Unleashing Readers

Teaching Tuesday: Random Thoughts From a Teacher Circulating During Testing

May 1, 2018May 1, 2018 by Kellee

Approximately 480 minutes of my life over the last couple of weeks has been circulating a room while students took their standardized tests. I not only accumulated approximately 20,000 steps, I had many random thoughts. Here are some of them:

Exercise

Does circulating a room in a regular circle or a zig-zag pattern give more steps in one lap? (Zig-zag.)
What ways could I get extra exercise while circulating and not being distracting?
- Answers: Toe raises/calf raises, squats, glut squeezes, wall sit, standing crunches, seated leg raises, standing leg curl, lunges, and I’m sure there are more!
Do I get more steps on testing days than on normal days now that we have Lanschool to monitor computers instead of having to circulate our rooms as much? (Yes.)

Technology

Since the world is so technologically embedded, is testing students on a computer the best even though some studies have found that reading paper-based texts is still more efficient?
Are these studies ignoring the future? Isn’t it counter productive to focus on how the past may have been better when the world is moving in a forward, not a backwards, direction?
Instead of saying that one-on-one or technology isn’t as good as ____, couldn’t we instead just teach students how to use new tools as well as we were taught to use the old? For example, there are many complaints about kids not knowing how to take notes; why don’t we teach them? Or kids not knowing how to research; why don’t we teach them? We were taught to do those things. Just because kids are technology natives doesn’t mean they don’t need to be taught the best ways to use the tools.

Change

So many adults say things about “kids these days,” but weren’t we “kids these days” at some point? Doesn’t every generation complain about the changes in the next generation?
Isn’t change what makes the world get better?
Just because things are done differently doesn’t mean they are bad.
For example, the SAT is now more text-based instead of random vocabulary and analogies–that is pretty awesome! And I wish it was like that when I took it.
Some change isn’t necessary though. Was our education system so bad when I went through it? The push for “rigor” is so intense now pushing kids into AP classes as early as 8th grade, but I feel like that takes away the growing up part and doesn’t give kids the foundation needed to be successful.
And what happened to kids having the chance to be kids?!

Disney

The Little Mermaid came out when I was 7 which was 29 years ago. Hundred and One Dalmations came out about 28 years before The Little Mermaid, so how old 101 Dalmations seemed to me is how old The Little Mermaid seems to them.
Frozen came out when these kids were 7. Elsa and Anna are their Ariel. These girls had princesses that were pretty kick butt to look up to their whole life while Ariel changed EVERYTHING about her for a man.
Or it could be looked at as Ariel had a dream and wouldn’t give up until she attained it and wouldn’t let others tell her she couldn’t do it.
Belle changed Disney princesses though. Except for Pocahontas, ever since Beauty and the Beast, the princesses are more than just someone looking for a man.
Was the book that Belle was reading during the song “Belle” her own story and the song writers were putting in dramatic irony for the audience?

Science and Pop Culture

If we now know that dinosaurs are more related to birds than reptiles and it is pretty common-scientific knowledge, why hasn’t the look of dinosaurs in pop culture changed? For example, a new Jurassic Park is coming out, but the dinosaurs still look like how we thought they looked before.
Though I do know that it takes a very long time for pop culture to catch up with science. For example, Curious George is still called a monkey even though in the 1940s or so the distinction between apes and monkeys were found, and scientifically I think everyone would agree that he is an ape.
Monkeys and apes are different animals and people can just not figure out the difference. We don’t get pachyderms or canines or felines or other groups of animals confused, why do we get primates confused?
But I wish big companies and movies wouldn’t help spread the ignorance. For example, Coca-Cola should be ashamed of themselves for spreading the ignorance that penguins and polar bears live in the same area. (P.S. They don’t! Not even the same hemisphere!)
This must be how Neil Degrasse Tyson feels about, well, everything.

What random thoughts do you have while monitoring testing (or any other time)?

It’s Monday! What Are You Reading? #IMWAYR 4/30/18

April 30, 2018April 30, 2018 by Kellee

It’s Monday! What Are You Reading? From Picture Books to YA!

It’s Monday! What are you Reading? is a meme started by Sheila at Book Journeys and now hosted by Kathryn at The Book Date. It is a great way to recap what you read and/or reviewed the previous week and to plan out your reading and reviews for the upcoming week. It’s also a great chance to see what others are reading right now…you just might discover the next “must-read” book!

Kellee and Jen, of Teach Mentor Texts, decided to give It’s Monday! What Are You Reading? a kidlit focus. If you read and review books in children’s literature – picture books, chapter books, middle grade novels, young adult novels, anything in the world of kidlit – join us! We love this meme and think you will, too.

We encourage everyone who participates to support the blogging community by visiting at least three of the other book bloggers that link up and leave comments for them.

Last Week’s Posts

Tuesday: Grading is Complicated: Ruminations of an English Teacher Educator

Wednesday: Blog Tour with Review: The Reckless Rescue (The Explorers #2) by Adrienne Kress

Thursday: It’s a Puppy’s Life from National Geographic

Friday: Teaching Guide with Discussion Questions and Activities for Polly Diamond and the Magic Book by Alice Kuipers

Sunday: Author Guest Post!: “What Kinds of Storybook Characters Teach the Best Lessons” by Patty Costello, Author of Catalina and the King’s Wall

**Click on any picture/link to view the post**

Last Week’s Journeys

Kellee

Hello, everyone! Sunday, April 29th is my husband’s birthday, so even though I originally planned on getting this post written, we just got home, and it is bedtime! I will catch everyone up next week 🙂

Ricki

Apparently, it’s not a good week for us. I was falling asleep in bed and realized I didn’t write this post! Ha!

My son and I read the Sticky Facts books. There are facts below each picture, and they are delightful to read. I’ll be reviewing these later in the week.

I REREAD The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas for the fifth time. My students are broken into three groups tomorrow. Twelve students are in each group, and they are discussing this book, Dear Martin, and All American Boys. I am excited to talk within the groups and across the groups.

Llama Llama Loves to Read is a great addition to the Anna Dewdney series. Published posthumously, this book features Reed Duncan as the second author. Duncan is her longtime partner, and he seeks to honor the work she left behind in various stages. I think that Dewdney would be proud of the way this one turned out. It is beautifully done.

My son and I are loving the We Both Read series. My Day by Sindy McKay is one of several books in this series that we’ve read together. For those of you who are unfamiliar with the series, the left page is the parent page (with more words) and the right page is the child page (with simpler words). In this book, there is just one word on the child page. In the more advanced book that we read earlier in the week, the parent page bolds new words, and the child page includes that word (among others). I try to avoid early readers, but my son really likes this one, so we have been taking them out of the library quite often.

This Week’s Expeditions

Ricki

I am loving Alone Together by Sarah J. Donovan. She is well-known and well-loved in the blogger world, and this book shows her deep knowledge of adolescence.

Upcoming Week’s Posts

Tuesday: Teaching Tuesday: Random Thoughts From a Teacher Circulating During Testing

Wednesday: Blog Tour with Review!: Don’t Ask a Dinosaur by Deborah Bruss & Matt Forrest Esenwine

Thursday: Sticky Facts series from Workman Press

Friday: 10 Year Anniversary Celebration of The Underneath by Kathi Appelt with an Interview with the Author, Book Trailer, and Giveaway!

Sunday: Author Guest Post!: “Defeat Your Fear of Writing” by Jan Eldredge, Author of Evangeline of the Bayou

So, what are you reading?

Link up below and go check out what everyone else is reading. Please support other bloggers by viewing and commenting on at least 3 other blogs. If you tweet about your Monday post, tag the tweet with #IMWAYR!

and

Author Guest Post!: “What Kinds of Storybook Characters Teach the Best Lessons” by Patty Costello, Author of Catalina and the Kind’s Wall

April 29, 2018 by Kellee

“What Kinds of Storybook Characters Teach the Best Lessons?”

Do you want to teach your students prosocial behaviors? What are good ways to teach children about sharing, caring, helping, honesty, fairness, and responsibility? One popular way is through storybooks, which have been a part of children’s lives and schooling for hundreds of years. Storybooks entertain, but they can also teach important life and moral lessons. But what are the best kind of characters in storybooks to teach children prosocial behavior? Does one type of character work better than another? Many stories for young children often contain animal characters who are anthropomorphized: they take on human characteristics and can talk, walk, eat, and get into all sorts of mischief too. A group of researchers at the Jackman Institute of Child Study in Toronto found that in a review of over 1000 children’s books, more than half the books featured animals, and only 2% were realistic depictions of the animals; in other words, 98% of the animals in over half of picture books feature anthropomorphized animals. People on all sides of the picture book equation – teachers, students, parents, authors, and illustrators – all have assumed that children are naturally attracted to animals and therefore in using anthropomorphized animals, a story may be more enchanting and its lessons more accessible to children’s young minds. And the bigger assumption is that children may be more likely to act in agreement with the moral of the anthropomorphized animal story.

But is this true? These same researchers – Nicole Larsen, Kang Lee and Patricia Ganea – realized in 2017 that no direct psychological or child development study had ever asked this question – are anthropomorphized animals better at promoting prosocial behavior in children compared to a book featuring human characters? The researchers realized that it was unclear as to whether children can learn prosocial moral lessons from stories with anthropomorphized animal characters and then act accordingly.

The researchers designed a study to help answer this very question: Can children learn prosocial moral lessons from stories with anthropomorphized animal characters? Do stories with anthropomorphized animal characters work better than stories with human characters at teaching kids lessons?

How did they study this? They first picked a book called Little Racoon Learns to Share by Mary Pacard. The book has a sharing theme and a moral lesson – that sharing makes you feel good. The story features anthropomorphized animals as the main characters. The researchers took the book and used Photoshop to create the same book, only with human characters instead.

All children in the study (males and females ages 4 – 6) had a vocabulary test first to make sure that they were all at a similar language ability level. Next, the children were allowed to choose 10 of their favorite stickers from a huge pile of stickers. They were then told that there was a child their same age that could not be there that day and therefore would not get any stickers. The children were told that they could share some of their stickers with this (imaginary) child by putting them into an envelope when no one would be looking. This was the pre-test or baseline measure to get a sense of their sharing level before they heard the book about sharing.

Next, students were divided into three groups of 32 children each. The first group heard the sharing story with the human characters. The second group heard the same story, but with the original animal characters. The third group, the control group, heard a story about seeds. The children in the control condition were also asked to choose between reading either a book about human characters or a book about animal characters. This question was asked to determine whether children would prefer to read the animal book or the human book when given a choice. If the argument that using anthropomorphized animal characters makes a story more captivating to young children is correct, then children should be more likely to choose the book about animal characters. I’ll cut to the chase on this one – the children in this control group picked each book equally – there was not a clear preference for the animal book over the human book.

After the three groups heard the book, the same sticker sharing task was given with new stickers (post-test). The researchers measured the differences in sticker donation before and after the story reading. Again, the researchers were wondering whether reading storybooks with a sharing theme could significantly increase children’s generous giving relative to reading the control story about seeds. More importantly, they examined whether the story in the animal condition with anthropomorphized animal characters and the story in the human condition with real human characters would have differential effects in promoting generosity in young children, that is, would the children share more stickers after hearing the sharing story with animals or humans, or would it even matter?

What happened? I bet you are very curious by now! Reading a book about sharing had an immediate effect on children’s sharing behavior: Children who read the book with human characters became more generous with how many stickers they donated to the fictional child. In contrast, there was no difference in generosity between children who read the book with anthropomorphized animal characters and the control book; both groups decreased how many stickers they gave.

Here is the chart I adopted from the study:

Condition	Before the book: How many stickers did they donate?	After hearing the book: How many stickers did they donate?
Human characters	2.03 stickers	3 stickers ↑
Animals characters	2.31 stickers	1.7 stickers ↓
Control condition – book about seeds	2.14 stickers	2 stickers ↓

Why did the researchers think this happened? Maybe children see anthropomorphic characters more as animals than humans. Maybe they are not able to interpret the anthropomorphic characters as being similar to themselves, and as a result, the lesson in the story is not absorbed. This does not mean that children should never hear stories with animal characters, but it’s important to keep this in mind.

Future research future should look at whether anthropomorphism in books has the same effect on older children as on younger children as this study was done on 4 – 6-year olds.

It’s fun (at least for me as a cognitive neuroscientist!) to think about storybooks from an academic perspective – maybe the assumptions we hold are not true – studying these assumptions in a systematic way can provide real answers and guidance for future generations of teachers and parents.

This post was adopted from the following article should you like to read it yourself: Larsen, N.E., Lee, K., Ganea, P.A. (2017). Do storybooks with anthropomorphized animal characters promote prosocial behaviors in young children? Developmental Science, pp. 1-9.

About the Author: Patty lives in Boise, Idaho with her husband, a zany awesome toddler, a dog named Pippa, and a dog named Spencer. She grew up in the Twin Cities and is a Minnesotan at heart (you betcha!). She has a BS in Psychology from the University of St Thomas and a PhD in Neuroscience from the University of Minnesota. She currently works in higher education. Her first book, Catalina and the King’s Wall, released May 5th, 2018 from Eifrig Publishing. At all hours of the day (and night) she can be found standing at her desk, helping her university run smoothly and working on her next children’s book. For fun, she likes to trail run, mountain bike, cross country ski, and hike. She is also a voracious volunteer for various local organizations.

Catalina and the King’s Wall
Author: Patty Costello
Illustrator: Diana Cojocaru
Expected publication: May 5th, 2018 by Eifrig Publishing

About Catalina and the King’s Wall: When Catalina overhears the king planning to build a wall, she fears her family won’t ever be able to visit. Catalina tricks the king into building walls that droop, drip, swirl, and swoosh away. But now the king demands an impenetrable wall. Luckily, Catalina has the perfect ingredients to bake up a family reunion! Through beautiful illustrations and enjoyable prose, kids learn how to stand by their convictions of inclusivity and kindness even when powerful people tell them not to.

Thank you, Patty, for a look at this study and for sharing your book!

Teaching Guide with Activities and Discussion Questions for Polly Diamond and the Magic Book by Alice Kuipers

January 28, 2021April 27, 2018 by Kellee

Polly Diamond and the Magic Book
Author: Alice Kuipers
Illustrator: Diana Toledano
Expected Publication May 1st, 2018 by Chronicle

Summary: Polly loves words. And she loves writing stories. So when a magic book appears on her doorstep that can make everything she writes happen in real life, Polly is certain all of her dreams are about to come true. But she soon learns that what you write and what you mean are not always the same thing! Funny and touching, this new chapter book series will entertain readers and inspire budding writers.

Teachers’ Tools for Navigation: Activities for Polly Diamond include:

Color Poem

On page one, Polly says that her teacher said her color poem was fantastic.

Have your students use the Read. Write. Think. template to create their own color poem.

Template

Finish her perfect house story

On page 3, Polly is interrupted while writing her perfect house story.

Finish her story with what your perfect house would include.

Wishes

When Polly realizes her book is magical, she thinks of many things she can wish for such as a cell phone, not frizzy hair, more books, a flat screen TV, and world peace.

Using a brainstorming graphic organizer, have your students think of all the things they wish for.

After brainstorming all of their wishes, have them circle your top three.

Using the five-paragraph format for informative essays, have students write explaining their three wishes.

Measuring

For Polly’s grandmother’s recipe for pancakes called for a cup of flour and a cup of milk. Many times, when baking, you do not have what you need to make the recipe, and not just ingredients—you may not have the right measuring cup.

Bring in one cup measuring cups along with 1/4, 1/3, 1/2, 3/4, tablespoon, and teaspoon measuring cups/spoons. Break students into groups and give each group one of each measuring cup/spoon as well as something to measure (water, rice, flour), and have them answering the following questions:

If you only had 1/4 cup, how could you get one cup of flour?
If you only had 1/3 cup, how could you get one cup of flour?
If you only had 1/2 cup, how could you get one cup of flour?
If you only had 3/4 cup, how could you get one cup of flour?
If you only had a tablespoon, how could you get one cup of flour?
If you only had a teaspoon, how could you get one cup of flour?

Favorite words

Polly has a lot of favorite words: words with double letters like doozy and mutli-meaning words like basil.

Have students make a list of three words that they really like.

For each word, they should define it and also explain why they like the word.

When finished, students should do a word meet and greet. Using clock buddies or some other buddy system, have students meet with other students in the classroom and learn about their favorite words. They should add the favorite words they learn about to their list.

Paint names

On page 29, Polly makes up names for paint that describes the color such as muddy pond, lunch bag, and baboon butt.

First, have students look at the colors Polly described on page 29 and find the corresponding color in either a crayon box or a color exploration site online.

Then, have students create color names using imagery. Either have them use the color exploration site online or the colors from Microsoft Word.

Affixes

Show students how there are different word parts (affixes) that can be put together to make new words. They are like puzzle pieces! Share with them the different types of word parts (prefix, suffix, root, and base) and how they fit together.

On page 56, Polly explains how adding un- to the beginning of a word gives it an opposite meaning. The word she uses as an example is unobservant. Share with your students that un- is a prefix that means NOT which does make a word the opposite. Have student brainstorm a list of words with un- at the beginning and define them using NOT as the definition for un.

Extension: dis-, il-, im-, in-, and ir- also mean NOT. Students can also explore words with these
prefixes.

Extension: On page 57, Polly also talks about adding –fully to the end a word to make it bigger,
but it does more than that. Share with your students that –fully is actually a combination of ful, a root word that means full of, and –ly, a suffix that turns an adjective to an adverb, so her example of sorrowfully means full of sorrow (adv).

After showing students how words break apart and how affixes help with word meanings, give students words with un- and –ful (or any other affix you taught) and have them mark the different word parts and define the word.

Coloring Sheets

Coloring sheets can also be downloaded from Chonricle’s website here.

See the Teaching Guide Created by Me (Kellee) for even more activities!

You can also access the teaching guide through Chronicle’s website here.

Recommended For:

It’s a Puppy’s Life by Seth Casteel

April 26, 2018 by Ricki

It’s a Puppy’s Life
Author: Seth Casteel
Published March 20, 2018 by National Geographic Society

Summary: Have you ever wanted to know what goes on in the life of one of nature’s most beloved animals–the puppy? Follow along in this picture book featuring the photography of Seth Casteel.

Follow several puppies as they play, go for walks, eat, sleep, and romp about.

My Review: Who doesn’t love puppies? I don’t have a dog right now, and this made me want to take a trip to the pet store! Seth Casteel does a phenomenal job capturing the spirit of these energetic pups. I enjoyed looking at the different angles that he used. Further, I loved the key at the end of the book that distinguished between the breeds. This is a charming book that kids will love.

Teachers’ Tools for Navigation: This book inspired me to want to take photographs! Teachers might use this at the start of a photography unit. They can examine the angles of the photographs and talk about how the author captured such incredible images.

Discussion Questions: Which puppy is your favorite? How does the author capture the spirit of the puppies? How does he organize the book?

We Flagged:

Read This If You Love: Dogs; Photography

Recommended For:

**Thank you to Media Masters for providing copies for review!!**

Blog Tour with Review!: The Reckless Rescue (The Explorers #2) by Adrienne Kress

February 10, 2019April 25, 2018 by Kellee

The Reckless Rescue (The Explorers #2)
Author: Adrienne Kress
Published April 24th, 2018 by Delacorte Books for Young Readers

Summary: More mystery, more bravery, more danger, and one amazingly reckless rescue await in the second book in the Explorers series! The perfect read for fans of The Name of This Book Is a Secret and The Mysterious Benedict Society!

Reader! Your attention is greatly needed. We have left things unresolved! What began as your average story of a boy stumbling upon a pig in a teeny hat and a secret international explorers society has turned into an adventure of epic proportions.

* The bad news: The boy (Sebastian) has been kidnapped by a trio of troublesome thugs.
* The good news: His new friend Evie has promised to rescue him!
* The bad news: Sebastian has been taken halfway around the world.
* The good news: Evie has famous explorer and former Filipendulous Five member Catherine Lind at her side!
* The bad news: There’s still the whole matter of Evie’s grandfather (and the leader of the Filipendulous Five) somewhere out there in grave danger.
* The good news: Pursuing Sebastian will lead Evie and Catherine to another member of the Filipendulous Five, who might be able to help!

This missive is a call to action and an invitation to join in mystery, bravery, and danger. There will be new people to meet, new places to see, and some dancing along the way. And one amazingly reckless rescue.

About the Author: Adrienne Kress is a writer and an actress born and raised in Toronto. She is the daughter of two high school English teachers, and credits them with inspiring her love of both writing and performing. She also has a cat named Atticus, who unfortunately despises teeny hats. She is the author of The Explorers: The Door in the Alley, The Explorers: The Reckless Rescue,and The Explorers: The Quest for the Kid. To find out more about Adrienne, visit AdrienneKress.com and follow @AdrienneKress on Twitter and Instagram.

Review: This book starts RIGHT up where the first left off–like, actually! Mid-sentence! And I’m so glad because the cliffhanger in the first one was so intense! But here we are, right where we left off: Sebastian is kidnapped, and Evie has to figure out how to save him (hence the title…). Like the first book, I found that the snarky narrator, silly footnotes, and ridiculous situations was humor that is right up my alley, causing many laugh out loud moments, but let’s not forget that the story is also a nerve-racking adventure story also! Other than the humor and adventure, I also really like the characters in this story. Evie and Sebastian complement each other so well, and we really get to see them shine in this book as individuals since they are separated.

Teachers’ Tools for Navigation: This series would be a perfect mentor text when teaching dramatic irony, breaking the 4th wall, and footnotes. Even reading the first chapter will cover these three literary elements and will also get a lot of kids excited to read the story. Because the other place this book belongs is in libraries and classrooms–it is going to be a big hit with adventure and humor fans!

Discussion Questions:

How does the narration style the author chose change the tone of the story?
Why do you think the author chose to include footnotes in the story?
How does the author use dramatic irony to keep the reader reading?
What is the “Lost Boys” K-Pop group an allusion to?
How do Sebastian and Evie complement each other?
How did some good or bad things in the story end up being the opposite of what you thought?

Flagged Passages: “Chapter 1: In which we resume our story.

There is a difference between fact and opinion. It’s hard to tell sometimes because opinions like to dress up as facts, and their costumes have gotten quite impressive lately.¹ There is a way, however, to easily tell the difference between them. You have to weigh them. Because, you see, facts have more substance. So they’re heavier. This is how one can know for a fact, for example, that being kidnapped for your brain is scary. Because when this fact is placed on the scale, man, does it ever tip the balance.

There are other facts one can be certain of. Like that private jets are cool. That traveling long distances get boring. And that not knowing where you are going or what’s going to happen to you is exhaustingly stressful.

And if you don’t believe me, just ask Sebastian, who is sitting in his seat and staring out the window of the private jet, feeling precisely all of those things.

It is odd to feed bored. Not that feeling bored is a rare or weird feeling. It’s a very common part of life, after all. But it just felt strange to feel bored in his particular situation. He should have been feeling terrified, possibly even a little excited. And he knew this because he’d felt those things initially when he’d been snatched out of the Explorers Society headquarters and held captive in a helicopter. But that felt like forever ago now.

¹I once saw an opinion wearing the most spectacular curly mustache that distracted me so much, I totally let him into my head, even though I found his footwear suspicious.”

Read This If You Love: The first Explorers book: The Door in the Alley, Emily and the Spellstone by Michael Rubens, Guardians of the Gryphon’s Claw by Todd Calgi Gallicano, Cucumber Quest series by Gigi D.G., Alex Rider series by Anthony Horowitz, The Lightning Thief by Rick Riordan

Recommended For:

Teaching Tuesday: Grading is Complicated: Ruminations of an English Teacher Educator

April 24, 2018 by Ricki

“Grading is Complicated: Ruminations of an English Teacher Educator”

My students (future secondary English teachers) have a lot of questions about grading. They wonder if effort should count. They wonder if an emergent bilingual who works dang hard on three drafts of an essay should receive the same grade as another student’s essay, which is better. They wonder if in the grading process, after looking at other student work, it is fair to go back and change a previous student’s rubric evaluation. They wonder if we need to use rubrics for everything. They wonder if rubrics are too limiting of intellectual freedom.

My students are brilliant, and they ask complex questions that don’t have definite answers.

Let’s take them one-by-one. I invite readers to push back on any of the comments. I don’t have the answers, and I am often wondering if I need to reimagine my conceptualizations of grading.

Should effort count?

I believe that effort should count. The book that we read (Wormeli’s Fair Isn’t Always Equal) argues that effort shouldn’t count. For me, that’s conceiving of grades in simplistic ways. English language arts, as a subject area, cannot be quantified. I think that multiple drafts should count. If we are to accommodate the varying needs of students in our classrooms, we need to consider effort. A student who has a learning disorder who works dang hard and produces draft after draft to improve an essay should get some credit. Not counting effort standardizes grades in ways that might be harmful to learners. I argue that we need to individualize students’ learning progress. We need to know our students, and then we can evaluate whether the paper earns the A. Does this dilute grading systems? It sure does. But are we in this field to actually help students improve their writing or reading, or are we in this field to calculate GPAs and circle the grade of an 81 on a written essay (something that can hardly be quantified)?

Let’s complicate it even more:

Emergent bilinguals. If we don’t include effort and don’t focus on students’ personal improvement in their reading and writing, wouldn’t emergent bilinguals who are just learning a new language fail repeatedly? For me, this is an easy-to-see example of why effort does need to factor into the grading process.

Rubrics

I hate them, but I also recognize their importance. I think it’s critical that students know how they are going to be evaluated. We need to show them rubrics before they start brainstorming. On the other hand, rubrics are wildly limiting on creativity and intellectual freedom. By creating rubrics, we automatically tell students exactly what they are looking for. I know that folks argue that they create rubrics that are very open. No matter how open a rubric is, it limits students’ creativity to go in a wildly different (and potentially incredible) direction. They are teacher-focused rather than student-focused. My solution to this is the provision of rubrics that are student-generated (as a whole class, most often) and as open as possible. I continually remind my students that I would excitedly invite a different approach to the assignment, and I invite them to see me if their vision seems to conflict with criteria on the rubric. The students and I collaboratively develop expectations, and it is my hope that this process will not restrict their visions.

Grading with Rubrics

A student asked the smart question—if I grade a student’s work according to a rubric and then read other students’ work and realize that I evaluated the first student’s work wrong, can I redo the rubric? I am very conflicted about this issue. If you didn’t even know how to evaluate the first student, how would they know how to earn an “A.” For me, this means that the assignment expectations weren’t clear enough. I told my students that they are welcome to go back and redo the grading process, but they might rethink how students might be more firmly aware of the assignment expectations. The solution here, in my opinion, is that students always need to be given the opportunity to revise. No summative assessment should ever be a definitive final grade, and students should always be able to revise their work to improve their reading and writing skills. An argument against this might be, “But an employer wouldn’t allow a worker to revise their writing!” My response to this is, “Classrooms aren’t businesses. Classrooms are designed to foster learning.”

What complications do you have with grading?