I had a middle school PE teacher chat with me for awhile when all was said and done. She said that during the break, she'd seen her supe out in the hallway. The supe asked her how the workshop was going. The teacher replied, "My brain is really fighting with itself. One half completely agrees with everything she says and the other half thinks she's crazy." (Little does she know, eh?) I had a couple of other participants make similar comments. In other words, it is so clear to them that these practices are the right thing to do, but to let go of including behaviors in grading (e.g. not giving zeros for plagiarism and making kids do the work instead) feels just beyond reach. They see the path to walk but aren't sure they have the strength to make the journey.
I spent about 30 minutes talking about motivation---and in particular, achievement goal theory. We as educators often tell students that we value their learning more than their grades---but do we really mean it? I showed them the graphic below and we talked about the idea that while we ostensibly want a "mastery approach" to classroom learning, which of these other orientations did students demonstrate?

I was truly excited to see so many people there. However, the drawback was that I didn't get to have the kind of interactive session I really wanted. Sixty people crammed into a room is not conducive for a Four Corners activity or other movement. Think-Pair-Share gets redundant in a hurry. Poll Everywhere was very well received, but as I'd anticipated, not all adults are comfortable with text messaging (although all thought this would be awesome for the classroom---and parent nights). I quickly ran out of handouts (sponsors had told me to plan for no more than 50---and I thought that even that was darned ambitious), but was so glad that I had my wiki set up so that people knew where they could get everything later. People were darned hungry for information on grading. Who knew?
4 comments:
WE did! :D
Maybe I need to make this a road show and do some "conslutting."
That's exciting to hear about, SG. And the time is right for consulting on this subject. O'Connor, Guskey, Marzano, Wiggins, and Stiggins broke trail for us. Now it's time to move out. The conversation is on. In a decade it will be old news. (But, thankfully, a good practice, a common practice.)
You rock. Sounds great.
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