MORE ON GRADING–I DON’T KNOW HOW I FORGOT THIS INFO

Obviously, I was in a hurry. But a few posts earlier, I wrote up the grading rubric that I’m using with my students at co-op.

Before implementing this scale, all of the elements addressed were taught. And the students received grades for their work, but over time I noticed that there wasn’t much improvement on the part of half of my class of students.

Now, I am getting emails from some parents that want to thank me for the improvements they see in their children’s papers. I wish I could say that I was receiving this type of feedback from everyone, but that simply wouldn’t be true.

About half of my students aren’t progressing as much as I would have liked them too. They are improving, but they keep reverting to the same mistakes over and over.

So, I decided to purposely give lower grades to all of the students for rough drafts. The drafts are checked by me for the elements I listed in the previous post. After they receive their initial grade, I give them their papers back to revise and edit. After the edits are complete, they turn in both papers. (I have had a couple of papers turned in to me twice with no revisions. To eliminate this temptation, they have to turn in the first draft and the revised paper.)

The second time around, I regrade the paper and when the edits are complete, they get at least a 10 point increase. I’m not sure how much I want to give them an increase, because I’m sure that some “thinking” child will throw together an awful paper over a one hour time period and let me edit to my heart’s content, with the hope that I will point out all of his or her mistakes for him or her and thereby eliminate the need to self-edit.

So I’m thinking a ten point increase for edits, with an option for extra credit for the extremely hard worker.

I came across a blog somewhere with a pretty profound thought. He said, and I paraphrase,

–Children will learn what is needed for testing–

Yes, I think that all of us do this in areas that aren’t our passion. So I’m trying to teach to the reluctant writer, the student that doesn’t want to put pen to paper. And I’ve got to think of all the ways he is going to try and get out of it.

See, this is one of those issues that is different between co-op and home. At home, there is no easy way out. My kids do it my way, because I’m involved with every step of the process. At co-op, I’m having to learn how to be involved in as many steps as possible, without being there.

It’s tough, but it’s worth it.