Credit Recovery
TL;DR — If you have no evidence of work by the end of this quarter, you may be given an incomplete and required to take a summer course of Edgenuity. You do not want this, so you should do the assigned work.
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Your final projects are due over the next two weeks.
To prepare for this, you’ve been asked to check in each day, to set goals based on that week’s part of the final project, and to use a feedback chain to revise and refine each step. If you fell behind over the last month, you were given two posts to help you catch up:
You also have a post about finding your motivation during this pandemic:
The question we must ask is this: What happens if you don’t complete any work by the end of the quarter?
Start by recognizing how hard it is to fail. In this makerspace, you are helped tremendously by the aggregate nature of grade abatement:
A profile score of 3 becomes a 65, and that profile’s language is largely about resistance to feedback and a lack of any positive movement. That is still a “passing” score. If you do even less, even when contacted repeatedly across an entire quarter, you might fit the profile of a 2, which is a 60.
This is not a floating standard. It is a recognition of the cumulative nature of true learning and the vector-like toxicity of grades, as that “Clarifying Grade Abatement” post explains.
In other words, if you are able to do enough work to meet the criteria overall of a GAP score of 3 or 4, you have authentically and legitimately passed the course. You would be obviously weak in basic skills and traits, but that would not mean numerical failure is appropriate.
The school is also making exceptions for you during Q4 if there are extenuating circumstances. Those exceptions fit our set of universal skills and traits, too: To establish those extenuating circumstances, you have to communicate with us, show self-awareness and a sense of self-efficacy, accept feedback about your situation, and much more.
So the real question is this: What happens if you don’t complete any work by the end of the quarter and haven’t communicated about an exemption? What if you really have done nothing, even after being contacted?
Well, here is one possibility:
If you have no evidence of work by the end of this quarter, you may be required to take a summer course of Edgenuity.
As the TL;DR at the top of this post says, you do not want this, so you should do the assigned work.
About Edgenuity
Before we look at how Edgenuity works, be sure that you have read the BCSD letter sent to the community on April 16:
You will also want to have looked at the post on motivation, since it dives more deeply into what motivates you, how that shifts during distance learning, what happens if you fall behind, and much more. Some of what is written below is lifted directly from that post.
The district’s letter explains, among other things, how and why traditional grades have been eliminated for Q4. Instead of a score on your report card, you’ll be given a Pass/Incomplete (or Pass/Fail) for each course.
Recognize that you’ve lost grades as a motivator after being institutionalized for a decade or more. Removing the Skinner box would be difficult without a pandemic. You may need another extrinsic motivation.
That’s what Edgenuity can be: an extrinsic motivation for some of you. More precisely, avoiding it can be an extrinsic motivation for some of you.
If you aren’t aware of the program, here is Edgenuity’s explanation of credit recovery:
Edgenuity’s credit recovery courses are designed to help students learn at their own pace and on their own time. The flexibility and design of these courses empower students to focus on exactly the content they need to in order to catch up to their peers, recover lost credits, and graduate on time.
You can click the link for more at the official site. It is a program designed as another chance, and while that is a good thing, it is also a last resort. Your assigned English work will always offer you more choice and enjoyment.
The following examples will show you how Edgenuity works. After reading, you should understand that meeting the criteria for your assigned Q4 work will be easier and more student-centered than having to come in (virtually or not) to do Edgenuity over the summer.
Start by enlarging this screenshot of an Edgenuity unit that ends with a quiz:
This is part of the Common Core ELA curriculum for NY. You can see the units that are prescribed by the state and Edgenuity on the left side of the image. The units that are checked have been assigned; the rest have been eliminated.
If you are required to do Edgenuity, a teacher or other educator will go into the Common Core ELA curriculum, remove enough units to line up with the required hours, and then assign it to you.
Now note the time required for each lesson, unit, quiz, etc. The highlighted lesson, on sound and structure in poetry, requires an hour. That lesson is part of unit requiring more than seven hours.
The time you spend is all tracked, and you have to do all of it. You can’t skip ahead. You can’t rush. You are required to follow the program.
Zoom in on the poetry lesson:
This is an example of how you lose flexibility when you move from your assigned ELA work to Edgenuity: You must warm up, go through the instruction, do the assignment, go through the next set of instructions, review, and take a quiz, and you have to do it in exactly the prescribed order.
Edgenuity excels at this sort of structure by eliminating almost all flexibility. To generate enough data, the program can’t tailor the learning and assessment to your needs. There’s very little differentiation, especially in the moment.
That’s why doing the assigned work for Q4 is preferable: Even through the hurdles of distance learning, you have teachers and other educators racing to meet you where you are. In Edgenuity, the driving force is a computer program. You necessarily lose the feedback and attention you need.
There are humans involved in Edgenuity, of course. The quizzes and tests are controlled and assessed by the educator overseeing the curriculum. But if you are required to complete Edgenuity over the summer, that educator likely won’t be your current teacher. You’d replace someone who’s spent a year getting to know you as an individual student with someone who may never see your face.
Here is an Edgenuity lesson that includes a writing assignment:
Writing-based lessons in Edgenuity are prescribed for you, just like everything else. This one requires almost three hours. The process is rigid: You must submit your writing, get some feedback, revise the writing, etc, and if that’s all normal, the rigid time constraints are not.
Your writing units will also include quizzes, even when that kind of assessment doesn’t quite fit. Again, this is a computer program: Quizzes and time-on-task are the easiest ways to generate data. It’s not necessarily about you. It’s about getting data to analyze.
Writing in Edgenuity is assessed according to rubrics and according to universal ideas of effectiveness, just like in any ELA course. Here is one Edgenuity rubric:
The standard for effectiveness is similar to what you’d see in any English class, because writing is a universal process with modular elements. The specific vocabulary and labels change, not the core components. There is much less margin for error in Edgenuity, however, because you are working against the clock, without easy access to face-to-face feedback.
Revision, for instance, is assigned as a 30-minute process. There is less time to go back and earn more points or a higher score, and you are graded in Edgenuity, regardless of the policy in place elsewhere. You will receive scores out of 100, pandemic or not.
The work, therefore, is more regimented and less student-centered. It is less engaging. It does not easily adapt to your circumstances, and you will always receive numerical grades.
Your Motivation, Again
The goal of distance learning is to provide you meaningful opportunities to learn, flexibility in how you reach goals, and authentic projects that showcase your skills and knowledge. Your teachers and administrators — all faculty and staff — are doing what we can to get you through this unprecedented time in our lives.
That’s why you’re being assessed this quarter through a Pass/Incomplete or Pass/Fail system. You are being given the flexibility you need to handle everything else going on.
Remember, too, that you have teachers streamlining requirements and adapting instruction almost daily. As long as you make a good-faith effort to do the work, you will be given the benefit of the doubt.
In here, we actually talked at length about that good-faith contract and the effort required to be successful during distance learning:
What Edgenuity adds to the discussion is an extrinsic motivation for students who require it. You should do the work assigned this quarter, advocating for yourself along the way, in order to avoid Edgenuity.
It’s also important to note that extra chances and modifications are built into the post-COVID learning you’re doing. It’s ultimately easier for all students to do what is assigned, when it is assigned, to the best of their abilities.
There is even an understanding that making a bad choice is not always a malicious act. It rarely is, in fact. All of us succumb to procrastination and other bad habits, which is why we spent part of the fall in this makerspace talking about akrasia:
Remember the phrase we had hanging in our room: Video meliora, proboque deteriora sequor. “I see and approve of the better, but I follow the worse.” It’s a human failing.
All of which is to say this:
You can do the English work assigned this quarter. You have time. It doesn’t matter what today’s date is. You also have a lot of folks to help you. We can tailor the work to your needs.
Feel free to ask questions below. Again, if anything about this situation changes, you’ll be informed immediately.