Teaching History with Mrs. Byars

Like most teachers, I spend the first few weeks establishing class culture, routines, and procedures with my students. This is also when I try and give my students some lessons and activities around how I grade since I am one of the few teachers they will encounter on our campus doing Reflective Standards-Based Grading.  I don't go over the syllabus or rules the first few days but I used the Fast and Curious EduProtocol to help introduce those things to students and as situations or transitions came up I explained how things worked in my classroom and then we practiced them. This isn't groundbreaking stuff, each time a new transition or procedure was introduced I'd paused class, teach it, we'd try it, we'd try it again, and then we'd move on.  To teach students how I grade, I kept my learning objective for the week prominently displayed:  LO#1: I can explain in my own words the classroom procedures, expectations, grading policies, and classro...

When planning for a Standards-Based classroom you follow a clear series of steps : 1. Pick your priority standards and rewrite them in student-friendly learning objectives. 2. Unpack those standards to really understand what they are asking students to know and do. 3. Build rubrics or proficiency scales to help make the learning objective accessible for students and to create a clear understanding of how mastery will be measured. 4. Build your assessments using those rubrics. 5. Create your learning path from introducing the learning objective to assessing the standard that includes a lot of feedback and formative assessment. 6. Make a plan for intervention and support. One of the most daunting elements of a Standards-Based classroom is the idea that feedback needs to happen consistently for students to be able to improve on the learning objective. We know a grade on its own is not enough to help students learn from their mistakes or to understand where they need to impro...

I am a part of a Facebook Group for AP World History teachers that also has a shared Google Drive (that I actually currently manage). It is a collection of amazing resources and one of my favorite lessons that comes from the drive is called "They Thought The Earth Was Flat" by Bill Strickland. It engages students in the common story of Christopher Columbus being one of the few people in the 15th century to believe the earth was round. The students read and analyze a series of 'documents' that seem to support this myth and then shows them the Farnese Atlas which was created in the 2nd century. After a few more pieces of evidence start to poke holes in this longstanding story of Columbus the lesson asks students to consider how historians look for validity in sources and how historians do the work of figuring out our past. I love this lesson because it really introduces what historians do and how messy history can be. It gets students thinking and talking about ho...

It is worth mentioning here that standards and standardization are not always the same; the former refers to the quality that the demonstration of learning must exhibit, regardless of format, whereas the latter embeds the quality by making the demonstration of learning universal. - Tom Schimmer Sometimes when I talk to people about standards-based classrooms the push back I receive is this fear that by basing grading and assessment on standards, we are forcing one-size fits all educational experiences on our students. This could not be further from the truth. A cornerstone of standards-based learning and grading is that the student is assessed on their skills and knowledge, not the individual projects or tasks completed or graded. As a teacher, this has changed the way I plan to allow students more choice on how they present or prove they have met the standards. No longer am I creating complex tasks full of points for neatness and execution instead, I am able to offer my stude...

If you've read my blog before, you know I mostly write about my experiences trying to reform grading practices in my traditional world history classroom in order to help increase equity and student motivation. Over the past few years, I have tried different formats of Standards-Based or Standards-Referenced learning and grading all within the limitations of a traditional online grade book and strict reporting windows. When I first started the grade reform journey I did not know I would end up going standards-based and what I eventually settled on was something called Reflective Standards-Based Grading . In this type of grading, you work towards learning objectives and students self-assess on those learning objectives with a clear rubric for each standard. They must provide evidence of mastery when they self assess which is typically classwork, quizzes, tests, essays, or projects. They turn this in for summative assessment and are given feedback if they do not achieve mastery ...

Over the past several years I have read a lot of books and articles on grading practices and while I have written a lot about what I am doing in my classroom I feel the need to share some of the books that inspired me and still help me on the path to more equitable grading practices that encourage learning over points. So today, here are three books that helped me establish my grading practices.  Rethinking Grading by Cathy Vatterott  This book remains one of my favorites. It is published by ASCD which is an organization that has tons of resources on grading practices and assessment. Vatterott does an incredible job of addressing the culture, why, and how of grading practices and has the research and examples to back her claims. This book does an excellent job of explaining how going standards-based means you don't just shift how you grade, you also have to shift how you teach.  "Standards-based grading is not just about changing grading—...

Recently, I have had some conversations online about grading practices where my use of grades and rubrics has been challenged. Most often my own defense of the letter grade or 4 point scale is often shot down by just one study: Ruth Butlers 1998 study on intrinsic motivation. This is the study that shows that feedback without a grade, just feedback alone, is the most beneficial and impactful for student learned. Now it is important to note that I absolutely love this study. But this study, like most educational research studies, looks in isolation at one component of teaching and does not take into consideration everything else. One of the big red flags with this study is that it looks at the impact of grades, grades with comments, and comments alone have on student motivation "when no further evaluation was anticipated." It is not looking at grades and comments in a cycle of inquiry or as part of the process of the feedback loop, it is not looking at formative ass...

I realized today that I have written a lot about grading practices. So here is a post that links to every blog I have written on grading practices in one place. I will try and keep this updated as I write and reflect more on this process. My Most Recent Posts  Click Here to Read Click Here to Read  Click Here to Read.  Click Here To Read. Some Posts To Get You Thinking About Grade Reform  https://mrsbyars.blogspot.com/2018/11/6-articles-to-get-you-thinking-about.html https://mrsbyars.blogspot.com/2018/12/thoughts-on-grade-reform-what-does.html My 5 Step Guide on How I Approach Standards-Based Grading  https://mrsbyars.blogspot.com/2018/07/where-to-start-with-standards-based.html https://mrsbyars.blogspot.com/2018/07/where-to-start-with-standards-based_11.html https://mrsbyars.blogspot.com/2018/07/where-to-start-with-standards-based_12.html https://mrsbyars.blogspot.com/2018/06/standards-based-grading-step-5-sto...

I decided to get a little too honest with the title of this post. I had every intention of starting this semester on the right foot, never staying late, spending time working on hobbies and things I love, and then last Monday hit and I felt like there was no way I would ever get through my to-do list. I stayed late almost every day and never really made it through what I needed to as new concerns and issues pilled up. By Friday, I was thinking that every goal I set for myself this semester was just an out of reach dream, how had I forgotten how demanding and taxing teaching is? How did I forget all the little stuff that pops up each day that has to be handled? I was tired. I was frustrated. I felt like a failure. And the truth was I had failed. I had failed at planning my downtime and so I often found myself spending too much time trying to decide which task to tackle that by the time I reached a decision my time was already gone. I was wasting minutes trying to decide "Shoul...

How do you approach a skill that you will work on all semester? How do you take a Standards-Based Grading approach to skills while still allowing for feedback, formative assessments, and without going insane from the workload or record keeping it creates for you as a teacher? The truth is: you have some options. As a social studies teacher, I am responsible for teaching a boatload of skills. Maybe not as many as an ELA teacher but when you have content standards and literacy standards combined, it can feel very daunting and overwhelming to take an SBG approach and often it can feel like something will fall through the cracks. First of all, there is a difference between what you teach and what you assess. You can probably teach it all, but where do you most need to focus your time and energy for assessing and grading? Second, something will probably fall through the cracks so wouldn't it be better for you to make a decision on what? Even Marzano Institute, the education r...