A graduate student from the University of Denver is spending time in my class these days. She saw the SSR going on of Houdini that I described in the previous article here. She asked how I hold the kids accountable for that. I told her about the test on Friday and basically how FVR didn’t work for my kids, it was just kind of a time to space out for lots of them.
Then, I’m going to call her Miss Accountability, she asked me how my use of jGR held the kid accountable. In other words, she asked me about how and when I graded their in-class performance according to the rubric. I thought right away of David and how he scores them quickly right at the end of class. I am too lazy for that.
So I told her that I what I do is grade the kids once per week on any given day, but I don’t tell the kids which day. (So an unexcused absence is a zero if that is the day I pick to grade them.) Now, I don’t actually pick a day, I just needed to come up with an answer for Miss Accountability. What I actually do is at the end of the week give them an Interpersonal Skill grade. But the kids don’t need to know that.
The result? The most involved classes I have ever seen in my career. By far. I’m done with asking students for anything. I’m making them show up. I wish to nominate jen for President of the Free World! And, BY THE WAY, you should have seen Annick Chen’s reaction to jGR. She went nuts. She loves you all who were in on creating it.
Annick immediately put it into chart form, we made some changes in a departmental PLC today, and the latest version is looking very snappy indeed. I call this thing a possible career saver and the greatest thing since sliced bread and Circling. I would put the link here but I don’t know how to do it bc she sent it to me as an attachment.