I was lying in bed not sleeping at 2AM or so (as one does), and had one of those ideas that I just had to use in class today (again, as one does: why is this getting more and more normal for me?). It worked so well I had to blog about it.

When I introduced the 0-4 "Levels of Understanding" to my students, some of them asked me to show some examples of the difference between the levels, and of course I didn't have any handy. I told the students we'd come up with them as we went along, and tried to forget about it. That obviously didn't work...
So this morning I threw together my best stab at an example of 1-4 for a Geometry construction  by working one out in four different ways. Take a look and see what you think.

I ​put 'em up on 4 walls, and had the kids circulate and "grade" each. I didn't tell them that there was one of each score, and I didn't give them any more pointers than to use the posters in the room (4 claims and levels of understanding).

​Cool:
-kids were referring to the posters, going up and reading more closely; signs they were thinking about it
-kids were discussing what proficient meant
-I think we started to get to the difference between a drawing and a construction.
-Could've done electronically, but it was worth 4 sheets of paper to see the kids moving around the room, discussing, walking up to check the posters.

What the numbers say:
I collected their post-it votes and (why the hell not?) recorded their responses and made a chart.

Take-aways:

• Except for the 1 guy that didn't like my best effort, everyone who disagreed with my assessment was nicer than me. (millennials? OMG I'm old enough to say that!)
• A 4 is pretty obvious.
• The inability to see what makes a 1 vs a 2 led to a great discussion of focusing on the learning target and the difference between drawing and construction.
• 3 vs 4 was also helpful, especially leading to the idea that trying an alternate method to confirm results might be a good way to make that difference.
• Having the discussion really focused our attention on the learning target: were we doing what it said? Just checking that out often settled any differences of opinion. 

I didn't have time to prepare something like this for my two sections of precal later in the day, but we got a little discussion in, and I had them start to try to formulate 1-4 responses for a question. Definitely doing this next week with them.

Man, this feels good. I had the energy today that comes with going into a 5 day weekend, and I got to translate that into something that felt really productive. The students' notions of what a math class is and how it is supposed to work are being challenged, and they are challenging me about how I assess, and ultimately grade. Conversation started! Let's keep it going.

How this all translates to grades
I have to give a percentage grade, there’s no way around it at my school. This is sort of the hardest part for me. My last school was an IB school, so I used historical data from IB exams to set up my system there. It’s a much more forgiving system, in terms of percentages, than the classic American system where 60% is the minimum passing grade. I’ve done a lot of blog reading about this, and I think I’ve got something I can work with:

Grading Scale (what I put in the grading system)
0=0%
1=50%
2=70%
3=85%
4=100%

Weighting
10%: Practice work (includes homework, classwork, etc, and is pretty exclusively completion grades)
65%: Summative assessments
20%: Cumulative exams
5%: Awesomeness
Awesomeness, you ask? Yeah, this is something I threw in to try to keep kids on their toes.

• It’s not extra credit - I expect all of my students to show some evidence of awesomeness.
• It’s intentionally vague - I don’t know how they’re going to be awesome, so they will have to come up with what this looks like, and convince me, on their own.
• It’s probably different for everyone - Are you a great artist? Love writing poetry? Like tinkering or building? Spend all of your free time on the computer? OK, do something awesome for math class with that.

This might be a complete failure, but I’m curious to see how it comes out, and I think keeping it at 5% keeps the stakes low.
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So, by the time parents come in for back to school night on Tuesday and hear about this, I’ll have presented it to all of my students as well. I expect some pushback, but I’ve thought about this for a long time now, and I’m feeling confident and ready to support my position clearly. Wish me luck! And, as always, let me know what you think.

This past summer, I was invited to participate in a Math Assessment Workshop for AERO (American Education Reaches Out), sponsored by the U.S. State department. For anyone who doesn't know what AERO is (I didn't really), it's basically Common Core for international schools; the goal is to create "a framework for curriculum consistency across grades K-12 and for stability of curriculum in overseas schools, which typically have a high rate of teacher turnover." The math standards are essentially the same as Common Core (in fact, I think they're the precursor to CC, but I'm not solid on my history there). The workshop was led by Erma Anderson (@ermaander), an impressive individual with a wealth of knowledge who I'm glad to have met and been able to work with.

We were a small group of 8 teachers from schools around the world, and from all different age groups (2 K-5, 3 MS, 3 HS). The rest of the group had participated in workshops before for the MSIS (Math Specialist in International Schools) program run by AERO; I was sort of an outsider who slipped in because my wife is doing MSIS, but now I want more!

Now, I thought I was pretty up-to-date on SBA in the math community (see the previous post for my history), but this workshop turned me on to a new framework I'd never used, read about, or seen before: the four "Claims for the Mathematics Summative Assessment" from the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium. The purposes of the workshop were to 

1. Try to write, or adapt, some "good" problems to assess these aims
2. Try to write a general rubric, which turned into more of a student profile, based on these claims.

We started the week writing a few assessment problems in grade-level groups, then critiquing them all together. I found this process challenging in a good way - frustrated by things I hadn't thought about, questioning my assumptions, occasionally questioning why we even teach this stuff anyway, etc. It made us really examine our goals in assessing our students, and recognize some inadequacies in many of the assessments we currently use. 

After getting our feet wet with this process, we turned to creating a student profile based on the four claims. We started out calling this a "rubric", which led to a lot of confusion about the purpose of the document. Once we changed our focus to creating a profile, we started coming together towards a final product. This process took two days, but we felt pretty good about having created a document that we all felt comfortable applying K-12

​After this, we got back to writing and critiquing assessments. The high school group borrowed heavily from Illustrative Mathematics problems, and the following are three problems we felt pretty good about. 

If anyone reading this is interested in checking out any of the K-8 problems, contact me.

Overall, it was energizing to be part of this group of math teachers who were focused and interested in what they were doing. I hope we can keep in touch through #AEROmaththinktank on Twitter.
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Processing...
Because of my unfamiliarity with the claims, I needed to do some independent study and research to help get my head around this way of approaching assessment. Here are two big ideas I'm going to try to use in assessment this year (but this will take some time, and I've got a lot of newness to deal with this year).

1. The four claims are the boss:
These are the things we are always assessing in math assessments, regardless of the specific learning target or subject matter. They should be considered whenever we are designing assessments. Part of Erma's instruction included a link between the four claims and the standards for mathematical practice (SMP); I'm much more familiar and comfortable with the SMP, so I found this helpful. The mess below is me visualizing this (and playing with MS OneNote on a new touchscreen computer).

2. Clusters are learning targets
I spent my first five years trying to write learning targets based on specific standards. Anyone who's done this knows how muddled it can get. Erma blew my mind with the idea of using the Common Core clusters as larger learning targets for assessment's sake. This is fitting in with the idea of a SBA "skills list", which I haven't used before, and the following is the beginnings of my attempt to do this for my geometry class this year. I'm using New Visions' curriculum as a jumping off point here.

Ok, I'm stopping there because the first day of work at my new school is tomorrow! Just had to get some of this down and out of my head before getting into work.