A little (welcome) trouble with the grading system

Hi Gang,

You know, last year, I was pretty tight with my grading system: My Work Ethic score started each grading period and went down. Students got a fresh start every six weeks. It was prettty hard on some kids, especially the ones who challenged authority. They'd wipe out and then check out.

So we changed it this year to meet the demands of the entire staff, but haven't we found it to be too easy, with students getting a fresh start every week? Also, I've always used Work Ethic as 50% of the entire grade, but again, it's too easy, especially since my kids are generally so nice this year!

So, any thoughts? I look forward to getting some advice.

Ideas:

Make the Work Ethic component less than 50% (some of you are probably already doing that).

Make the Work Ethic score reset every progress report period or every month or some other alternative.

Good afternoon all. How are all you doing in your classes? Heidi's classes has now been trimed from four to three. We keep hearing about some of the other classes being still overloaded. What kind of numbers do you have? My classes are pretty good for numbers especially fifth where Jen Kohl is removing five or six students.

Setting up ABI (Aeries) Gradebooks for our Work Ethic scoring

To make scoring efficient, set up your gradebook for easy recording. Here's a step-by-step guide:

1. Log on to Aeries.

2. Click on the Grades tab. Then click on the Gradebook sub-tab.

3. You'll need to add your students to each class, if you haven't already done so.

4. Click on Edit Assignment Type.

5. Choose a number code and a name, e.g. Work Ethic.

6. Choose percent. I chose 50%. Apply changes.

7. Next, click on Edit Assignment.

8. Choose Assignment Type. Enter discription, e.g. Week One. Enter 100 for Max Score. Choose Date Assigned (Monday of that week) and Due Date (Friday of that week). Click Add.

9. You can add all six weeks (approx.) for the grading period at once, with different names (Week One, Week Two, etc.) and different Date Assigned and Due Date and then click "Grading Completed" each week as they're completed, or you can add an assignment for each week. When you do add an assignment, you'll need to enter "100" for the score of each student, and then subtract 5 points for each performance, behavior, attendance, and tardiness infraction.

10. I recommend counting the tardies and unexcused absences each Monday for the previous week. This gives students a chance to clear absences and tardies. If they don't do it by then, it's on them. Self-responsibility!

11. After I have a weekly score on Monday, I post the results each Monday by printing the grade report, so kids can know where they are. To print, place mouse over "Scores by Assignment" and click on the assignment you want from the menu. Then, click on "Print Preview." It will display a nice chart, which you can print from the browser's print command on the File Menu.

I hope this guide helps. If you have any questions, post comments. I'll read them (or others can and answer, too!) and try to offer advice. Let me know if I made any mistakes in my explanation.

Good luck!

Happy School Year! Resource Updates

Hi, everyone. As you know, I've placed a resource page for each of you in my EDblog.org educators' blog, and I've placed a link to it here at the VOA blog in the Links. With time, some of these links get old. Also, sometimes you have a favorite website you've found for your class, and I don't know about it. Please let me know, by commenting on this post, if you'd like any changes, deletions of bad links, and any additions. I'll edit the pages and make them whole again.

Happy blogging, team! (enough with the cheerleading, Calvin...okay)

Hot tip: You can access your NVUSD email from the link I've place in the Links. Look down in the previous posts list and you'll find a training post that explains how to use the NVUSD Web email logon. Good luck. Let me know by comment if you have trouble doing it.

A successful meeting and a final VOA contract!

A special thanks goes out to Susan for hosting a fabulous dinner, which we all enjoyed so much. During the pre-dinner work session we hammered out the several changes needed, and I for one really feel strongly about the contract. I know it will be a valuable tool for each of us in managing our classes. I include a link to it here, as well as over in the links area.

Congratulations to us all, and see you around school (only two more weeks, cringe!).

Let's work a little on the contract before we meet for dinner

Before we meet for a working dinner next Wednesday, maybe we could do a little advance work to save time when we get together. That way, we can avoid not finishing up during what will probably be our only meeting before school starts again (Hate the sound of that! So soon...).

So I'm posting a slightly revised Contract here, reflecting a change Randy suggested ("win" changed to "earn") and a typo fixed.

Any other ideas?

Also, I'd like to address a couple of Susan's questions. First is the concern of this performance grading system taking up a lot of time. My feeling is two-fold: One, if our Aeries gradebook (or any gradebook you like) is set up right, it won't take much time, and, two, we have to spend time grading these kids anyway, why not get it out of the way as we go and say, "Wow, half the battle's over!"

I'd be glad to show how I set up my Aeries online, in advance, and how I use it in real time in the classroom.

And that might answer Susan's other concern, that Aeries might be complicated to operate or couldn't be open in the classroom. We can lock our desktops any time we want and unlock quickly, so that has a work-around.

Now, I think I softened up my original system quite a bit, so I hope no one thinks it's too hard. My hope here is that we hold our students to a high standard (and ourselves too). We also get to model a strong program, and that's good for our reputation at VHS. What's more, we might be able to survive if the school disciplinary plan runs into some bumps, which I know we're all a little worried about.

A last point: I know some of us don't like to enforce all of the VHS school rules, and I know that it's compounded by the fact that teachers all across the campus ignore them. That's makes all our lives tougher.

We can lobby to have the rules changed. I fear that we're not helping our kids by showing them that we know how to break rules, how to selectively ignore the ones we don't like. And we're not helping our colleagues who enforce them when others don't. It makes the tough teachers look mean, uncool. And that, I feel, is really uncool.

That's an area where we really could use some discussion.

Final tips on using the blog: What I'm typing right hear is a "post." We can all "comment" on a post. This allows us to introduce a topic or set of connected topics. The comments section is where we can discuss back and forth the topics mentioned in a post. For example, if members have thoughts about what I've just said, we (including me) can swap ideas through a back-and-forth in the comments.

If anyone had a unique perspective that they feel warrants a new discussion, they can create and publish a new post. We have to be logged into Blogger.com to do that, but it's pretty easy.

Now, I'm the administrator, but the only extra power I have is to delete posts or comments, plus I suppose I can delete members. But all of us can post or comment. All my suggestions are about process. And, again, as a member of our team, I welcome suggestions about how we can best use the blog. As administrator I'm only taking the extra role (not really power) of being organizer.

I hope to hear reactions to the new contract and any other ideas about it or anything I've said in this post.

A Draft of the VHS ROP Contract

Well, here we are, folks, with a draft of a VHS ROP Contract, which you can view by clicking here, or by clicking on its link in the Links section to the right.

Let me know what you think.

I'm excited to think about our having a strong, unified disciplinary policy to support our teaching next year, and for years to come.