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Ethan Guthrie Herrell
Fair Isn’t Always Equal: Chapter 14 Teachers who try to keep the focus on the individual student and what they can do and can’t do, (a category most teachers fit in, though they do not always have the knowledge or training to do so properly), but the reality that parents have more often than not fallen in with today’s competitive atmosphere, where it is about who is ahead or in the top ranking, as though education was some sort of NASCAR race. Nevermind that each driver ends up at the same spot having driven the exact same amount of time. It’s about whose in the top rankings. You can see this in all the talk about colleges: which ones are the “best” or “prestigious.” Too few just want all of them to be better and are trying to figure out how to do that.

Writing accurate report cards has got to be one of the most stressful and difficult jobs a teacher could have. For high school teachers, they must be aware that future employers will look at these report cards. Names such as “remedial” not only inherently insults to the students, but are perceived as being truthful insults by future employers. Finally, you should always grade students on the progress they made and not on what they were not ready to achieve but were arbitrarily supposed to achieve. toc

Sam Leal
Chapter 14: Responsive Report Card Formats

Report cards are often left as just a letter next to the name of a class. When teachers differentiate for gifted students or students who may need more time than others with learning, how can that be reflected on a report card? Do grades have different meanings for different students? Report cards are to be an accurate and developmentally appropriate rendering of mastery of material and therefore this needs to be clearly communicated to the students and parents. Report cards are very important and an insightful opportunity to look at progress and student growth.

One format that is brought up in the chapter is grading towards an adjusted curriculum, in which a student is graded upon where they were as a student at the beginning of a class to their progression at the end of that grading period. I think I fit more towards a way in which you include both grading personal progress and achievement against the standards. I’ve never seen this in my high school, but it seems that it would give much more insight than other formats. One letter grade would represent their progress and the other would be a grade that they would earn against the standards. That is still really hard though, if a student earns a D3 it means they had a great year progress wise, but are still a little behind. I can see parents taking this as the teacher thinking their student as dumb. So it is very difficult as well, but definitely something to consider.

Cidney Mayes
Feedback is critical in the classroom, and also to parents. When parents or guardians receive their child’s report card, they want to know if their child is developing the way that they should be. There are several ways to communicate this information. Wormeli discusses adjusted curriculum where the student is graded within the context of their own progress, which allows the teacher to give the student the higher grade, while noting that the student receive adjusted curriculum. This is a good approach, because if the teacher records the grade that merely reflects where that students is in relation to the other students in the class, the value of their own personal growth and achievement is diminished. As the book puts it, that kind of grade “destroys hope” (175), and does not encourage that student who is making progress to continue to do so. Another format is the dual approach, which combines personal achievement and standard achievement. These types of grades combine letters and numbers to demonstrate their progress in class standards and numbers to represent their own personal growth.

I like both of these ideas, because they really focus on student growth and treat students as individuals. I think I favor the last method of using both standard achievement and personal growth, because it provides a big picture idea of where the students is as a whole. It is important to emphasize student growth, but also important to let parents and future teachers know where the student is in term of content and standard mastery. With the letter and number grade, both of these ends are met. Additionally, the comment section of the report card is incredibly useful for providing any additional information or feedback, and I plan on using it liberally when it comes report card time.

Colby Hill
This chapter is on report cards and how students, teachers, and parents view them. Last Thursday, the last Thursday in the schools, students got their report cards back. Many smiled, some frowned, but almost all of them mentioned their parents somehow. “Oh my parents are going to love this!” “My parents are not going to be happy with this 62….” “Dad said if I got all A’s I’d get a new fishing pole!” And many other exclamations. While listening and observing the students I realized, and I somewhat already knew it, that parents play a huge factor in report cards and feedback. Comments can really help parents understand where the student is, as well as helping the students figure that out also. The chapter also mentions ideas on how parents view the report cards way different then teachers (and way different then the students as well!) Making personal comments on each report card is not a bad idea at all, explaining where the student is with the rest of the class. This can help the student see how they are doing and help the parent see how their child is doing. What could be a real good outcome from this is teacher and parent teamwork! Maybe I could formulate a plan with the parent to create a learning strategy for the student (that is, if the student has fallen behind others).

Karina Sprague
This chapter was similar to the previous chapter, but instead of talking about gradebooks, it talked about formatting report cards. I found this chapter to be pretty useless because I know I will probably never be interested in becoming a principal or an administrator, so this information seems quite useless for me now. Most schools have a school wide format used for report cards, so it is not the teachers responsibility to create a format. Also, online grading systems offer automatic report card formatting. Since report cards are sent home to parents, they should always be easy to navigate and understand. Therefore, the teachers will probably only give input towards the format if they receive calls from the parents about navigation problems. Formatting of the report cards should be the least of the teacher’s worries.

I would have liked to see this chapter talk more about teacher’s comments on report cards rather than formatting. As a linguistic learner having few logical/mathematical intelligence traits, I think that all report cards should be sent home with some sort of narrative from the teacher explaining the student’s progress, behavior, and performance. It is hard to understand the student just by looking at a letter grade, and a lot of parents are more concerned with behavior rather than knowledge. Unless the report card grades the students on behavior and progress made (which they should not include because those things should not be graded) the parents could get a better understanding of their students overall performance if they could read the comments from the teacher or teachers.

Elizabeth Sargent
Report card formats are something that every school drools over every year. Teachers and administrators are looking for “a greater range of narrative comments that help them express unique situations with students while also seeking consistency teacher to teacher and among grade levels”(173). It is hard to get a report card format that covers every possible aspect that they want covered. Sometimes these frustrations are not even over the format but with technology. Technology is often a troublesome and mixed, viewed topic. Report cards, despite the format are to convey one thing: the mastery of the material unbiased on the differences between students. The marks in report cards are what most young adults base their lives off from, and from a very young age everyone learns to cherish and work for the best grade they can achieve. How do we as teachers know when a students has achieved the best they can do? By modifying the curriculum are we making a certain assignment too easy? If we grade personal progress with standard achievement are we grading too close to home? These are all questions that can be answered by the type of rubric that a school chooses to use.

I have always liked the idea of progress reports. No certain grades, but comments from the teachers, that are given without judgment. A couple of sentences to parents to let them know how their child is doing. But I also think that the student should be given something direct from the teacher to tell them how they are doing, but a little differently than what we, as teachers, would say to parents.

Emily Haskell
Chapter 14: Responsive Report Card Formats

This chapter again talked about how the teacher can focus on standards and personal achievement rather than simply on a letter grade. However, one of the things that is very important to this is that the teacher can justify this and communicate their rationale to not only the students, but to the parents of the students and to the administrators as well.

I think this is a great way to do report cards because it does put so much emphasis on the standards. I think that in classrooms where we put so much emphasis on the standards and using them in our everyday teaching. So shouldn’t we use them in our grading process as well? If we think about it, what do teachers use now to convey what they student has learned? Usually they use a letter grade and a comment that has come off of a premade list. If you ask me this doesn’t tell anyone anything about what a student has learned. =

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Jordan Hale
This is one of the scariest parts of teaching to me. This is where you need to defend your number grade you gave to a student to their parents. There are parents who don’t care, parents who understand it and work with you, and parents who think their kid is a God and can do no wrong. Either way, parents scare me, especially if I need to defend a grade against an angry parent. Hopefully, using these tips in this chapter, I can avoid these fights. The idea of an adjusting curriculum is a great idea. This style assesses students on how they have grown. It would be easy to say to a parent “You’re son/daughter has grown from getting D’s in September to A’s in May because they have shown tremendous growth over the grasp of the material, so they got an A.” That wouldn’t be too hard. On the other hand, having to tell a parent that the student has declined, therefore I am disregarding the good grades and your son/daughter gets a D. Parents would not be happy about that. One way to avoid that all together is to have a continuous progress report. It shows the content mastery of topics in each subject, with two spots for comments under each class. This is a good way to justify each level of mastery so the parent can always know why the student got what they got. One thing that jumped out at me was that parents commonly ask the question “Is my child developing normally?” (178). This shows that parents are happy with commonality. //As long as my child is behind, I am happy.// This is a question that should be diverged to show the students growth, not to compare to other students, because each student is different.

Spencer Hodge
Chapter 14 discusses report card formats. There are many different formats when it comes to report cards. The one that I liked the best was the one that broke the grades up into several categories. I liked this format because it allows the students and parents to see what areas of the class, and classwork, that they are doing well in and it also shows where they are struggling. This will make it easier for the student to improve their grade because they know what to focus on. If a student sees that they struggle on tests, by looking at the report card, then they will know to spend more time studying for tests. Breaking report cards into categories will help students succeed. Also from my field experience at Mt. Blue High School I learned that they use an online system called power school where both students and parents can view the student’s grades. This has proven very successful because you can check it at any time as opposed to waiting for a timely report card.