"Whereas most teachers wish they could find some purely objective way to evaluate students, the reality is that the subjective factors (poverty, cultural differences, language diversity, violence in the community, and underesourced schools that have not prepared children well for the academic work ahead) impacting school performance must be accounted for when evaluating students well." (What Should I Do?- Richert)
I struggle with grading objectively with deadlines because I want to teach students to be academically and professionally responsible by sticking to a "no-late work" policy. However with criterion-based grading, I only assess students on the skills and competencies they can demonstrate. We are also limited by the timeline of each unit and the skills and knowledge build on. One solution is to have self-paced modules where all the activities have video directions and can move ahead as quickly as they want. I would still have to have deadlines for when we have class discussions to build a consensus around certain lab activities. It might also be challenging to spread out the physical resources, but I could organize the supplies into bins where students can grab them on their own. I could also create videos about the lab setups and guiding questions. Another problem I anticipate is students working ahead where I have to ask them a guiding question or provide them an answer in a specific sequence. I could prerecord answers and guiding questions and set up a "Canned response" in gmail so that students would know to send me an e-mail at certain points in the lab and gmail would send out the appropriate video question or answer at the correct times. These self-paced units and tools would also support students who come to school late. Students would easily be able to come in and work on their own during lunch or after school. This would also help students who are out of school for school for health, family, or personal reasons. My potential lesson for phase 5 will try to create these self-paced lessons with digital supports. |
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