No Quarter Given
Grade abatement from Q1 to Q2
Read on for general feedback about the first quarter of grade abatement for 2015. After a long discussion of your GAP reports, there is an assignment. If you haven’t slogged through it already, start by reading this essay:
Part 1: Chasing the Dragon
Student-submitted GAP scores for Q1 fell into one of three categories:
- Accurate
- High
- Low
That’s obvious. It might also be obvious that the students in Group #2 need the most feedback. First, though, let’s address Group #3:
(The spelling of this — imposter versus impostor — seems to be arbitrary. Try not to think about it too much. I broke the gestalt part of my brain by researching the difference, so both words look like nonsense to me. That’s called semantic satiation, by the way, and it’s worth a parenthetical mention.)
This is a financial column in The New York Times that includes a good bit of universal insight into why we discount our own successes. At some point, we are all likely to do this, especially as we learn more about our limits and potential. It’s part of the learning model we’ve discussed before:
But that doesn’t mean that Group #2 is arrogant or ignorant. Far from it. Whatever is going on is more complicated than that. Back on September 5, it was likened to an addiction:
I think this is about semiotics, which is the study of signs and meaning-making. Grades are symbolic, and they corrupt how we interpret learning. Learning can be incremental. It can be desultory. It can happen in bursts and epiphanies. It should be individualized. What we do should be closer to jazz than a funeral dirge — but grades prevent that.
The hope of grade abatement is to compartmentalize grades and learning. It’s like sublimation: We skip over the usual mathematics (weighting assignments, floating standards, dropping grades) and straight to a a state of abstraction. The learning is independent from the final grade, even as we build evidence of the profiles over time.
The best way to talk about this stuff — sublimated semiotics, to be a little pretentious about it — is to look at the two most common errors in Q1 GAP reports:
- Asking for a 9 when the evidence fit an 8
- Asking for a 5+ or 6 when the evidence fit a 5-
Part 2: Reasoning Forward, Not Backward
If your evidence didn’t match the score, the correction was made for you. That gives you the chance to use the correct score as a means of reverse-engineering feedback. You can also seek out students in your peer group who did fit the profile you wanted. Reading their reports will give you more insight than just about any other approach.
This is another part of that Occam’s Razor post: It is always better if you come to a conclusion on your own, rather than being dragged to it. What you need to know about this course, about grade abatement, and about why you fit the profile you fit — 95% of it is available to you already.
The onus is on you. If you don’t search for an explanation, that ignorance will carry over into future failures just as inevitably.
If, on the other hand, you want to be a 9, there is a way to do that, and I think it starts with an effort to think about the goal in different language. Don’t say, “I want to be a 9.” That’s reasoning backward from the grade. Say, “I want to improve [x],” and then fill in that [x] with all the skills and traits and artifacts that the best students produce. Say, “I want to show the greatest possible strength in writing,” and then figure out what that sort of strength looks like.
If you want to avoid the 5- you earned, you can’t say, “I want to avoid a 4.” That, too, is reasoning backward from the grade. Say, “I want to improve [x],” where [x] is the skill or trait you lacked in the previous quarter. Say, “I want to stop wasting class time,” and then build that habit over several weeks.
The more you are able to think in terms of evidence and specific learning, not numbers, the less the numbers will matter. Your goal isn’t to excise numbers entirely from your thinking, however. To avoid these paragraphs each being 500 words long, I’m going to refer to GAP 9s and GAP 8s, and you should lean on that shorthand, too — as long as you are able to compartmentalize and focus on skills and traits at the same time.
Part 3: Individualized Learning
First, let’s look at the grades themselves. You need this Medium essay:
Whether or not you read it the first time it was given to you, read it now. It’s been revised, and you’ll now find a letter at the beginning that clarifies a few things about grade abatement.
It’s true, as it says in that letter, that you are able to take risks in here. You are rewarded (for lack of a better word) for everything positive you do. But you still need to demonstrate exemplary traits and skills to earn a 9. You need to be highly skilled to earn an 8. To avoid a 5- or 5+, you need to be consistent and reliable, and your mistakes can catch up with you quickly.
Consider our usual bell curve:
Most students, at least initially, fall somewhere between a 5+ and an 8. This image isn’t based on hard data, nor is it prescriptive. It’s a visualization of an idea. But after five years of pushing grade abatement up the mountain, I’m telling you: Most students, at least initially, fall between a 5+ and 8. The 9 is rare. The 5- is rare, too.
If you fell into one of the lower profiles, you shouldn’t need much feedback beyond what is available in many, many other places. Focus on your use of time and resources. Meet with me as necessary. Make sure you get your assignments done — and done well — by any deadline.
If, however, you are trying to turn your 7 or 8 into something more, the feedback is simple: Make this course unique. Make it yours. Individualize it. That approach will make the work more enjoyable and it will yield the strongest and longest-lasting skills and traits.
You can best do this by utilizing radial and proxy feedback. Meet with me in groups during the period, and when possible, talk to students who’ve already made this course their own. Then start to figure out how to adjust lessons, texts, and even writing prompts to suit your individual needs.
The correlation between doing that kind of heavy lifting and receiving a 9 is high. It’s not causal — the difference is important (and sometimes hilarious) — but it obviously matters if you can set aside time to individualize the course in this way.
It’s also often as simple as taking advantage of opportunities that come your way. Can you get to school early? Touch base for five minutes. Do you happen to have lunch P4, P6, or P7? Think about stopping by 214 to work with your peers. Do you want to come into a P5 study hall and talk about English? That works, too.
The point: I’ll meet with you whenever I can. I’ll give you whatever help you need, even if you don’t avail yourself of what’s online. If your parents need an explanation, they should be able to ask you, because you are the centerpiece of this course; but if that’s not possible, I will meet with them, too.
You have enough in the way of resources to make yourself an expert in your own learning, and this is a course that doesn’t just encourage that — it requires that. You are the beating heart of what we do.
Part 4: And on that Note, Some SWOT Analysis
To create the best version of you, you must become an expert in your own learning. You’ve done a considerable amount of metacognitive work already, but there is always more to do. This time, we’re looking to expand your “network of possible wanderings,” a term used by Teresa Amabile to define expertise:
Expertise encompasses everything that a person knows and can do in the broad domain of his or her work. Take, for example, a scientist at a pharmaceutical company who is charged with developing a blood-clotting drug for hemophiliacs. Her expertise includes her basic talent for thinking scientifically as well as all the knowledge and technical abilities that she has in the fields of medicine, chemistry, biology, and biochemistry. It doesn’t matter how she acquired this expertise, whether through formal education, practical experience, or interaction with other professionals. Regardless, her expertise constitutes what the Nobel laureate, economist, and psychologist Herb Simon calls her “network of possible wanderings,” the intellectual space that she uses to explore and solve problems. The larger this space, the better.
The emphasis is mine. The next paragraph offers examples:
Creative thinking, as noted above, refers to how people approach problems and solutions — their capacity to put existing ideas together in new combinations. The skill itself depends quite a bit on personality as well as on how a person thinks and works. The pharmaceutical scientist, for example, will be more creative if her personality is such that she feels comfortable disagreeing with others — that is, if she naturally tries out solutions that depart from the status quo. Her creativity will be enhanced further if she habitually turns problems upside down and combines knowledge from seemingly disparate fields. For example, she might look to botany to help find solutions to the hemophilia problem, using lessons from the vascular systems of plants to spark insights about bleeding in humans.
Again, the emphasis is mine. Read the rest at The Harvard Business Review.
Your assignment is to create and complete a personal SWOT analysis. Read the directions first:
Your next step is to determine how to adapt this tool to meet your needs. You could use the worksheet MindTools designed, or you could head over to Google to search for other templates, models, and approaches to SWOT analysis. There are dozens.
Find one that works for you, and then adapt it to meet your individual needs. Complete that SWOT analysis with as much insight and detail as possible.
The deadlines and other requirements are cross-posted on Sisyphean High and Google Classroom. This assignment ought to develop organically, however, through conversation and experimentation.
For reference, here is the infographic designed by MindTools:
