By the time a high school student graduates, he or she will have spent around 2,340 days in school — about a third of an 18-year-old’s life, depending on how the hours are calculated. That’s a sobering fact (and darkly amusing, in the hands of The Onion), because there are a few kinks in our educational system. As Sir Ken Robinson puts it:
That video is one of the two direct inspirations for a grade-abated, interstitial, and makerspace-driven English classroom. This article by Alfie Kohn is the other:
As for what those adjectives (grade-abated, interstitial, makerspace-driven) indicate? Read on.
Navigating This Site
Current students should use the appropriate menu to select the instructional posts for their course. The other menus link to this year’s Google+ Communities or to some of the key pieces of our paradigm shift.
Students are encouraged to visit classes other than their own. In English, all courses are linked by a “skill spiral” — a universal set of skills that are introduced, practiced, and then mastered. The pace of that process is broken up by grade level, with additional speed and depth added for Honors or Advanced Placement courses. But as Robinson says in that video, separating students by manufacture date is strange, once we get past its ubiquity.
The point, though, is that students benefit from paying attention to what else happens in the classroom, and this interstitial hub is an extension of that classroom. It’s like reading the posters or perusing the student work hung up for other courses. When tenth graders are introduced to certain skills and traits, AP students in eleventh grade have an opportunity to review those skills and traits; as juniors publish personal essays, sophomores are given a prediction of what they’ll do next year; and so on.
The idea of an interstitial hub is to push real collaboration, especially in the service of creating new meaning. It will seem like more work at first, but all work in here serves the same purpose — and all of it is unified and rewarded by grade abatement. See below for more.
More from Sisyphus
Below are links to the modular components of the course. This is an expanded and revised version of what is available on the main Sisyphean High site. As we iterate, this will be updated.
Interstitial Classroom Links
These are the elements of a 21st-century ELA classroom. The complete evolution is explored in this essay of mine:
The Interstitial Classroom: The key to collaborative and autodidactic learning; or, how an English teacher learned to stop worrying and love the Internet
The current components of the interstitial classroom are laid out below.
Medium (@sisypheanhigh) | I will eventually carve enough time out of my schedule to start writing essays again. What you’ll find now is a mixture of direct instruction, general explication, and strange allusions.
Google Classroom | This is an option for us to use in our collaborative efforts.
Twitter (@sisypheanhigh) | This is a work-in-progress. At some point in the our future, I hope it will highlight student work and success.
Facebook | What’s before a work-in-progress? This page has been created, but that’s it. We’ll discuss the efficacy of Facebook as an instructional tool down the road.
Subreddit (r/SisypheanHigh) | This is an artifact from many years ago. The students shifted from reddit to Google+, having decided that Google offered more baked-in accessibility. There is still a lot to like about a subreddit, though, and it is an option for us.
Grade Abatement Materials
This is the universal language that enables us to eliminate grades and individualize the learning process. It is a complicated and iterative evolution, driven largely by this paragraph in Alfie Kohn’s “The Case Against Grades”:
“Like it or not, grading is here to stay” is a statement no responsible educator would ever offer as an excuse for inaction. What matters is whether a given practice is in the best interest of students. If it isn’t, then our obligation is to work for its elimination and, in the meantime, do what we can to minimize its impact.
The first GAP (grade abatement profile) guide, written some five years ago, leans heavily on Kohn, but even then, the conclusion was clear: We can’t eliminate grades. We can only abate their effects. Fortunately, that is more than enough to transform the learning experience for teachers and students alike.
Grade Abatement Profiles | A one-sheet with all of the grade abatement profiles.
GAP Tiers | Each tier is delineated and analyzed. The relevant profiles are reprinted on each page.
GAP Checklist | A three-part checklist used for exploration, learning, and creation.
GAP Checklist: Annotated | An interactive explication of the checklist1.
GAP Guides | These are required reading for anyone involved in grade abatement, from students to teachers to parents. They are presented chronologically, and with minimal editing. The language evolves, the protocols shift a bit, and everything is iterated on from year to year.
Bishop Composition Materials
These documents explain bishop composition, also known as emulation-through-analysis or ETA writing. The underlying philosophy is to have students write what they read and read what they write. Like the chess piece, writers have some restrictions on the direction of their movement, but only the limits of the board for distance. We are leaning on the etymology of the noun: Bishop comes from the Greek episkopos, meaning “watcher or overseer.” Students oversee the individual elements of the writing process, with a teacher overseeing the process as a whole. This is also a deliberate reference to Elizabeth Bishop, whose poem, “One Art,” begins like this:
The art of losing isn’t hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.
It is no disaster to lose an antiquated, anti-student style of writing instruction.
DAMAGES Rubric | A single-sheet version of the universal rubric.
DAMAGES Rubric Redux | A much cleaner version of the rubric that is attached to a modified scoring scale. Useful when we’re forced to ruin the writing process by assigning a grade to the final product.
Prompt Decoding | A practical overview of how prompts guide all writing responses.
Writing Process (Lite) | A handout that walks the writer through the DAMAGES process. The steps are modular.
Writing Process (Full) | An expanded version of the lite guide. This offers more explanation for each element, but it sticks to the same (optional) order of operations.
Post-Writing Process | More useful as a concurrent writing report — one implemented throughout the writing process, not just at the end.
ETA Reading Model | DAMAGES-driven annotations of an argument, used to illustrate emulation-through-analysis (ETA) writing.
The PDF will be replaced with an up-to-date Google Doc when I get the chance. ↩