A palpable silence descended in room 811. Three classes in a row the silence fell, at the same moment in my plan for that day. It wasn’t a silent reading silence, or a working on a writing task silence, or a … Continue reading
I’ve had this post on my to-do list for months. To be honest, this is the piece of this whole process that I have the most questions about, so I just kept putting off writing it. I’m in a book … Continue reading
In conversations with teachers about alternatives to traditional assessment, especially skeptical teachers, I often hear, “there’s no way my students will work without points.” I get it. I do. My journey to here has been lengthy. Paradigm shift does not … Continue reading
Hello friends–we now have a bunch of new ones! Thanks for coming to our #StopGrading presentation. We enjoyed talking with you. Here’s the website full of resources that we shared in our presentation. Please share as widely as you … Continue reading
We have two more days in our classrooms before we board a jet plane and head east to Atlanta for NCTE16! We’re thrilled to be traveling and presenting with a few of our colleagues this year, and we’re looking … Continue reading
As a follow up to a previous post about the process my students and I went through to craft our grade agreement for this year, I wanted to share the finalized grade agreement we ended up with. Here it is. … Continue reading
My colleagues and I did our #StopGrading presentation at our state ELA conference a few weeks ago. Seeing as we’ll be doing the same presentation later this month at NCTE in Atlanta, we distributed notecards to the teachers who came … Continue reading
The first semester I went gradeless, I didn’t have in place any kind of agreement with students regarding what would make an A, B, C, etc. once we had to put something in the gradebook at the end of the … Continue reading
You know the drill. Parent sits down for a conference at parent/teacher conferences. You pull up your grade records for the student. You walk the parent through the grade data, pointing out what the student is doing well and what … Continue reading
I no longer put grades on individual pieces of student writing for a variety of reasons, but one of the most important ones surfaced this evening. I’m making my way through the first batch of my students’ thorough revisions. These … Continue reading
