Click to visit the image source, which is home to a teaching philosophy that might make its way into our studies before the end of the year.
For Students in Regents 11 Only
A lengthy post like this is designed to teach you in between classes. A calendar for the rest of the year, like this one, is designed to help you prepare for the next class. The entire assessment system is designed to help you be productive during class.
We, your two teachers, try not scold or hold hands. But the work you’ve been assigned is valuable. You need to finish it.
Therefore, for the next three weeks, we are going to give you daily feedback based on what was observed during class. Your in-class focus and productivity will be assessed after 42 minutes on a scale of 0-3.
That scale has been posted before, in the notes that were part of an instructional post. It’s as simple and straightforward as it gets:
Starting this evening, you’ll find daily scores in Infinite Campus. They are posted out of three points and are categorized separately from all GAP scores. None of these three-point scores has any impact on your average. This is informational.
Note: Because we are not yet in Q4, the scores for April 9-13 will be located in the gradebook for Q3. This cannot be changed. You will have to look there for the first week.
Brief Background and Basis
I’d like to make it clear that we have avoided tracking your in-class work this way for philosophical reasons, opting instead for slightly less Skinner-box-like options. As Alfie Kohn aptly writes:
It’s not enough to disseminate grades more efficiently — for example, by posting them on-line. There is a growing technology, as the late Gerald Bracey once remarked, “that permits us to do in nanoseconds things that we shouldn’t be doing at all” (quoted in Mathews, 2006). In fact, posting grades on-line is a significant step backward because it enhances the salience of those grades and therefore their destructive effects on learning.
Emphasis added. The impact of Infinite Campus is to make the destructive effects of grades immediately available to you at every point during your day.
You need to do this work, however. If grades are the currency, we’ll try daily scores, briefly, to see if it finally shows you the impact of your choices.
Because you must learn self-control. You must follow the rules of your classroom, just as you’ll have to follow the rules of a workplace. If you have a concern about those rules, you can advocate in an appropriate way. You can ask for further clarification. But ignoring and breaking the rules will only hurt you, now and in the future.
Read this, if you haven’t already, and even if you have: