As I mentioned in the last post, I weigh jGR at 65% of the grade. But how frequently do I assess using jGR? A teacher asked me this question in an email:
Q. In your new book you mentioned using jGR for a daily assessment. Do you make that assessment every day for every kid? I love it, but I know I wouldn’t have time between classes to do that every day, and I am concerned that I might forget how well they did by the end of the day.
A. I totally agree with your concern about remembering what each kid did. With me it’s not that I might forget, I actually do forget how they did because I don’t care. I did not become a teacher to assess people. This is where I differ from a lot of our group members who are much more responsible than me in keeping up with jGR.
The PLC members have been talking about a computer program called dojo where you make categories for how the kids do on jGR on a daily basis (head down, no English, clarifies meaning with the hand over the head move, etc.)
But if a teacher has 150 kids and has to quantify, mark in a chart somewhere how many times a kid does a certain thing, they can’t teach. I can’t anyway. The class gives itself over to assessment of kids many of whom don’t care. Being a right brainer, I just literally cannot do that, note behaviors, any more than I could fly to the moon.
So this is a big discussion and, since what we do is a process reflecting the individual personalities and whims of each teacher, and not a method that all teachers must, robot like, do all in the same way (gag me!), we each get to decide how often and in what way we assess with the rubric.
That said, I will agree that a teacher can be too slack with jGR. You can’t just slap a generalized jGR grade down at the end of every few weeks. The kids see that and their performance goes down because you are not “on them” every day with a grade with the powerful tool that jGR is to keep them in line. So you can overdo and underdo jGR in my opinion.
(This is such a weird conversation. A person should want to learn a language! But we in schools have turned kids off to learning so deeply that we have to do this kind of marshaling of their behavior with rubrics and stuff. So fricking weird.)
Anyway, I am guilty of jGR slackness and this year I definitely will grade more often with jGR, like maybe four days a week, quickly after class. But I won’t mark down individual behaviors that I see or don’t see on a chart built for that kind of observation of what individual kids are doing.
To each her own on this one.