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
On Tue, Mar 2, 2010 at 2:07 PM, Norman Maynard <nlm1@verizon.net> wrote:
> One of my personal frustrations with the current conversation around
> educational reform (at least the admittedly small parts of the conversation
> that I hear) is that it seems so lacking in specifics.
> What other real, practical, concrete ideas can we begin pushing?
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