FIAE+B1+Chapter+13

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Jasmine
Chapter 13 describes different types of grade book formats that all work well in a differentiated classroom. the fact of the matter is that no gradebook or system fits every classroom, and it is important that a teacher notices this. The type of grade book chosen depends on the students, curriculum, and the teacher. All of them have their strengths and weaknesses, which Wormeli clearly addresses, but I particularly like two of grade book formats. I like the “Grading Assignments by Date “ grade book (p. 166-168). This grade book allows the teacher to put in grades in a timelines so he or she can look at a students growth over time. This can help a teacher decide whether to focus on the most recent grades to use for the report card, or to use all of them as they configure how the student has been improving. I like this way of viewing a students grades and I will definitely consider using it as a teacher. The “Topics-Based Gradebook” (p. 168-171) incorporates many types of grading into one. It uses a timeline, standards/understanding, and a 4-point scale. It is excellent for differentiating as the teacher merely can change the standards for the grading and explain why. Each assignment also gets grading on several standards/understandings for one assignment so the teacher can recognize where a student’s strength and weaknesses are. Teachers are able to explain to parents in detail where their child is struggling, improving, and excelling. I think it’s a great format but definitely one I will use once I get used to teaching because it is very complex with all its components. At first, I will probably start with something a bit more simple to avoid too much confusion, but it sounds very interesting, and is definitely something that I will want to use in my classroom.

Ally
I think grade book format should be personal preference, if one does not like a certain format then they should find a format that is comfortable to them. Ultimately your grade book needs to be organized for you to understand and keep track of grades. Grades mean the world to many of the students because they effect sports and for some, their home lives. A teacher needs to be able to teach and then keep track of the grades. The book had many different formats on how to do this. I personally prefer the grade book where the work is ordered by the date or by weight. Those both make sense to me to do because they are organized and students understand them in the grade book. The one that did not make sense to me was the symbol grading. I feel like that is way too complicated for a teacher to keep track of. Teachers can easily get confused with what the symbols possibly means. If you are going to use a grade book then they need to have it organized in a way they can understand. I feel like having a key is too much work for making a key and then having different grades symbolizing the different grades. This could effect my students because if my grade book is organized then it will effect grades and the outcomes because they might get missed or averaged incorrectly. This could effect my classroom because if I get the mess up the grade book it effects all of my students.

Tyler
Chapter thirteen discusses different gradebook formats in differentiated classrooms. Now, there is no one universal gradebook that works for all teachers. Teachers should try to implement different grading formats that fit their needs for the class they are teaching. One way teachers can organize their gradebook is by grouping assignments by standard, objective, or benchmark. The figure provided in the book(13.1) gives a visual example of what a gradebook that assesses by standard, objective, or benchmark would look like. This allows teachers to record two grades for the same assignment. While this may be a little more work, it more accurately assesses a student's mastery of a subject.

Another strategy is to group assignments by weight or category. Weighted assignments means that some assignments are worth more than others. For example, a research paper is worth more than a test, which is more than a quiz, which is more than homework. These weights can also be adjusted to students with disabilities. A student who has a writing disability may have the weight of their papers lowered in order to accurately reflect their mastery of the content.

Probably the most simple way to organize a gradebook is to list assignments by date due. This allows teachers to see which students turned in which assignments on which day more easily. Also, most computer gradebook programs allow teachers to color code their assignments, so tests, quizzes and homework all have different colors. The teacher could also categorize their gradebook by subject. This is a good way for the teacher to see how well students did on specific topics in comparison to other topics. All of these strategies work well for different teachers in different situations.

Abby
Chapter 13 of //Fair Isn’t Always Equal// continues to look at grades, but this time focuses on the actual maintaining of a grade book. There are many different ways to organize a grade book and this chapter gave a few examples of how that could be done. Wormeli suggested having teachers organize grade by date to show growth or decline or having the students grades sorted into categories. This way the teacher can assign different weights to different categories and make quizzes worth more than homework or papers more than tests. This also can be beneficial for students that are struggling in a certain aspect of mastery do to learning disabilities that category can be weighted a little less. Another format he suggests is having different mastery categories and have multiple grades for each test, paper, or assignment and keeping track of their mastery that way. This can be a bit time consuming, but it does a better job actually assessing student progress. I honestly had never put this much thought into how I would keep a grade book. I always thought that I would just write done the grades that the students deserved and then add them up and average them at the end of the quarter to find out what the overall grade they had was. I see now that there is way more to it than that. I see the point that averaging is not fair because a student may not understand a concept at first but that by the end of the grading period they have reached full mastery why should their original misunderstanding be held against him or her.

Katie
This chapter of Fair Isn’t Always Equal discusses what teachers should do when they put grades into the grade book and how the grades should be formatted. Teachers should format their grade book by what the assignment is, what it is trying to prove that the student can do once it is accomplished, and what standard the assignment is covering. Each of these categories makes it easier for the teacher to see what they are grading their students on. It also helps to differentiate the grading according to who the student is because the way the grade book is set up, the students are being graded for how well they are doing as individual students. When I become a teacher, I think that I will organize my grade book first by the date the assignment was supposed to be completed and then I will have them organized in such a pattern that it might go homework, quizzes, and then tests just so that I know what happened and when it happened. I also like the idea of organizing the grade book by the standard that the assignment was accomplishing and giving more detail of what the assignment was so that when parents can look at their student’s progress report, they can have a better understanding of how well their child is doing on certain criteria in the class. I feel that it is important for parents to understand their child’s progress and report cards because it helps them to stay on top of what their child is doing in class and how well they are doing.

Lizz
Chapter 13 in FIAE is about the different types of grade book formats for the differentiated classroom. Grade books are all different and there is no one grade book format that works best for all teachers. There are three grade books formats that I found interesting which are grouping assignments by standards, listing assignments by date, and topic-based grade book. The good thing about the grouping assignments by standards is that at any given time the teacher can ask how the student is doing regarding a particular standard or benchmark. The grade book that I like the best is listing assignments by date. It has the advantage of looking at student’s progress over time. With the technological advances we have today we can make an electric grade book and we can color-code the different assignments. I think as a teacher I will use this way for my grade books because I like the fact that I can see the student’s growth over time and it will show the strengths and weaknesses. In addition, I like the fact that I can color-code it since I sometimes can be a visual learner. The last grade book format is called topics-based grade books and it seems time consuming at first but it gets easier the more teachers do it. The students get specific feedback, which results in better learning. To me though this grade book format looks hard and confusing and I would not want to figure it out as a student either. Overall, as a future teacher grade, books are very important but every teacher has their own way of doing things and mine might not even be any of the ones mentioned in this chapter.

Jake
This chapter talks about different ways a teacher can organize his/her grade book. Wormeli outlines a variety of ways and the three that stick out to me the most are Organizing by date, organizing by standard, and or organizing by topic. The each one has obvious pros and cons, and one thing that Wormeli does point out is that there is no wrong way for a teacher to organize their grade book.

Personally, I have never thought about how I would even begin to organize a grade book. I. more than likely, would have shown up to my first job and simply started with day one and kept on going. However, if I was going to use one of the formats that Wormeli provided I would most likely go with organizing by date. This would allow for me to see the student’s progress over time and I would be able to outline the points when they were struggling, both in individually and as a class. Also, because the class units would be topic based, organizing them by date would be essentially the same as organizing them by topic. The only difference would be the label you put in the grade book, and potentially the way you think about it overall.

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Jenn
Chapter 13 strictly discusses discovering the gradebook format that works best for your differentiated classroom. As the book so wonderfully states, "Flexibility, not rigidity, enables trees to withstand the changing winds; it's good advice for our gradebooks as well." This statement is a great way to be introduced to when thinking about gradebook formats. Using gradebooks to focus on the standards in which the student was assessed, instead of the assessment itself makes gradebooks more worthwhile, especially for reporting services. It helps make it easier to understand which topics each student hasn't fully mastered in relation to the standards, not to the percentages of what each assessment they completed. Once again, this goes back to the idea of differentiated instruction. Differentiated instruction is teaching everyone the same objectives but using different methods to get there. If you use a gradebook in the way that the book is suggesting, then differentiated instruction is being supported in the gradebook as well as in the learning process in the classroom. After all, how else are you supposed to actually use differentiate instruction if you aren't using it in assessment and grading? As the book also mentions creating a gradebook this way allows the teacher to weight their categories for each student for a more accurate representation of the student's mastery. The chapter also suggests using a median or mode as a more accurate representation of reporting a composite grade for an individual student, rather than using the mean when there is a higher difference in scores.

Caleb "DJ Fletchy Fletch" Fletcher
When I heard grade book as a student I pictured a legendary tome that the teacher carried around. They were like magical wizards that were able to concoct grades out of numbers written on pages. It was like watching Gandalf and Dumbledore combine into one realistic human being. Sadly, however, as I’ve grown up and learned the ways of math I learned that it’s not as magical as I use to believe. It’s even more! Math is a wondrous and beautiful device that is able to do so much. This chapter shows us teachers how to develop our ancient tome exercise in a differentiated classroom. It suggests that we label our assignments individual with corresponding letters and make sure that everything is organized. Wait a second; I believe this book is telling me that in order to grade I must be a clipboard. Surprisingly, I am all right with that. It makes sense that in order for a student to be on do well a teacher has to be organized and ready for him. This chapter gives us clear examples of how we go about doing that. From listing assignments to how we can grade them on this magical tome known as a spreadsheet. We are going to make what has been known as magical tomes even more incredible because known we will have a source to see how our students are mastering the subject. As a teacher in my own classroom, I can’t wait to have one of these grade books. I actually want to get a large leather bound one and call it my tome., mainly because it has quite a good ring to it.

Dan
It is pretty clear that grades are going to be a major part and problem of being a teacher. It is hard enough to correctly give students the grades they deserve, as many times it seems very subjective. Now teachers are faced with keeping a grade book and properly labeling each assignment. This chapter provides helpful ways of going about keeping a grade book. One way to keep a grade book is to have the standards listed in the columns above the assignment. I believe this is a great way to keep track of grades, because it does not necessary assess the tests, assignments and so on, but rather shows how the student has grown in each standard. Our ultimate goal as educators is to show student understanding, not how well they can take a test. The other method of keeping a grade book that I agree with is the topics-based grade book. It is very organized, has a key to keep track of each and every individual assignment, and with advances in technology, it is easy to create. It might take some extra work, as each subject and topic is given its own grade, but I like the way it is organized and can easily be followed. When I have my own classroom, I will try and create a grade book that organizes each topic so I can give them each a grade, and also incorporates the use of the standards as guidelines for my grading as well.

Alex "Slack Master Flash" Slack
When it comes to formatting in my classroom I believe to not put so much effort into grades but instead grade more on effort. What I mean by this is that in this chapter it stress so much how you grade book is formatted and what point scale to use and so one and so forth we can beat this topic to death. Yet what I believe is fair as well as equal and can always be seen like that in my eyes is that you can genuinely grade based on effort in the classroom besides if students learn the material that is great but as teachers we just want our students to learn so ye si understand the value of grades, but make it something achievable to every student in yoru class therefore always have effort and understanding being gauged yet at the same time know that you do not always have to fall back on grades I would say that structure your grade book how you seem fit in the classroom, yes if you are a clipboard and want to go straight from the text then do it, but when it comes to modeling your grade book it is something I think you feel more as a teacher than write as an instructor.

Roger
The thirteenth chapter of FIAE covers the setup of gradebooks and how they might impact the classroom. The author went over various strategies for grade recording and which strategies might be more effective. This is kind of nice to know, but it does not seem necessary to take a whole chapter for it. Various arrangements have their benefits and their flaws, which again goes back to a common sense sort of thing. Again, this is a nice thing to know, but does not need the amount of detail that was put into the chapter. I do not feel like there is much to write for this chapter, as it seemed like a lot of filler. Pretty much the only thing that comes into my mind when reviewing this chapter is, “cool, options.” Really the most effective method will be whichever way the teacher decides to organize their gradebook – the person who creates the gradebook will most likely know how to best navigate it.

Brittany
This chapter discussed different types of formats that teachers use in their gradebooks. I think this is one area that should be completely up to how the teacher feels will best show and organize their students work. I personally like the format that organizes items by category, which I would include the dates as well, because then I can see the student's progress over time in that category. I could also see their strengths and weaknesses and where I need to focus my attention on for that student in particular. I think that it would be hard for me to have to follow a format such as the "Topics Based" approach because it uses letter codes and I feel like it could be easily messed up on accident. Overall I did get some new ideas from this chapter on types of gradebook formats, the one I had never seen before and found interesting was "Grading According to Standards Approach". I think it would be difficult at first but inevitably very useful.