Before I really get into this one, I must first say that I will use the terms Alg 3 to mean the first semester and Alg 4 to mean the second semester of my District’s second year algebra class.  I am specifying this because as I have talked to and grown in my understanding of Math, I realized that every district does this differently.  This is my attempt at mitigating  a little of that confusion.

Right, so before I can post the third (and far from final) draft of my Alg 3-4 Skills checklist, I think it would behoove me to first share what my starting point is.  Here are my district’s expectations for Alg 3 and Alg 4.

First off, ignore the dates at the bottom.  This class has not been updated with either the new standards (adopted a year and a half ago) or been re-formatted to be standards based instead of textbook based.

Does anybody else see a difficulty with what I am trying?  Some of the topics here are HUGE!

So, I needed some ground rules.  First off, I can not assess everything I teach.  This is vital, and essential.  Second, these skill assessments can not be the only assessments I give.  I am going to have to assess in a comprehensive manner. in addition to my skills assessments.  Finally, my skills list must fit on one page, single sided.

Okay, that last one seems kind of arbitrary, but it is not.  Part of my goal with this assessment strategy is to give the learners a recognizable and achievable set of goals, even if, or ESPECIALLY if, they hate math.

Giving them a three page list of skills the first day of class is saying to those learners, “you are going to fail this class because the amount of things to learn is ginormous”.  I can’t do that.

One page, even if I have to leave off some skills, even if I have to double up on some skills, is still better than overloading my learners.  Now the burden is on ME to focus my efforts and make sure I don’t leave off some important aspects of the math.  Their burden is to learn.

So, here it is. 

I tried to match my District’s blueprint, since that is what the CRT is based on.  This is not a final draft, by any means.  I am very open to suggestions and criticisms.

H tried this with Intermediate Algebra (my district’s Alg 3-4) and found it to be lacking.  That makes sense to me, because Alg 3-4 is more complex.  At least Alg 4 is.  The first semester of Alg 3 is really just a review of Alg 1-2. 

Well, not to be discouraged with what H found out, I am going to try it as well in my Alg 3-4 classes as well.  I think, however, that H is right on the money when she says that Alg 3-4 covers HUGE amounts of math more than Alg 1-2 does.  This means that the objectives either need to be very vague and all encompassing (kind of like the standards are) or I need to have 40 or 50 skills to assess.

Obviously there is a problem here.  I have worked over my district’s blueprint once, and then went back and read what H had to say on the matter as well as Dan Greene and looked at the amazing video project that Sam did with his class.  My bottom line is that I think it is possible, but not easy to do.

I have a rough draft of my skills checklist done right now.  I am not sure I am going to post it yet.  I am not happy with it.  I think I am stuck in the “do I have to assess everything?” mode.

More on this later after I yank myself out of that mode into a more productive setting.

First things first.  Everything I discuss here is specific to EasyGrade Pro 4.0.  Why?  That is what our district is standardized on.  I am sure that everything can be modified to any gradebook, however.

First thing, set up the categories we will be using to grade with.

Notice that only 15 percent of the grade is due to any assignments, and it is not labeled as “homework”.  We are committed to trying to get the freshmen to work 100% of the time in class so we don’t have to assign homework.

Not sure how that is going to work out, yet.  The “Panther Math” category is a required element of our school.  Every learner does a Math Proficiency practice of some sort every day until they pass the proficiency exam.  This begins the first day of class as freshmen.  It has been showing results so far.

Notice that 70% of the grade is tests!!!  The Comprehensive exam is to make sure they are ready for our district’s CRT.  They will get 3 comprehensive exams, 1/3 of the way through, 2/3 of the way through the semester, and then the Final CRT.

Next, the way of inputting into the gradebook.

Notice the “Complete” and “Not Complete” names.  Those are how we decided to communicate the success of the learners.

So, here we have 7 fake learners.  When they demonstrate mastery on the “A” exam, they get a “COM” or complete worth 100% of the points.

The learner does not get a score in a “B” test until they passed or “Completed” the “A” exam.  Notice that Frank is doing well.  He completed objective 1, but he scored 0 out of 4 on the “B” for objective 2.

John, on the other hand, is doing poorly.  He is not even close to mastery, and his grade reflects that.  Jean has mastered 1 objective, so her grade is higher.  Shelly has mastered none, but she is trying and because of the trying has a solid C.

This system gets past the point values to the importance of COMpletion and MASTERY.  For the teacher, COM’s are good, points are indicative of remediation.  I think this will alleviate the problems H had (see her posting here.)

Okay, ladies and gentlemen.  If you have any thoughts, criticisms, suggestions, lay them on me.  We go live with this with 4 Freshman Algebra 1 teachers, at least sixteen sections of this, starting in August.

More on this will follow.

Okay, so we have some philosophy down to guide our decision making. We have some rules and procedures, a way to communicate the test questions across multiple teachers, and some basic forms so our freshman will have a consistent set of handouts and standards. 

Now all we need is some way for the teachers to know exactly what he heck we are doing and tracking the same way.  One thing to note when looking at this.  In our district Alg 1 is split into semesters, Algebra 1 and Algebra 2.  So our Alg 2 class is called Algebra 3,4. (yes, it does cause confusion when talking to people in other districts / states.)

Great, we have standards aligned with each topic, those standards are aligned with the district CRT’s, so hopefully we have all our arrows pointing in the same direction.

We spent quite a lot of time massaging this.  We are not assessing everything that could be assessed.  For instance, we are not assessing 1 step equations.  We still have to teach it, but if the learner can do 2 step and multi-step equations, then they can do 1 step equations.

What I will not post here (for obvious reasons) is our excel spreadsheet with the questions in it.   We used Microsoft Equation 3.0 to construct our problems, so they are objects that can be copied and pasted into the following file.

that we agreed to use.  Copying and pasting the problem into it gives us a very structured way to give out tests.

Finally, we agreed to a rolling 3 in class assessments. This means that every assessment will have 3 presentations to the class.  The first time will be an “A” assessment, and the second and third will be “B” assessments.  If the learner passes any of them once, the “A” assessment is complete.  They only need to do the “B” assessment for full credit.

Gradebook next!

Okay, so we sat down (five of us) and hashed out some of the mechanisms and details we will use on our assessment journey.

First, we all agreed on the principles that Dan documented. Yes, I said some bad words when I read his three principles, because he scooped me on something that he had not written about (yet) and I thought I would have something truly unique to offer.  Oh well.

Next, we got down to the nitty gritty.  How many questions on each assessment?  What constitutes mastery?  How do we decide?  Where will these questions come from?  How do we create a continuity across four different Alg 1 teachers?  What standards are we going to actually address?  Do we have to assess everything we teach?

Answers below the fold in order to conserve space.

Read the rest of this entry »

Okay, let’s set the stage first.  My school is a State of NV Model School.  We try things and we do things that other schools don’t so we can always be pushing the envelope of what works, and what doesn’t.  Our principle gives us a good deal of latitude in the issues of curriculum as long as we hit the standards of both the State and the District, and we have some solid research to back up the things we try.

That is the purpose of this first post on this topic.  I wanted to construct a place where other teachers could come to and find a resource for much of the research necessary to accomplish the task that my department has established.

What is that task?

My department is re-writing it’s Alg 1 curriculum to be focused on mastery assessment and mastery teaching of the material.

Whew.  That is a huge task.  We talked about it.  We chewed on it.  And now, during the Summer, we are going to do it.

First off, here is a concise, neat, and altogether well written philosophy of what the process must entail.

Dan’s Guiding Principles for Assessment   I was very upset when Dan posted this, because I had half of our principle written and he scooped me.  My 3 were almost identical to what Dan wrote.

Next, some methods to make it work.  Dan’s Comprehensive Math Assessment

Yes, we are borrowing heavily from Dan’s work.  I am not going to re-write what he did a very good job explaining in his posts and his comments.  READ HIS COMMENTS.  Both the criticisms and his responses and adaptations.

Finally, here are two pages from another teacher name “H.”  He did the same thing in his classes last year.  We are very aware of what H did and did not do, and we are using his suggestions in our writings as well.

Applying Dan’s Assessment system Part I

Applying Dan’s Assessment system Part II

I was kind of quiet over the last two weeks.  I drastically underestimated how much time was required for the last two weeks of school.  Who knew creating review packets, grading huge projects, and getting all of the i’s dotted and the t’s crossed would take up so much freaking time!

Not me. 

My first official year of teaching is over.  Wow.  It was a terrific year.  I have a great department, a great school, and I think I fit in very well with my peers.  What more could a person ask for, right?  I mean really.  The complaints I read about from other teachers center around “that so and so is such a jerk” or “I hate my school they don’t support me in X”.

Me, I love my school.  My school is fighting to do new things and constantly improve.  My district is constantly trying to figure out ways to take what my school does and move it to other schools.  My school was just nominated as a Model School for my State!  What more could a new teacher (at the ripe old age of 38) want?

That is not to say that my first year was all roses.  It was tough learning classroom management with freshmen.  I think I sucked in several different ways, and I had way too many F’s.  I made it so difficult to fail, but so many learners still just gave up and refused to do anything.

What more can be done?  Well, we (my department) are going to re-write our Alg 1 curriculum to radically change it to a more flexible and more focused on the assessment and teaching alignment.

More on this soon.