Teaching History with Mrs. Byars

This summer I am experimenting with reflective grading practices in my World History summer school class. It felt necessary to find a new approach to grading after months of reading and research and countless moments in my classroom where traditional grading systems just weren't cutting it. I was fed up with "how many points is this worth?" or "how many points do I need on this to just pass the class?" Many students weren't trying to learn, they often weren't trying to improve or achieve an academic goal, they were playing a game of points. My first week of reflective grading still feels like a monumental success, students understand the process, students are listening to feedback and trying again on their work, and most students when asked how the process was going for them responded positively. But a few students raised some excellent concerns in the first week that I'd like to share. 1) The 4 point rubric and the traditional online gra...

I am one week into teaching a four-week long summer school course that I am grading using only students reflections on the learning objectives and right now my mind is racing. I started writing about why I decided to go "grade-less" last week and in five short days of summer school World History, I have a lot of thoughts and emotions to sort through. Everything is kind of messy, but the good kind, the kind that feels like progress. Here is a brief update on a few of my thoughts so far. 1) OMG I love Station Rotation Dear Catlin Tucker , Thank you. Your blogs and tweets about Station Rotation in secondary school inspired me to try it and I get it now. It is the best way to find time to meet with students, to host interventions, to differentiate instruction, and to keep students engaged by keeping class moving with a variety of activities and assignments. This model of teaching allowed me to meet with students one-on-one in a way that was effective and meaningful.  ...

It's Friday morning of my first week of summer and I am getting things together to take back to campus because I start summer school on Monday. I love summer school. Four short weeks of accelerated teaching, a crash course of content with students who all have a reason to be there, summer school is full of this energy and drive you don't get in the normal year. I also love summer because it is the perfect place to try something new. This summer, I am changing my grading practices. I am changing my grading practices because I am frustrated by how often students copy and cheat, I am frustrated by how defeated students become from a zero, I am frustrated by the question "how many points do I need on this assignment to...?", I am frustrated that compliance is more important than learning, I am frustrated that the traditional system offers little room for growth mindset, I am frustrated that my traditional grading practices don't focus on learning at all. So, I ...

Over the past few weeks my World History students have been hard at work on research projects in class class, it was a project I had designed with concepts like Genius Hour and 20% Time in mind but I also knew that I was too far behind in the year to allow my students to just study anything they wanted as both those concepts promote. So I took the things I love about Genius Hour and I applied them to a content specific research project:  Students would reflect daily on their work.  Students would have choice on what they researched (as long as it fell into the realm of World War II). Students would work on this only in class and would get ample time devoted to this task alone.  Students would have total choice in the final product they created from their research. Even knowing that I was limiting their area of study to anything World War II was daunting, part of me worried there wasn't enough buy in, that students would not be able to find something they...

Why I Picked up the Book How do you grade? What is the purpose of grades? And what do grades actually mean? These are questions that plague me as I stare at stacks of work to grade and wonder if the grades I give truly serve me students the way I want them to. I've already read on the subject but still had more questions so I decided to focus my next reading on a book about Standards-Based Grading.  The Review Rethinking Assessment by Cathy Vatterott  clearly explains what standards based grading is, how it can help our students and change our classrooms, and how to practically implement both on the classroom level and school wide. Throughout this book, she raised the exact questions I have been facing in my classroom and made clear and solid arguments for how adopting a Standards Based Grading practice could address those issues.  The most compelling case made in this book is that we need to move away from compliance only classrooms. That by teaching comp...

When I started this year a colleague of mine was obsessed with #BreakoutEdu and she kept building these incredibly intricate lessons and showing pictures of students highly engaged in their work. During first semester, I had dipped my toe in the water by making a scavenger hunt that had some locked google forms that students had to open to get the next clue but they were mostly review questions and did not have the same elements of a true breakout.  I knew I wanted to do something big to bring up morale and energy when students returned from Spring Break and I also wanted a lesson that was a mix of review and new information, to get students back into World War II after a week away. So I created by first Breakout lesson and it was amazing.  What is BreakoutEdu? Well, it's kind of like an escape room for your classroom but instead of having students locked in a room and trying to break out of it, they are trying to break into a series of bags and boxes that each h...

Why I Picked Up This Book:  It is only my third year teaching and being fresh out of a credential program and having two-years of BTSA/Induction you would think that I would be relatively confident in my grading methods. When I taught at a Middle School I thought the issue with grades was "the system" and not me. Students would move onto the next year even if they failed and I thought this was the problem that made grades seem so irrelevant in my classroom. Then I moved to a high school and I truly wanted to believe that things would be different because students now had real consequence if they failed but I found the same issues and concerns in my high school classrooms and it got me thinking about the purpose of grades and how they can best serve our students. It is a hard conversation to have, and a hard one to inspire in others because grading is such a personal part of how a teacher runs their classroom. So I was incredibly grateful when a colleague of mine c...