For the last two — almost three — years I’ve been in survival mode. Pandemic stress + endless COVID-school shifts + serious health issues in my family have left me treading water. And, to be honest, when you’re drowning, you’re not pondering innovative ways of getting to the shore; you are grasping for survival in […]
I’ve been writing about how the pandemic and virtual teaching has made me rethink all kinds of things about my teaching practices, but the one topic I’ve been avoiding is the biggest. It has probably been the biggest teaching shift I’ve made in my 20 years of teaching…and yet I’ve been hesitant to talk about […]
Rubrics tend to be about compliance, not thinking…
My 40th birthday is in a couple of days, June 6th to be exact. I expected this to be a difficult time in my life as I don’t like accepting that I’m getting older (turning 30 involved a lot of crying!). It has been kind of the opposite; it has made me appreciate the cliche […]
When was the last time you took a multiple-choice test? For me, the last time I took a multiple choice test to demonstrate mastery was during our beginning of the year compliance training courses (you know, those courses we have to take every year). Here is the real question though: Did it show my mastery […]
I have been using writing portfolios to assess my students’ writing in December and June for as long as I’ve been teaching. Portfolios are wonderful for so many reasons: they invite students to compile a body of work, encourage revision, show growth over time, and so forth. But sometimes they feel a little stale, a […]
Student pre-annotation lets teachers grade writing based on student intentions, resulting in a more robust understanding of their work.
When an attempt at motivating a student goes wrong, professional positivity is a must.
The response to this series of posts about my experiment to give up traditional grading in my senior English class showed us that teachers are searching for a better way to assess student work — a way that helps build relationships and helps students grow. Here, you’ll find links to the three parts of this […]
I would wager that grading is probably the very least favorite element of teachers’ jobs. (I would also guess this is quickly followed by complaining parents and senseless, top-down mandates.) We’ve all had the fantasy of the perfect teaching job that would exist if only we weren’t bogged down in numbers and rubrics and gradebooks. […]
moving writers 