Thursday, March 30, 2017

SoL Challenge Day #30

Subjective grading
gives me much anxiety.
I wait for complaints.

In addition to getting better at staggering due dates for my own grading sanity, I realized today that this foresight has other benefits.

I crumble a bit inside when students don't feel I've graded them fairly. I go through the rubric with them. I give feedback on drafts. We look at enough examples to understand the product without stifling their creativity. Their final grade is explained. Yet, it seems, with each assignment there are one or two students who don't feel they were graded fairly.

I handed back two larger writing assignments today. After watching one student crumble up his paper without reading the comments and another mutter anger under her breath, I felt entirely deflated.

So much time put into each assignment.

My willingness to discuss any grades after class was not taken up on, and I fought frustration with my students and myself the entire way home.

Tonight I will work through another rubric and try to eliminate as much potential for subjectivity as I can.

Tomorrow, I will try again.

6 comments:

  1. This is one of the hard bits. We try to make the rubric objective, but a certain amount of subjectivity creeps in. Do you have a teacher you can check in with when you are in doubt about your objectivity? I check in with my next door neighbor and find that just talking it through with her helps.

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  2. So hard. I am torn whenever I take the time to give feedback to students only to see them not even look at the comments.

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  3. I know that with my age group (7th-8th graders) I am amazed at how many kids will say, "But I finished it--why do I have a C?" despite the rubric. They are thinking of their effort--especially if they normally don't put out much effort--and not looking at the product itself. I've been doing more lately with having kids write in Google Docs and take comments from me that they then revise from before we ever talk about grading.

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  4. Grading can be such a challenge for this reason. I co-teach, so it can be difficult to grade without feeling anxiety over if we are grading the same! We check with each other to make sure we have the same criteria, even with the rubric.

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  5. Grading can be such a challenge for this reason. I co-teach, so it can be difficult to grade without feeling anxiety over if we are grading the same! We check with each other to make sure we have the same criteria, even with the rubric.

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  6. So much of writing is the process. I want to look for the small improvements, but we don't have enough time to write so much that we can focus on individual skills. Loving writing is my goal at 4th grade- if they can learn some skills too and learn to take feedback and make revisions, I call that a bonus. Keep fighting the good fight

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