This is a repost of a recent comment here:
It is hard to look a kid in the eye – especially one who is bright and used to getting A’s – and tell her that her OUTSIDE behavior (reference the rigor poster found on the resources page of this site) is not sufficient to get more than a 2 on the jGR. But if we give her a 3 or 4 now, she has won. She gets to be labeled either:
3 (B/C) RESPONDS REGULARLY IN TL OR VISUALLY, INCONSISTENT USE OF “STOP” SIGNAL
or
4 (A/B) RESPONDS AUTOMATICALLY, IN TL, TO ALL INPUT, INCLUDING USING “STOP” FOR CLARIFICATION
when in point of fact she is doing neither, regardless of what she is understanding ON THE INSIDE (again, see the rigor posters – resources page on this site, for clarification).
Many of us don’t own this. We give the grade. We see the kid get a 10 on a quiz and we think that they should get an A in our class and so we do it. That is the old patterning that is keeping our comprehension based instruction from really taking off because of Robert’s original point last May (2011) when he pointed to the Three Modes of Communication and basically asked, “Hey, do these count? Is not the main piece of the national standards the Communication piece?”
(In my view Communication certainly is the main standard compared to the other ones like the ultra lame “Comparisons” – what the hell does that even mean? And the “Connections” one is even more lame. Give me a frickin’ break.)
So you take the kid with the 10/10 on the quiz and you give her this:
2 (C/D) ATTENTIVE BUT DOESN’T RESPOND; DOESN’T USE “STOP” SIGNAL
and so her grade at this point is made up of three 10’s on PQA/Story quizzes but she REALLY DOES deserve the 2 on the ACTFL Interspersonal Skill piece because she REALLY DOES NOT RESPOND even though she is attentive, and her grade drops from the A to the B or even lower and all hell breaks loose at the family teacher and the parents grab the pitchforks and head for the principal’s office and we have a “situation” and how are going to respond to it? To be clear, when we lie to the kid and the parents by putting the 3 or 4 in the gradebook we are letting this kid GET AWAY WITH not aligning with the Interpersonal Skill of the Three Modes of Communication.
Therefore this child’s grade is not based on a set of observable criteria (behaviors) that demonstrate communicative competency based on the ACTFL Performance Guidelines for Grades K-12. And she gets away with not negotiating meaning in class, just staring, and the entire argument about assessment in TPRS/CI classrooms that we have been making here for about a year and a half of rather intense discussion is completely dismantled with one click of the mouse in the gradebook bc we don’t have the courage to force the child to compoly with standards.
And, don’t forget, the first time you give a kid a 3 or 4 when they deserve a 1 – if you are in fact using the jGR to grade your students this year – then you kind of have to do it for the rest of the year. That is not serving the child, who needs to develop eye contact and all the reciprocal and participatory human skills that are so dreadfully lacking in our robotic data driven schools.
How, if we don’t hold these kids responsible to the national standards, can we say that we are doing our jobs properly? And how can we look parents in the eye and tell them that we are getting their children ready for the workplace, where communication skills far outweigh the need for a strong grade point average?