SBG Year 2: Initial Thoughts

Okay, time for some brainstorming! I mentioned in my last post that I have a LOT of areas for improvement in my implementation of SBG. I got all inspired reading the comments to Shawn’s post where people shared how they make reassessing work, and here are my initial thoughts, very much subject to change.

1. I want to start each day with either a warm-up (over new material, from the last day or so) or a quiz (over material I expect the students to understand). It could be either one on any given day, depending on what I feel like the class needs.
   
2. Warm-ups are only given comments, no scores.
   
3. Quizzes are given comments and scores.
   
4. Quizzes cover multiple Learning Targets. Students are told when a Learning Target will be quizzed for the first time, but older Learning Targets are always a possibility.
   
5. Students may use their notes & textbooks during warm-ups, but not during quizzes. (Consideration: Maybe if students feel completely lost on a quiz, they can pull out book & notes and just make a note of that before turning it in? It would go down as a score of 1, but at least they would have the ability to work on learning it better rather than staring at it and then turning in something blank.)
   
6. Occasionally, Learning Targets may be assessed via a project (in or out of class, group or individual), or through demonstration of mastery in class discussion.
   
7. I think I’ll no longer be using the “most recent score wins” as my way of determining grades. ActiveGrade has several options for how to determine a student’s current score on a Learning Target, and I will play around with those some more before deciding on a method.
   
8. For individual reassessments, each class will have an assigned day on which students can come in at lunch to reassess. In order to reassess that week, the student must respond to the following questions at least 2 (3?) school days ahead of their class’s day.
   
   1. What went wrong before?
      
   2. What have you done to improve your understanding? Provide evidence of the work you’ve done.
      
   3. How do you know that your understanding is better now?
      
   4. How would you explain this concept to a friend?
   
   
9. I think I’m not going to set a specific limit for how many Learning Targets a student can reassess at once, but I will reserve the right to say “too many” if I feel like that’s the case. Lunch is only so long, and Learning Targets do vary in complexity and time required to demonstrate understanding.
   
10. I also want to allow a student to suggest an alternative method of demonstrating understanding. In theory I was doing this last year, but I didn’t regularly encourage it, so students rarely stepped up. I would love to have kids say, “Mrs. Dean, I think I really get it now. Let me show you a way that I figured out I can use it.”

So…what do you guys think? Help me work through and refine these ideas. :) Also feel free to comment on whether this sounds like a system someone else will be able to step in and use with relative ease, since I will be taking maternity leave during the third quarter.