Schedule time before March 1 to read this post and apply its data and feedback to yourself. Think of it in terms of interstitial awareness: When and how will you be able to read this most carefully?
Ask any general questions in the comment section at the end of the post.
GAP Q3A Scores
It is critical that you first read this post on pre-GAP triage:
Then you must find your set of GAP Q3A data in the following spreadsheet:
You can also use type the URL directly: https://tinyurl.com/gap-triage-218. Note: Profile scores for Q3A will not be posted for AP students. See one of the later sections for an explanation.
New Hall Passes
On Friday, February 15, one of the bathroom passes for Room 210 was found on the floor of the cafeteria, which is, as you may have noticed, not the bathroom. We’d already lost a pass or two this year to that sort of abuse, so you’ll now be signing out and back in every time you leave the room.
If you take too long, go too often, wander down to the cafeteria, or in any other way abuse the privilege, you lose that privilege.
No More Phones
December saw the first moratorium on phones:
Phones can be learning tools, though, or so the thinking goes. In January, we went back to student choice and self-control (again), and you were allowed to use phones and other personal devices in the makerspace.
Starting February 26 — on Tuesday, so you have Monday to make peace with the change — you’ll be prohibited from using your phones in the makerspace. The negative impact on your learning far outweighs the benefits.
You might want to read this to understand why the ban is necessary:
I will sort out individual access as necessary. Anticipate putting your phone in the holder in the corner, or accept that one of your teachers will take the phone to administration.
Spreadsheet Specifics
You should read the triage post and look over the spreadsheet first.
Total Check-In %
These numbers are based on the maximum possible “Daily Check-In” responses from November 17 through February 14. Absences and individual circumstances were taken into account after the fact on a case-by-case basis.
These percentages also ignore the content of those responses; instead, we are using them as reference points for habit-building and compliance. They are part of a bigger picture, like everything else.
Learning By Doing
This will get its own lesson, post, and discussion at some point.
The basic idea is that the more you, the student, do on your end, the more you learn. The work teaches you without the need for constant correction and redirection. When the assignments, texts, questions, etc., are done sincerely and thoughtfully, the doing is often enough. Hence the 0/1/2 scale on a triage spreadsheet like this.
That scale is there to tell you, after the fact and in conjunction with a GAP score, “No, you didn’t do enough.” Find the folks who wrote a lot for the ETA podcast assignment, for instance. Their work taught them through the way they did it. Others would be recorded as a “2” mostly out of kindness, but they definitely didn’t learn a lot from the writing — it’s a couple of sentences, if that, and obviously not enough to construct real meaning.
You get out of this what you put in. That’s the key to learning. You are given lessons that teach you by making you the agent of change. It’s not just about being corrected and redirected and so on. You explore and think in writing, and while helpful correction always comes in person, in class, in face-to-face meetings, etc., the habits and understandings that last longest happen through the work itself.
It’s a better form of feedback. When you don’t complete the assignment sincerely and thoughtfully, it doesn’t work. For you. It’s on you, then, to put in your best effort each time.
Update: Reading Calendar [Assignment Notes]
This assignment is on the post-panel proof-of-process pre-GAP spreadsheet as “Update: Reading Calendar.” It required only a single click. You had to indicate that you read the update by marking the assignment as done. Look at the directions in Google Classroom: “Let us know that you read the post.”
That’s it. Click a button. Let us know. Look at the spreadsheet, and note how many folks didn’t do that. Whether it was an oversight, an indication that they didn’t read the update, or disengagement, the takeaway is the same: You have to get better at organization. You might want to revisit that unit from the beginning of the year:
No Q3A Scores
Bolded to help you find it: There will be no scores in Infinite Campus for Q3A. You’ll get a six-week score at the end of Q3B1.
Look again at the spreadsheet for your course:
Look at the entire class. Many of you are expecting an 8 or 9 for work that objectively cannot fit those profiles. That’s on the basic level of sufficient work, which you’d do well to review:
You have the rest of this panel to live up to what you’ve given yourself for Q3A. If don’t, your six-week score will reflect that lack of amenability and self-awareness.
This is about preparing you for the future. You have to be aware that you or some of your close peers are cutting corners, self-sabotaging, making excuses for poor work, etc., and you have to help each other to be better.
Here is a paragraph written on February 15 by a student whose body of evidence for GAP Q3A actually fits a 9:
One of the interesting things I have noticed particularly about the Tier 4 Group 9 students is how it relates to self-awareness. One of the main aspects that helps a student categorize themselves into a Tier 4 Student is their ability to be self aware of their work. When filling out a GAP report, it is almost entirely reliant on a person’s ability to be self aware for them to be able to judge themselves. If I am attempting to grade my work over the past 3 weeks, I must have a good enough understanding on how I work, and the level of the work I have done. However, when filling out the report and being self-aware about one’s self-awareness, it almost creates a paradox. If a student fills out anything lower than a 9 for self aware, the student has automatically proven themselves wrong by showing they are aware enough to know their work isn’t up to standard. And if a student is blindly filling out the form, putting 9’s because that is the grade they want, are they really being self-aware and looking at themselves from an objective microscope? It is interesting to be able to have such a high level of self awareness, because if you are aware of the fact that you do not know self-awareness, then you are self aware of what you know and what you don’t know. At some point by the 4th Quarter, I would like to be able to gain a better understanding of this concept, so I can be objective not just when scoring myself on GAP, but when looking at all my work in general. I believe gaining this knowledge would be beneficial to me not just in AP Lang, but all other classes, and many other places in life as well.
You can test yourself immediately: Did you read that closely? Did you think about its purpose within this lengthy, ameliorative feedback post? Or did you skip over it?
Draw your peers back to that paragraph. In our post-panel proof-of-process pre-GAP spreadsheet, that student has nothing but twos. They are solidly effective, too, not barely adequate. Point out that fact to folks who don’t read this post closely.
Here is what I wrote back to that student on February 17:
This is a great answer to the prompt, but it’s also a great starting point for a necessary discussion in class. You have peers who lack that self-awareness, and by default, that means they aren’t the 8 or 9 they *think* they are. You, however, are a 9; your work is consistent, thoughtful, thorough, etc., and all the feedback you get reflects that.
The discussion is about how to help others *be* an 8 or 9, not just *want* an 8 or 9. What tone does the course need to strike? Does the feedback need to be harsh or kind? Do these folks need multiple chances without the penalty of low scores?
Think about those questions. These are essential questions to all of you, whether you deserved a 9 or not. These are questions that inform how you are taught and how you learn. Offer some of your answers in the comment section below.
While you’re there, consider what another student with twos across the board of our post-panel proof-of-process pre-GAP spreadsheet wrote on February 15:
I also believe I displayed the characteristics of a fourth tier student through my feedback and peer collaboration. I have sought feedback in a variety of ways. Whenever I am unsure of an assignment or what a prompt is asking, I reread instructional posts, utilizing this source of online feedback. I also ask for my peers’ feedback frequently. Just for one example, when writing my response to prompt #1 for the essay writing assignment, I read my response to [a peer]. I was unsure of a few of the things I included in my piece, so I asked for her opinions. [They] advised me to add a few sentences to improve the piece, which I ultimately did. Further, I think I reach out for teacher advice frequently, asking questions or asking for a piece to be given feedback on.
Perhaps the biggest difference between an accurate end-of-panel justification and one that is just wishful thinking is specificity. The students who work backward from the high score can only repeat the language of the profiles, if even that; they haven’t actually done what they should have. Folks who have met the criteria can reach into almost any lesson, day, week, etc., and talk about specific evidence.
But I empathize with you. I know exactly how hard it is to untangle the way you think about grades. I know this feeling:
The rest of my comment:
This is worth unpacking, so I invite you to write about it. The number is what trips you up, not the self-awareness. It’s an unavoidable part of a system built on grades: We can’t untangle their connotations easily, even when that’s the healthiest and most productive thing to do.
This student is one of many who would be a 90 or 95, if I didn’t decide to forego scores until the end of Q3B. They all know, to some extent, what their evidence deserves, but they can’t reconcile that knowledge with what a 90 or 95 does to their overall GPA.
This is a reflection of a broken system. It’s no one’s fault. But if the system is broken, we have to be better than the system. Not by floating the standard2, but by gutting the machine and rebuilding it. The chassis can’t change, but everything inside can.
Individual Exemptions and Exceptions
On the subject of empathy: Zeroes in any post-panel proof-of-process pre-GAP spreadsheet have to be considered in context. Missing work goes in as a zero; that’s how the formula works. There are often individual exceptions or exemptions, however.
The point of the spreadsheet is to draw your attention back to specifics. If you didn’t negotiate the requirements of an assignment or communicate clearly and explicitly what you were doing, that’s a problem.
There’s a reason that communication is before writing in our set of universal skills and traits. When in doubt, you need to communicate.
Essay Writing: Five Prompts (Process) [Assignment Notes]
Go back to Google Classroom and read the directions for this assignment. Here is the second-to-last paragraph:
It’s also a test, again, of your ability to read directions carefully: You should attach evidence of your writing process here, but that evidence will vary from person to person. Anything from brainstorming to reflections on the process to a final essay would be evidence. You’ll need to work with your teachers in class to figure out what works for you.
You had to attach something here. Something. “Anything from brainstorming to reflections on the process to a final essay would be evidence.”
Here from one of your peers is an actual essay that works as evidence: https://tinyurl.com/y4mx634q.
Here is an essay that came from an individualized prompt: https://tinyurl.com/y3rqpkcg. That works, too.
The point is that the directions tell you what to do. They aren’t open for interpretation. You can’t replace them with your own assignment unless you have explicitly and individually been told otherwise.
Essay Writing: What’s In Your Name? [Assignment Notes]
Go back to Google Classroom and read the directions for this assignment. You’ll be told to read the instructional post, and when you do, you find this:
The prompt for this writing assignment is simple: Write an essay about your name. The trick is unpacking that prompt and finding an interesting approach to the subject.
That was posted January 31. We talked a lot in class about this essay as an alternative to the “five prompts” essay, so you might not have finished it. That would be fine, but finishing is obviously different from starting. You had to do something over the three weeks this was an assignment, and it needed, to some extent, to reflect your understanding of the writing process:
In other words, if you don’t have anything here, and you don’t have anything submitted for the “five prompts” essay, what did you write? Where is the evidence of three or four weeks of makerspace work?
For the most part, if you did anything here, it “counts” for the post-panel proof-of-process pre-GAP spreadsheet.
Moving Forward
With all that in mind, you have to start thinking about the end of the year.
We’re going to speed up. You’re going to have to make good choices, pay attention to directions, etc., because we will be balancing exam practice with the usual reading, writing, and problem-solving we do.
Remember that you are in a college-level class, not just an AP class, and college is all about making good decisions. Use the space.
Ask any general questions you have in the comment section below.
The only potential exception to this is giving students whose body of evidence fits a 9 profile the 100 they earned. My fear is that this would still create, through the lack of scores for other students, a kind of Pavlovian panic or self-doubt in those other students. ↩
I’ve linked to this before, so I’ll bury it in a footnote:
That essay will ring true to most of you. We have to better than that floating standard. We don’t have to be cruel, however, to do it. It’s not just about grit; it’s about empathy, too. We can use our profile system to walk the line. ↩