Almanac for Teachers. Grading Over The Years #4 – Grading Advanced Concepts in Class

This blog addresses a situation that is common to all teachers whose curriculum includes advanced topics. The process I’ll describe will work with any level of content. I used this method most often in AP Biology because I used other methods described in these blogs in all my classes

It is difficult to know how well students understand advanced concepts. Many students in AP and similar courses are excellent test takers. An “A” on an exam on a topic demonstrates a high level of “book knowledge,” in all cases. The level of understanding is more difficult to measure by traditional testing methodology.

To address the “understanding” component, I have students do a variety of creative activities. I use analogies and have students generate their own. They solve a mystery when discussing DNA. They draw “portraits” of family members after a genetics simulation. I addition, are various times my students have, among other things,

    

·      Written letters to the developer of the microscope and 

·      Written letters from their brain to their lungs attempting to get the human to stop smoking.

·      Written dialogs between them and a deceased friend who died of drug use where the deceased friend warns them of the dangers of drug usage. 

·      Written journal entries chronicling the development of a bird embryo.

·      Written poetry to highlight environmental issues.

·      Drawn comic strips illustrating different invertebrate.

·      Drawn/Digitally produced comic books and graphic novels on how rocks form.

·      Drawn or painted original art highlighting endangered species.

The assignment highlighted in this blog is: The Voyage of Uli Urea. Students describe filtration and urine production in the kidney in a story.

The Voyage of Uli Urea

Your excretory system does a magnificent job of removing some very nasty waste materials from your bodies. You hardly ever think about this system. BUT, you might if you had finished a L-A-R-G-E soft drink about an hour ago and you were sitting on the wonderful seat of a yellow school bus and you were bouncing along on a rough stretch of roadway and the mean, rotten bus driver would not stop and take a "potty break."

Anyway, you are to pretend to be "Uli Urea," a molecule of nitrogen waste in the blood of your body. Use the words listed below in a cute story that describes the excretory process.

To come anywhere close to full credit on this assignment, you will have to use information from your Campbell text. Other sources are, of course, okay, but if you use anything but Campbell, you must reference your information. In addition, you have to explain what happens in the Loop of Henle (both down and up)—you’ll need to use terms like hypertonic, hypotonic, permeable, impermeable for any hope at full credit.

 The first time you write one of the words from this list in your story it must be in ALL CAPITAL LETTERS and UNDERLINED. Example: KIDNEY. The words must be used in cor­rect order that they occur in the excretory process or you will lose points.

WORD LIST:

AQUAPORIN	PROXIMAL TUBULE*
ACTIVE TRANSPORT	RENAL ARTERY*
BOWMAN'S CAPSULE*	RENAL ARTERIOLE*
COLLECTING TUBULE (DUCT)*	SALTS
DISTAL TUBULE*	TOILET
FILTRATION	UREA
GLOMERULUS*	URETER*
HOMEOSTASIS	URETHRA*
KIDNEY	URINARY BLADDER*
KIDNEY PELVIS*	URINATION
LOOP OF HENLE*	URINE
NEPHRON	WATER

The terms marked with asterisks (*), must be in the correct anatomical order.

Your final draft should be word-processed using as many pages as necessary. You will be allowed one error in spelling or grammar per page of text you write. After that first error, points will be deducted for each additional mistake.

Once the stories are complete, students “trade and grade” papers using the PPT slides shown below.

The graders use pens or pencils I provide. Three times during the process—after slide 5, after slide 6, and at the end, they record partial scores in the margin. They total those scores. See the sample below.

Go back and check the grading slides. Note how the marks on this paper correspond to the directions. Because of that, I know which items are correctly sequenced. My job is to determine the correctness of their usage.

After this process, I had only to read the papers for coherence/content, adjust an occasional grading error by the student grader, and deduct points for grammar if there is more than one mistake per page. More often than not, any grade adjustment ends up in favor of the author of the paper. It takes relatively little time for me to do my part of the grading. All the grunt work was done during the peer grading session.

Students like knowing how they did on what was graded before class ends. Because my time commitment is reduced, they get their final grades quickly as well.

In addition, I have a clearer picture of the level of understanding of students on this concept, which will be on their unit exam, than if I asked the to "draw and label a nephron and describe each label in one sentence."

An Aside:

Kids tend to be brutal sticklers to what I say or show when grading. For example, if I say, “there should be twelve items in these two paragraphs,” it’s not uncommon for a hand to shoot up. “This paper has eleven in two paragraphs and one in another. I gave them eleven.”

When that happens, or if I adjust while reading the paper, I—the teacher—come across as a helper, not an executioner. “Thank you for the extra point,” is common. For an example of how little most students understand how their grade in the class is calculated, keep coming back to this blog.

Next Blog: Grading-Part #5. Group Work and Study Guides

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My website is: www.crdowning.com

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Authors: Lessons Learned from Young Writers – Part 2 of 4

This is an edited version of a post from one year ago.

When last we left our student-authors, they were struggling with the concept of editing versus checking for errors. This is the conclusion of my blog on my experience with 8^th-12^th-grade authors.

As the school year draws to a close, Mrs. Ray and I have made a decision. There will be no book this school year. Our current plan/goal is to get the premier anthology, Sci-Fi High - First Days of School, out before Halloween. This requires more editing by this year’s authors, most of whom will be returning to the project. See below.

In a perfect world, we’ll have Volume 2 ready by April. But, we shall see. The book will not go to print until both Mrs. Ray and I are in agreement on the worthiness of the edited manuscript.

Only one of our authors is a Senior this year. She already knows her schedule for next year at college and will be able to come to some of our sessions as we finish editing go to press. So she will have her story included in Volume 1.

What follows is a series of observations, comments and suggestions gleaned from this experience. They are in no particular order. Feel free to rank them yourself.

The book’s cover. We were fortunate. Mrs. Ray was looking at art pieces at the school's Career Expo.  She thought one artist's work was amazing. When it was time for the book cover, she asked the artist and found out she was interested in our Sci-Fi High project. She created a cover with the promise of it just being an addition to her portfolio.  In the end, she earned 1 credit in the process. Here's what she came up with after a couple of meetings.

It’s not the final draft, but you get the drift. Pretty cool. More on the cover in Part #3.

Things we will change. First, we are establishing non-negotiable deadlines early on in the process. We allowed too much discussion and verbal explanation of the stories to occur between the authors without requiring completion of specific pieces of writing. As a result, many of the stories ended up being hastily completed.

Transitions between plot points were problematic. Our authors were most proficient with essay writing. Many tried to morph that style into an iteration of science fiction writing. Those morphs were not successful. We will do directed study of short stories before writing begins anew in the Fall. We have plans for “hands-on” experiences with marking plot points and identifying necessary edits early on.

TeachersPayTeachers. Mrs. Ray and I are meeting this summer to produce a product for Teachers Pay Teachers, an online “warehouse” for teaching materials. I have 27 products up in my store there. But they are science-oriented, or at least non-English/Language Arts-oriented https://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Store/Chuck-Downing.

Teachers look first within their discipline for ancillary materials. Mrs. Ray is an English teacher. She’ll be starting her own store with our Sci-Fi High writing/production process as her first major product. This will maximize our exposure to the target audience.

Grammarly & Hemingway. Students work best when they have exemplars at key points in whatever process they are engaged in. Grammarly is a free web-based program that goes a step beyond MSWord’s grammar check. It’s far from perfect, and it costs money to see the “advanced” errors it discovers. But, it directs any writer to what might be problem areas in their manuscript. We will require students to use this at each stage of the production process.

Hemingway is purchasable editing tool. It points out common issues in manuscripts of any sort. This makes it a great tool for fiction writers. I use it to limit the convolutions that easily arise in my writing. Short sentences with few adverbs and passive voice statements are the goal of the app. They are my goals, too. We will recommend, but not require, our authors to use this tool as well.

There's been an update in Hemingway since this screenshot. It's a much more user-friendly writing tool now.

Life lessons as part of the story development. From the beginning of the project, our authors were instructed to include a life lesson—think moral—in their stories. This was one aspect of the project that was not misunderstood and was refreshingly clear in almost all the stories submitted. This will continue to be a requirement next year.

Think about volunteering your time to work on a project with young writers. You don’t have to find a school to volunteer at to help students with their writing. That might sound like the quickest way of involving yourself, but all schools have some vetting process for volunteers. Be prepared for what might be a plethora of hoops through which to jump if you don’t have a child enrolled at that school. Public libraries have volunteer programs that might qualify. The YMCA, Boy’s Clubs, Girl’s Clubs, and other such entities offer after-school programs for students.

Bottom Lines.

• Every student-author exuded a missionary’s zeal when talking about the book/class/project and their part in it.
• Mrs. Ray was most gracious in allowing me to work with her and her students in this project. Our maiden voyage was exhilarating. It was also frustrating. It was also incomplete.
• We both agree to give it a second shot.
• Word about the class/project spread throughout the school. Close to a score of students filled out applications to join our Author’s Guild—my euphemism for the Creative Writing elective course. Armed with what we know, now fine-tuned by what we learned, we’re forging ahead in September of this year.

Next Author’s Blog: 

Lessons Learned from Young Writers – Part 3

Follow me on Twitter: @CRDowningAuthor and Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/CRDowningAuthor

My website is: www.crdowning.com

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Authors: Lessons Learned from Young Writers – Part 1 of 4

This is an edited version of a post from one year ago.

In September of 2015, I started working with a group of middle and high school students on a project. The previous school year, I’d done a talk on Science Fiction writing. During the talk, the kids had a chance to write a bit from a prompt.

I got good feedback from the teacher, Debra Ray, about the presentation. Over the summer, one of the students drove over 40 miles to come to one of my books signings.

I had an idea.

Over the course of my teaching career, colleagues have heard the phrase, “I’ve been thinking,” hundreds of times. Some of them learned to excuse themselves from the conversation at that point. Others politely listened and performed the part of “bobble-head doll” with consummate excellence—nodding at appropriate times. But, some were willing, and a few were anxious, to hear my ideas.

I talked with Mrs. Ray about the possibility of meeting with a group, like a club. The club would be for students that were interested in writing short stories for inclusion in a self-published book.

She took the offer and expanded on it. She convinced the site administration to allow her to offer a “half-credit” elective class. When school started, enrollment was 11 students.

Mrs. Ray and I both thought we could have a manuscript ready for CreateSpace and Kindle by April of 2016. That didn’t happen.

We planned on publishing the book in September of 2016.

Here’s what I learned from the young writers that first year.

Happening	Lesson Learned
The kids were excited to share their ideas with one another.	Excitement should be an integral part of any writing process. If what you’re planning and writing don’t excite you, trash it and start over.
The kids were reluctant to make a commitment to a plot.	It’s important to set a course and start sailing. If you find yourself lost in the doldrums of the writing process, look to your plotline. If it’s lacking, fix it!
There was too much talking about the stories and not enough writing of stories early on.	Write. Put words down on paper or in an electronic document. Talking about and thinking about ideas, characters, actions, setting are all good things to do. But, set a deadline for yourself. Begin to write your story sooner rather than later.
Ending their stories proved problematic.	I’ll never forget reading a book by a famous author deep into his career. I'd enjoyed his earlier books. The storyline in my chosen book was good.  Without foreshadowing of any kind, at what I’m convinced was his contracted word count minimum, “they all went into the basement and it blew up.” That was a terrible ending. I’ve not read another of his books since. O’Henry’s “surprise endings” are surprising because of the outcome O'Henry chose to use. The surprise does not result from that ending leaping away from the storyline. The end of all well-written stories is based on what’s been written prior to that ending.
Editing is hard.	Nothing new learned here. What was reinforced was the need to understand what editing entails. Correcting spelling and grammar errors is essential. But, filling holes in plot lines, expanding the depth of characterizations, and transitioning between plot points instead of leaping from plot point to plot point must be addressed early in the editing process.
Editing takes time.	Most of our students had been successful in English classes. They were good at writing essays. But, they were used to editing to a final draft in under an hour. The difference in editing a 500-word essay and a 5000-word story is more than a ten-fold time commitment.

In spite of the steep learning curve for students and teachers, enthusiasm for this elective course is high. We thought that Mrs. Ray might have to limit the number of students enrolled.

That’s another expectation that wasn’t met.

Next Author’s Blog: 

Lessons Learned from Young Writers – Part 2

Follow me on Twitter: @CRDowningAuthor and Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/CRDowningAuthor

My website is: www.crdowning.com

I'd appreciate your feedback as a comment on Blogger!