How to grade differentiated assignments

Whenever there is discussion of differentiation, or creating and using differentiated assignments, one of the biggest struggles that comes to my mind, and I think for many other teachers, is how to grade those assignments fairly (and hopefully without creating excessive work for the teacher).

It can be overwhelming to think about how to grade all these different assignments or how to make sure that students are fairly evaluated when they're given different assignments here are a few ideas:

First of all, keep in mind that in some cases differentiation is simply another way to learn the content, or practice with the content, and that it does not need to be graded separately. It is a different way to arrive at the same goal and only feedback or formative assessment may need to be given.

If you do decide to grade the differentiated assignment, here are a few suggestions:

1. You could create a checklist and then simply add or subtract a few items on that list from the differentiated assignment.
2. Create a rubric so that whichever format of an assignment students are doing they need to meet the same general criteria but they might meet it in different ways.  The rubric should be focused on the content and the goals of the assignment, not the format.  Here is an example of that. Along with rubrics, here is a more in-depth discussion of something called the “slide rubric” which allows students to show growth, and to show more differences between levels on the rubric. It would take a bit of work to set up, but be easy to score when finished. 
3. The differentiation may be scaffolding that is provided within the assignment, in order to reach the same goal. So, it may not be visible in the final grading.  The final assignment that is turned in may be the same, but it may have some scaffolding built in. 
4. If it's a small assignment, you might want to consider giving a check, or a completion grade for partially complete, incomplete, or not done scale, given whatever their assignment directions were.
5. Assessment could also focus on progress monitoring, such as showing growth, depending upon the needs of your classroom.  I think elementary classrooms do a much better job at this than secondary.  We have a lot to learn from them!! 

As you are thinking about this, remember that 

Grading should ultimately reflect the standards so you're grading should come back to what are the key points that students need to know did they demonstrate their understanding?? Maybe they demonstrated them in different ways but if they sufficiently demonstrated that they know the material that should be the focus of their grading. In other words, the grading is tied to the content of the project, not the format of the project. This is discussed further in this webpage (a very thorough look at differentiation, with a discussion of grading).

If you are using technology, Google Classroom has great options for differentiation as well, that you should be aware of! This article doesn’t specifically address grading, although it touches on it, but it is a great description of using Google Classroom to differentiate, and may give you some great ideas!

As far as a more theoretical perspective, here is a great slideshow from Carol Tomlinson (Differentiation Guru) on grading. She outlines 6 principles on grading that absolutely apply to grading differentiated work as well, and help put things in perspective.

How have you differentiated and graded those differentiated assignments in your classroom? I would love if you would share your experience and your ideas with us either in the comments here, or in our Facebook group.

Help Your Students Struggling with Vocabulary

My Students Know the Content -- Why Do They Test So Poorly?

You may have been taught and prepared to teach your students the content. You have spent time doing that, and you think they understand. Then you give them standardized test questions and they bomb, they shut down, or they keep calling you over very confused. How can this be? You thought you taught them this information?

Sometimes it's not the content words that students are struggling with, but instead it's the non-content vocabulary or the Tier 2 vocabulary. In other words, they know the content but they don't understand the questions or they don't understand the reading passage. If they don't really understand what they are being asked, they can't begin to answer the question.

So many of our students don't have the background knowledge and vocabulary, they may be ELL students or they may just not have a lot of academic vocabulary.

So what can we do about this? 

We need to teach our students this vocabulary! And to successfully teach vocabulary students need practice with those words in several different ways. Of course, this seem like an overwhelming task try to bring our students up to grade level with their vocabulary during science class or another content class but it doesn't have to be as difficult as it sounds. I have written about this before, but I was asked for more specifics on how I implement that strategies and vocabulary that I use.

Here is what I have done

Here is what I did to work on tackling that problem and I'm hoping it will help you too. I went through our last couple years of State exams as well as a few other resources and I compiled a list of Tier 2 vocabulary words. I also asked my students, as we did practice questions throughout the year, what words they didn't know or were confusing and added to the list. I also shared resources with a few other teachers. At that point I had a very good list of words.

I use those first for warm ups. Here are the basic steps that I follow:

• I took a word a day, usually, and I gave them a sentence or a picture to infer, or comparison to another word. 
• Then I had them try to conceptualize and infer what they thought the definition of the word was. 

I would usually project these on the board, and have students record their answers. This could, of course, be done in a Google Form, slide, on paper, or many other formats that fit with your classroom routines. This did two things at once: (1) they got to practice the skill of inferencing and using context clues to figure out the meaning of a word that they didn't know, (2) they also started to get familiar with some of these words.

I would usually do one word a day so five words a week and then after the end of the week or at the end of 2 weeks we would have a little quiz on those words. Sometimes it would just be a matching quiz, sometimes question that had one of those or a reading passage that had one of those words so they could see it in context.

After awhile, it was amazing, students started to learn some of the words but more importantly they started to gain confidence. When we do test questions where they would run across those words I would start to hear things like “Oh, I know this word!” “This is a word we just did last week.” They were not longer foreign, but were familiar instead. Even if they didn’t remember all the definitions, the vocabulary had lost its power to be scary!

What's the Next Step

It's so important that these are integrated in throughout the year and the students practice using them so that it's not an isolated thing. To facilitate this, when we did stations for other topics (I do a lot of stations in my classroom) I usually throw in one extra station to focus on those vocabulary words. It might be the same thing as what is on the board, as a review, but a few task cards printed out. It could be matching up words and definitions either on paper or on Quizlet. Sometimes the station would focus on vocabulary more subtly because it would ask them to write a test question using some of those words (maybe with a word bank or sentence stems). It's so important that they see these over and over again so that they lose their fear and mystery.

Where Can I Find Out More

More strategies are outlined in this great article 8 Steps to Tier 2 Academic Vocabulary in Your Students and here Enriching Academic Vocabulary: Strategies for Teaching Tier Two Words to E.L.L. Students.

This is something that you could easily implement on your own but if you would like to make it easy, my complete set of over 200 words (more than enough to use one every day) they're available here

Here are a few of the pieces of feedback I have gotten on this resource.  I hope it can be helpful to you as well!

I also wrote more about this strategy in these other posts, here, here, here, here, and here.

How do the New NGSS Standards really affect me?

As Next Generation Science Standards come out, and start to be utilized in more states, and more classrooms, you may be wondering how this affects your science classroom.

I participated in this very basic short training for NGSS, and had some discussion in this facebook group. Through that reflection I thought I had a beginning understanding of NGSS, at least how it is set up, and had some thoughts about how it would affect my classroom. I was waiting to see how the assessments worked, but felt that I had a pretty good start. 

 

Now, however, I am working on designing curriculum for a new course that that will be aligned to NGSS, and I found myself again confused and thinking through some of the issues surrounding it.

I wanted to write a post where I share with you a few of the main points that I am taking away, and hopefully open up some further discussion.

A little background on NGSS

Make sure you check out the NGSS website. It is pretty easy to navigate, and has sections on Understanding the NGSS. Two of the most useful handouts, in my opinion, were

• How to Read the NGSS
• NGSS Cheat Sheet (from the training, not the NGSS Website) 
• and The NGSS Fact Sheet (especially page 2) 

As you may have noticed right away, each standard is broken down into performance expectations (what students need to know or be able to do to demonstrate competence), framework dimensions, and then correlations to common core.

The NGSS draws from three dimensions. These are as follows:

• Disciplinary core ideas: our traditional content - subject matter
• Science and engineering practices: what may previously have been called science skills such as using models, planning and carrying out investigations, analyzing and interpreting data, etc.
• Cross-Cutting concepts: concepts and themes the cross many different science areas - such as patterns, cause and effect, stability and change, etc. 

These dimensions remain constant across grades P-12, but obviously go into greater depth at higher grade levels.

The NGSS are also correlated to Common Core, so they support math and literacy integrated into the science classroom.

These changes were made with a few larger shifts in mind. The shifts are:

• from isolation to integration
• from science inquiry to science and engineering practices
• from discrete science ideas to science and engineering crosscutting concepts

As we look at using NGSS in the classroom, it is not a complete departure from what we have been doing. These standards emphasize greater depth, problems solving, writing, engineering design and problem solving, and more progression through the grades. This is in line with teaching science as inquiry, using the 5 E’s, phenomena-based teaching, and many other good science teaching practices, but often takes it a step farther. As part of NGSS, these science and engineering practices and cross-cutting practices need to be taught more explicitly than we are used to doing. We may think that we are already teaching them, but in NGSS they get more emphasis as skills and content in their own right.

Here are a few of the ‘takeaways’ from our PD circle in the Facebook Group

Engineering design:

The biggest takeaways for me from this module were the embedded skills, and the process itself - collaboration, optimization, and revision, grit. I think it is important to explicitly teach these skills. A lot of projects, or even experimental design lend themselves well to this if we spend more time on the design process rather than giving students a step by step method, but teach them modeling and design skills. It’s not so hard to do, but a different perspective.

Cross-cutting concepts

I learned that it is important to “draw the concepts into the foreground”. We can (usually) easily recognize patterns or cause and effect but students really struggle with those relationships. Starting to use the terms with young children is exciting because much like a foreign language it will be easier to become more fluent in science and get to a deeper understanding of science content in middle and high school.

I do think it requires a re working of lesson activities and instructional formats. I know most of my stuff mainly reflects disciplinary core ideas. I have to work in the practices and concepts more and make more integrated performance assessments.

Focus on a few at a time and be intentional! Looking at the planning sheet our district made, it matches completely with this idea. So manageable! Also, I agree that we need to pull them into the foreground, like the depth and complexity icons.

Science and Engineering Practices

I learned that science is really a much more round about discipline, which is so different than what I’ve always learned and taught. I realized how much more integrated science should be, and that I should be talking about it like that in class. Doing science in class was completing rigid labs to achieve a desired outcome. I started off teaching that way, but have loosened up over the years to encourage students to create their own investigations. BTW, I much prefer the term investigation to experiment. It can include so much more.

I need to be much more intentional in pointing out the practices not only when we do them, but whenever the opportunities arise. I liked identifying them in the video and article.

The students need to talk, and they need to experience by learning.

Science is messy, and it is so good for the students to see this. It is hard to let go of control and fear that the students will not learn what they need to learn. It may take longer and be louder, but it is good for them! They might be wrong sometimes, but over a few practices, can correct misconceptions.

How to match up the standards to your curriculum

When trying to match up the standards to my curriculum I got a bit overwhelmed at first because of the different dimensions. After looking at some other resources, and talking to some colleagues, here are the conclusions that I came to:

The part I am correlating my curriculum to is the performance expectations at the top. There are much fewer of these than there were in our previous state standards, but they are broad and more comprehensive, so as you teach them, you are covering more content.

These performance expectations also lend themselves well to developing projects that would demonstrate competency in these areas.

One, or just a few performance expectations might cover an entire unit.

However, as you are teaching these, you want to keep the other dimensions in mind.

For example. When you teach the core disciplinary ideas, make sure that you are including some problem solving, engineering design, and cross-cutting science concepts. Also make those cross cutting concepts really clear and explicit

Where do I find examples of NGSS in practice?

As you are looking for NGSS aligned lessons and further resources, I put together a few websites that I found while searching:

• NSTA has an NGSS Hub that can be searched by grade level and core idea
• The Next Generation Science Website itself has some sample classroom performance assessment tasks. There is not a big library here, but growing, and they give good examples of how the different dimensions are integrated.
• If you prefer videos and examples, rather than lesson plans per se, The Teaching Channel has a “Deep Dive Guide to NGSS” and quite a few videos where you can see it in practice. 
• One of my favorites - since NGSS is focused on finding phenomena, and students acting as scientists to explain, I love this database of phenomena that can be searched by standard! 
• Lastly, although it may be a bit overwhelming, this concept map is a wealth of information on everything NGSS related! As I get further into NGSS, I definitely plan to explore it much farther!! 

I know some of you are way ahead of me in how your states are implementing NGSS. If you have insights or examples I’d love if you’d share them either here or in the facebook group.