Tag: your friendly neighborhood spider-graph

15 Comments

GAP Framework: Within Reason

  By All Junior Classes (2017-2018), AP English Language & Composition (2017-2018), English 11 Regents (2017-2018)

Within Reason

The scoring panel for the first part of Q2 ends tomorrow, December 1. You’ve been given specific criteria for a GAP score of 7 or higher, which we’ll review in a moment. Start with the profiles in full:

Click to embiggen.

The fourth tier is all about feedback, which you know is one of the two most important elements of success. This time, you were instructed to have evidence of your interstitial work, specifically in two categories:

  1. Notes on instructional posts
  2. Evidence of online contributions

These requirements are clarified below.

① Notes on instructional posts

The first instructional post for this scoring panel is “The Age of the Essay,” which was published on November 5. The most recent is “Well, Why Read?” which was published on November 29. Those posts, plus the many given in between, are responsive and multifaceted learning opportunities. You should have taken notes on them as you would on any academic reading assignment.

You had a checkpoint assignment on Google Classroom on November 27 that asked you to submit copies of these notes. Three more posts were created for you after that:

Within reason, you should have notes on these, too. The key phrase there, though? Within reason. You do not need hours of notes on every instructional post. The most recent ones make this explicit. You need to engage with each post, learn what you can from it, and determine how it helps you meet your learning goals.

There are dozens of possible approaches to this. What matters is that you have a habit of mind — that you are aware of every post, that you read every post, that you learn from every post. And that you ask questions.

② Evidence of online contributions

I won’t recap the many posts explaining why you should practice online discussion. It’s a requirement. You have to try it, much like you’d have to try to talk in an in-class discussion, if that was required.

In this course, the easiest way to ask questions and seek feedback, from me and from your peers, is to leave comments online:

Interstitial Discussion

This practices your communication and writing skills, your collegiality and amenability, your organization, and much more. It makes you think in writing, and it freezes your discussion for later reference. Within reason, you should have at least one contribution to these posts.

Again, the key phrase: within reason. You absolutely should invest in this site, because it’s the surest way to get feedback from peers and me in the context of instruction, but there are other ways to contribute interstitially. Here are a few:

  • Collaborating and leaving comments on peer work in Google Docs
  • Holding discussions through Google Communities
  • Having focused group chats (e.g., through text messages) about course work

If you continue your collaborative learning in a writing-driven way outside of our 40+ minutes together, that’s interstitial learning.

Note: I think it’s fair to have a discussion about whether or not taking notes on those instructional posts counts as interstitial evidence. It probably does. That teaching is designed, like this post that you’re reading now, to be consumed interstitially; notes on this kind of teaching are, therefore, interstitial. The issue is the lack of audience and potential collaboration. But any student reading this, now, who has chosen to work individually and interstitially probably has enough evidence there to elide the discussion/collaboration requirement.

On RE/AP Differences

One more thing: This is cross-posted to both junior courses, Regents and AP, in order to illustrate the universality of what we do. I also want to describe, in this public place, one of the key differences between a college-level course and a non-college-level course.

The language of the profiles for grade abatement is the same, and the basic course of study for a junior is the same (e.g., you all take the same Regents Exam in June). But the expectations differ. There are measurable increases in reading and writing assignments for AP students (plus the Lovecraftian AP exam in May), but the real difference is what’s expected.

The superlative language of a GAP 9, for instance, indicates different expectations. What qualifies as “strongest” or “best” in each course is different. Even a word like “precocious” takes on special meaning: In a college-level curriculum, the definition’s indication of “early development” operates in a different context.

How does this play out in GAP scoring? Within reason, a student in AP, in addition to completing the more numerous formal assignments, would take more notes on more instructional posts. She would contribute more often, and in more ways, to online discussions. You are still looking at a key phrase, though: within reason. Do not put crushing pressure on yourself in an AP class, and do not believe you can’t do more than what’s required in a Regents class.

GAP Scoring: Q2A

Find the GAP assignment on Google Classroom. Attach copies of any evidence that is required to justify your assumed profile. Include copies of evidence you’ve already submitted. Add links to shared folders as a comment there, on Google Classroom, if necessary. Then complete the Google Form included with the assignment.

When you complete the GAP report, which is in the usual format, be honest about your success over the last 3-4 weeks. Remember that growth requires honesty, and that each panel resets your evidence. From December 4 to December 22, you build another profile. You have another shot at the best kind of learning and the highest kind of reward.

In addition to the GAP report, you are strongly encouraged to complete a self-assessment spider graph, basing your plotted points on your work in each skill and trait over the last 3-4 weeks. You’ll need these handouts, in this order:

  1. Grade Abatement Skills & Traits
  2. Scoring Guidelines (Self-Assessment)
  3. Spider Graph: GAP Skills & Traits

You’ve seen most of them before, but not in this order or with this particular formatting and purpose. Look over the skills and traits, as always, to remind yourself what they entail; look over the quick scoring guidelines for a 0-9 self-assessment; and then fill in a hard copy of that spider graph with what you think your wheel of evidence looks like.

In case the Google Drawing of the spider graph doesn’t work, here’s a JPG version that you can print. You’ll have photocopies of all this on Friday, December 1.

Ask questions below.

No comments

Spider Graphs: Self-Evaluation

  By AP English Language & Composition (2017-2018)

You should be fairly immersed in this by now:

Gestalt Suite: Getting to Know You

As it says in the body of that post, part of this self-assessment and introspective work will be kinesthetic. So let’s color:

Click for the full image.

Click for the full image.

 

Those are printable copies of, in order, a blank spider graph for our GAP skills and traits and a blank spider graph for Howard Gardner’s multiple intelligences. You are meant to figure out how to use those from your close reading of that instructional post. In addition, you might want a printed copy of this handout, which helps with self, holistic, and performance-based assessments1.

When properly filled in, a single spider graph looks like this:

Click for the source, which is about rating coffee.

And an iterative spider graph — one filled in now and then again later, or filled in to compare two sets of data — might look like this:

Calvin really needs to get it together.

You should end up with a visual approximation of these skills, traits, and intelligences, at least according to your self-assessments.

Two things:

  1. This is about valuing yourself differently — looking not at GPA, class rank, social status, etc, but at the stuff that really matters. You are smart in different ways. You are skilled in different ways. You want to fight the Dunning-Kruger effect, sure, but you must also learn how and why your skills matter. Imposter syndrome is just as limiting as an inflated sense of self.
  2. This is also a test of your efforts lately, because you’ll either have done the necessary research to learn about multiple-intelligence theories or not, just like you’ll have invested in learning the skills and traits of the class or not. You’ll have looked up the Dunning-Kruger effect, because it was assigned to you, or you won’t have.

These aren’t mutually exclusive. It matters if you didn’t do the reading assigned in that post. It matters if you aren’t carefully reading directions, looking up concepts, etc, because that was the assignment. And if you’ve gotten to October 17 without figuring out how your English course assesses you, that definitely matters.

But if you use the opportunity to plot these graphs and color them to learn about Gardner’s multiple intelligences, that’s great. If you only now start to teach yourself about the language in our set of universal skills and traits, that’s great, too. If it’s only now that you ask me for help, that’s not anything but fantastic. It’s never too late to commit to growth and improvement.

In other words, let’s focus here on what you see in yourself, on what makes you unique, but let’s make that self-assessment an informed opinion. Don’t make an assumption about these labels and what they mean. Do the research — into multiple intelligences, our GAP skills and traits, what a spider or radar graph looks like — and then do the work.

Ask questions below.

  1. You want the printed copy, because browsers want to take the emojis I like and replace them with frankly terrible versions. This is an example of browser-based umwelt, by the way: See xkcd here. ↩