I heard the words "alternative grading" for the very first time

[liberal_at_heart]

For the first time in three years I have hope that the school district will be more flexible now that he'll be trasitioning to high school next year. The school district just performed a three year re-evaluation to see where my son needed support services. The school pyschologist suggested that teachers who knew my son was struggling could evaluate his work based on participation or effort or something along those lines. She also suggested to the general education class teachers that homework needs to be simpler, shorter, and less complicated than the homework that goes out to the rest of the students. I think this was the first time in three years I have sighed a sigh of relief.

[patrice]

1. Progress, individual progress is a useful hallmark of learning. It doesn't have to be relative to

others. It can just be relative to an individual, i.e. a starting point of somekind is identified for that person, education/learning occurs, and as a result, change in that individual occurs, there is progress from whatever their starting point was to another step beyond, built upon, that starting point.

Progress is all you really need to see.

Progress is a good indicator of learning, because CHANGE, change in one kind of behavior or another as a result of some form of education, is an essential trait of learning and progress = change.

On edit: Excuse my perfunctory manners . . . Good! luck! to you and to your son.

[liberal_at_heart]

4. thank you

he has made great individual progress over the years. He just gets so frustrated when he can't get it. He wants so bad to get it, to understand. When he doesn't know an answer or he gets it wrong he feels bad. I just want him to be in an environment that is structured so that he can get it. My favorite class is his writing class. His teacher sends home a paper that has each paragraph blocked off and each paragraph has a writing prompt either a question or a statement that helps him figure out how to expand on what he is writing on. If you sit there with him and ask him questions and help him brainstorm he can write, but you tell him to write a page on such and such topic and that is all you give him to go on and he is lost. It is that kind of structure I would like to see in all of his classes. Unfortunately I don't see that in all of his classes. In fact writing is the only class where he really gets that kind of help.

[patrice]

5. Writing is a great skill! He should be quite proud. I believe that writing skills are maybe

disappearing, so he will have something special if he continues to develop his writing.

He could be a truth teller and we NEED some of those.

Listening and talking honestly with kids is also one of the very best things you can do. The world out there is getting pretty difficult and their social thing is harder than our own social experiences were at their age, so the respect that we demonstrate for young people by stopping our "important" activities and listening closely and having real and courageous conversations with them can be very powerful experiences for them. Keep listening. Keep on talking.

I was a pretty popular high school teacher in my time (I had 2 certifications English and Psychology and taught mostly seniors in high school, ran the high school newspaper and produced the literary magazine). I was tough and failed a bunch of kids, but almost all of them liked me anyway, because I weighted their participation in class discussions at 25% of their over-all grade and responded honestly to their questions as long as they were on topic.

My family, my sisters mostly, and I, have seen a lot of stuff going on with kids, our own and other people's, some of that didn't turn out well, some that looked pretty bad for a while turned out real well anyway. I know some of us have felt absolutely and completely and utterly teetotally blind while it all was going down, but people staying heart-close with one another anyway and never giving up is what gets everyone through.

[jenw2]

2. A term I've heard used to describe this is differential learning

I saw that in an article about how several local schools were making classes harder to keep ESL students from passing.

[patrice]

3. I haven't seen it around for a while, but you might google "authentic assessment" too. I like it

because it directs a teacher's methods toward what a given individual student can actually do, whatever their personal authentic skills and or talents or interests are, and education/learning content & activities for whatever subject is built out of those already existing interests/skills/aptitudes and proof of learning (progress/change) is established by making an actual record of what the student actually does (i.e. not just a grade). That record could be one or more of several things like photographs, recordings, stored samples, videos of activities, drawings/paintings . . . almost anything that captures the change that occurs from learning. Personally, I visualize that there could be CDs with material stored on them that shows the change in projects over time. The key would be that it should be activities that are motivating so that the student will enjoy returning to them again and again to apply new learnings and do it better.