Bill, I'm really impressed with the practices your school is implementing.
Can you share some of the process that led to these steps?
In the second paragraph below you describe your efforts to allow more
student directed learning in a class. I'm wondering if there are schools
thinking about implementing a school or division wide pedagogical version of
Google's 20% rule?
Fred
On Wed, Mar 3, 2010 at 8:54 PM, Bill Ivey <bivey01370@gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi!
>
> Our middle school program did abolish letter grades this year. We're
> using standards-based assessment with a scale of "Mastered -
> Developing - Needs Attention - No Basis for Assessment." It has been a
> pretty smooth transition all in all. Students are much more focused on
> the narrative comments in progress reports than ever before, we don't
> have parents stressing about the different between an A- and a B+ ,
> and pretty much everyone is in "as long as there's growth and it's
> clear what each student needs to work on " mode.
>
> On empowering students - I can think of two main ways I try to do
> that. One is that I do not determine content for six out of the nine
> units in my Humanities 7 class. We use the seed questions, "What do
> you want to know about yourself?" and "What do you want to know about
> the world?" and group together the resulting questions, determine a
> theme question, and then backward design the details of the unit from
> that point.
>
> The other thing I do is to try to give MOCA, the middle school student
> government, a genuine voice. For example, last year they were
> complaining it was unfair that the upper school Student Council had
> voted to only allow rising 9th graders to vote in the May election for
> StuCo President. So they wrote up a request for an audience with the
> newly elected StuCo President and the faculty advisor, which was
> granted. They asked if they could have two middle school
> representatives on StuCo the following year (i.e. now), gave their
> reasons, listened to the reactions and gave their final thoughts.
> StuCo approved the idea, and so now they have representation on
> Student Council for the first time in the history of the middle
> school. They are currently trying to leverage that into having them
> all allowed to vote in this year's StuCo Presidential elections.
>
> There's a couple of examples, at any rate.
>
> Take care,
> Bill Ivey
> Stoneleigh-Burnham School
>
>
>
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