowerSchool), they are hindering themselves, creating more work. Look at this chapter with a grain of salt, because as technology becomes more and more influential in the classroom, administration will lay more and more hands on how it is used. Therefore, the "freedom" grade books offer with be counteracted by the efficiency of universal, electronic systems.

Jennifer
I honestly never realized that just setting up a grading format was so complicated. I figured teachers would just write in the assignment and then place the grade next to it, at least that is what I have seen. These formats show a lot more information and indicators of students mastery than grade books that my teachers have had. I like the topic based grade book approach because it will show students skill and mastery of specific subjects within a subject, and it shows the skill mastery in a variety of assignments. This way you can see if the student really mastered the skill or knowledge through their application. You could even combine the standards and topic based if you wanted to, but I think choosing one or the other would be best.

Josh
Armstrong gives many examples of ways to format a grade book. Some different ways are to: Group assignments by category (ex. Analysis, Synthesis, Prediction), which measure students level of performance based on skills that they have acquired. Another way is longitudinally or by date, a topic based grade-book, which I liked because it allows the teacher to see which topic the students struggled with and might need to work some more on, I had never thought too much into different formats of grading, all I have been exposed to are the generic ones that have the assignment and the grade out of how many points. As a teacher I would like to get creative with my gradebook, and most likely use the topic based format.

Zack
The gradebook is the one thing that all students wish to get ahold of to change their grade to some thing they believe they should have received. I am very much for the conventional grading book where the grades are put in by the assignment that they are collective. I do not agree with changing this make sure we match up with some randomly selecting standards to follow. The standards were selected so that we could have a benchmark, but why not throw out the standards and teach to teach. Start from the beginning of the book and go to the end, do not skip chapters just because of standards. That is the dumbest thing ever, lets do chapter 1, 3 and 6 of this book to get the standard but skip 2, 4 and 5 because you do not need to learn that yet.

George
The gradebook. Hell in the format of an Excel document. This chapter talked about them and how to organize them to the best you can. I got a look at my teachers grade book with PowerSchool and Powerteacher. There is a problem with them that is supposed to be the benefit, which is students and parents can see them. This might be good in the case of making sure students have everything in and that they know what their grades are but I watched my mentor teacher field a call from a belligerent parent complaing that the gradebook hadn't been updated in a week. There was one missing grade, and that was because she had been busy with her work with after school sports. I don't envy this in my future.

Liz
The Gradebook. They are all a bit different. They have different purposes. In the field my experience came with the electronic Powersoft gradebook. It was interesting to say the least. The actually hard copy of the gradebook did not exist for my mentor teacher but rather his gradebook included the work of his students that he couldn't pass back due to incomplete work. The chapter presented here of FIAE is about how different gradebooks are set up and what exactly they show. The various gradebooks freatured show different things about how students learn while also allowing teachers to present grades in an understandable fashion. The gradebooks shown also allow for the teacher to present information to themselves to gain knowledge of strengths and weaknesses. This ability comes from when teachers stray off the paved super highway of Quizzes, Tests, and Homework but towards the animal walking path of Standards and the mastery of content.

Damian
Keeping a grade book in the traditional, hard-copy, and spiral bound format is fast approaching the archaic methods of yesterday. With the advent of technology appearing in the classroom at an exponential rate keeping physical records seems pointless and more frustration than it’s worth. Even if a grade book was kept in Microsoft Excel on a spreadsheet that calculated all of your grades through the simple imputing of SUM and EQUALS formulas it would be a better choice than pen and paper. Although the grade books that my teachers kept does carry with it a deeply rooted sense of wonder and mystery, keeping something just for the novelty factor isn’t the best way to go about things. Although, they do have very leathery covers, almost like the grade book creators decided to emulate a religious text…