Last year I allowed students to have a second assessment when they felt ready to take it, but I think most students just procrastinated. So this coming year I will set a limit of two weeks following the first assessment to improve upon it. Also they will not be allowed to take an assessment of a higher level objective until they have mastered the basic level objectives. So this provides class time for some students to have second assessments of basic level objectives while others are testing for high level objectives.

Hi Evan,
I do have a separate part of my gradebook for Unit tests. You could say I’m not fully SBG since it’s not all of my grading and I’m ok with that. This year I’m allowing students to also take unit tests at different rates. There will be deadlines, just to keep them on track and so someone doesn’t have 5 unit tests to take in the week before finals! ha! To me, that is also real life. My boss gives me work with deadlines. Its up to me to spread it out, do it quickly, or procrastinate. But, the deadline will happen and I need to be ready. IMO, that’s also more of what they will experience in college.

I try to do a combo of SBG and learning at various paces with the reality that life has deadlines and tests. To me, better for them to learn some of those hard truths while a freshman in high school when there is time to recover and parents & teachers to support (not rescue) the child through their decisions.

Complete agreement on the synthesis part. I love the term fail up too. Exactly the right message I’m shooting for.

I have a question on the ‘buck stops here’ part, as that conflicts with my understanding of SBG. Do you use a separate grade for unit tests, or is it still completely standards based?

Part of my hesitation going into SBG was that feeling that you mentioned: sometimes there are deadlines, times when failure is not ok, etc. The more I thought about it though, I don’t know think we need school to be that way. I couldn’t reconcile the disconnect between telling my students that not everyone learns at the same rate (justifying SBG) and also requiring that they learn something by a specific time. We have a final exam for the semester. Isn’t that good enough for the retention part?

Go for it, Rebecca. I’m glad I did. I took the advice of some others who told me that going in half-way is a recipe for the system not working. You can’t say you value retakes and SBG and then only make it 30% of the grade (as I did).

I am also putting in standards for semester long skills that don’t fit neatly into a unit. Some are related to computational thinking. Others relate to making a video or screencast that clearly demonstrates how to do a mathematical task. The beauty of SBG is that it forces you to identify what you value and clearly define it as a standard, rather than tossing in an assignment for five points ‘just because’.

Hi Michael,

Thanks for your comments. I agree completely that SBG has a tremendous effect in raising the involvement of students in the day-to-day operations of the class. The fragmentation part is a tricky one – I’d like to find out more about that aspect of your SBG experience. Do you think it has to do with standards that are too grainy/specific, or is it an assessment issue?

Your approach moving forward sounds really good . Keep me posted when you get that blog post together.

Evan

I’ve been using SBG since Feb. 2011. I use it in all of my math classes – Alg 1, Geometry, Alg 2. I also still have unit tests for 2 reasons.

1. As mentioned above – to synthesize information. It’s too easy in SBG to not put together the beginning and end of a unit. Or, even stuff from other units. Synthesizing is an important skill that students need to have.

2. At my school we talk about “fail-up”. We want our students to know that failure is ok, but we don’t stay in our failure, we work towards the “up” part. Yet, there are times when failure ISN’T ok. For example, do you want your retirement fund manager to fail with your life’s investments? Is it ok for bridge engineers to fail when designing bridges we will all drive on? Failure is for formative times – when we can redo. But then there is the “buck stops here” moment that hopefully our failures will have taught us how to be successful. IMO, a unit test is for after they have failed & reassessed on SBG quizzes (that’s how I do it in my class) and now they are prepared for the moment when failure would actually be bad. Formative = fail up, summative = success due to learning from the failures on the formative.

I started using SBG two years ago in Algebra 1. Tweaked it last year in Algebra 1 and implemented it (rather poorly, I would say) in AP Calculus last year during the second semester. I need to flesh out my ideas in a blog post of my own (I typically write in order to discover what I think, not just express what I think), but I can share now that I’m thrilled at the impact SBG has had in my classroom for students’ awareness of their progress and motivation to improve by targeting specific weaknesses. However, the way I’ve done SBG has completely fragmented my Algebra 1 course, and I’m certain that my students are being shortchanged on the synthesis side of things. It sounds like the presence of unit tests in your classroom protects against some of what I’m struggling with, so my vote would be to keep them (or trade them for something with the same benefits).

My approach moving forward with SBG will look something like this:

1. Spend time reflecting on and improving my course outline, particularly in terms of establishing three to five bigger themes (“units,” I suppose) into which the smaller standards fall (or maybe I just mean “clusters” here in the sense used in CCSSM

2. Give students a performance assessment at the end of each unit that requires students “to apply content standards… in the context of all of the standards of the unit” rather than only in isolation

3. Improve the quality of my individual standard assessments and consider grouping/mixing some of them together in the course of a larger unit so students have to wrestle with multiple ideas (and their connections) on more of my assessments

We’ll see what I can accomplish in the time I have, but I’m hopeful that I can enact these changes this year for Algebra 1, and at least shift the rest of my courses (Algebra 2 and Precalculus with Trigonometry) a little bit in the direction of SBG.