1 Grading and Differentiation: Reconcilable Differences? A Practitioner’s Journey Carol Tomlinson University of Virginia [email protected]To Untangle the Grading Knot We need to consider two elements: 1) Grading issues of particular concern in a differentiated classroom 2) Best practices in assessment and grading 3) Whether best practices in assessment & grading would adequately address the issues related to grading & differentiation. Unless we understand both the issues related to academically diverse classrooms and best practices in assessment & grading (and their interrelationship) we’ll stay tied in a knot! And unless the former leads us to solve the latter, we have a problem as well.
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To Untangle the Grading KnotWe need to consider two elements:
1) Grading issues of particular concern in a differentiated
classroom
2) Best practices in assessment
and grading
3) Whether best practices in assessment
& grading would adequately address
the issues related to grading &
differentiation.
Unless we understand both the issues related to academically diverse classrooms and best practices in assessment & grading (and theirinterrelationship) we’ll stay tied in a knot! And unless the former leads us to solve the latter, we have a problem as well.
2
The power of grades to impact
students’ lives creates a
responsibility for giving grades
in a way that reflects both
assessment best practice &
sensitivity to the human
beings we teach.
3
Some ?s about Grading &
Academic Diversity! How do learners benefit from a grading system that reminds everyone
that students who speak English as a second language do not perform
as well as students without disabilities or for whom English is not
their native tongue?
! What do we gain by telling our most able learners that they are
“excellent” on the basis of a standard that requires modest effort,
calls for n intellectual risk, necessitates no persistence, and demands
that they develop few academic coping skills?
! In what ways do our current grading practices motivate struggling or
advanced learners to persist in the face of difficulty?
! Is there an opportunity for struggling learners to encounter excellence
in our current grading practices?
! Is there an opportunity for advanced learners to encounter struggle in
our current grading practices?
Tomlinson
What is Fair in School?
Making Sure Everyone is Treated Exactly Alike?
4
What’s Fair?Daniel was born with legs that won’t carry him.
What’s fair about that?
Juan’s dad doesn’t smile because his back is too tired from picking beans or apples or whatever is growing in somebody’s field in the next place.
Roy doesn’t have a dad, smiling or not.
What’s fair about that?
Elise doesn’t talk. She doesn’t know the language of the lunchroom table, so she has no voice. No friends.
Lavon doesn’t talk because he’s afraid. His mom is sick and maybe won’t get well. He is silent but his eyes get darker every day.
Jessie has a head full of ideas that should make him happy and probably would if there were someone to talk to about them. Allthose ideas make a wall between him and the people who step back when he talks.
What’s Fair?Matthias is sixteen now. He’s been an indentured servant to the alphabet for
over a decade. There is no end to his bondage in his view.
Lindeen means to make people happy and takes the wrong path every time she tries. All the kids hate her. She must know her compass is broken. She looks sad all the time, unless it is scared.
Derek is good in math and poor and Black and doesn’t know how to make the pieces of a life he imagines come together in the dreams he doesn’t tell his friends about because maybe they’d be mad. And they’re what he has and he can’t risk the loss of them.
What’s fair in those worlds?
What’s fair anywhere?
And all those lives come together in the place called school where fair is everything.
What is fair in the place that demands all those lives that know little of fairness when they come?
Tomlinson ‘04
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What is Fair in School?
1. What role should “fair” play in school?
2. What would “fair” mean in school in order for
school to work for the full diversity of
learners?
3. How does “fair” generally work in schools
now? How does that definition of fair play
out for various learners?
4. What would “fair” mean in regard to grades?
All learners need
a balanced success
to effort ratio
6
Struggling
Learners:
Heavy Effort
Little Success
Advanced
Learners:
Great Success,
Little Effort
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The Unspoken Effect of Grades
For some students, the certainty of praise
and success in school has become a drug;
they continually need more.
For many other students, year upon year of
“not good enough” has eroded their
intellectual self-confidence and resulted in
a kind of mind-numbing malaise.
Earl, L. (2003). Assessment as learning. Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin, p. 15.
What role should grades
play in regard to the
“success to effort” ratio?
In other words, can we
do anything to moderate
negative motivational
effects of grades?
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