Sunday, September 18, 2016

Making Failure "Hard"- Reflection

Click here to read an article titled " Making Failure Harder Work Than Passing."

This article is by a woman named Angela Campbell (2015), who is a high school Chemistry teacher.

The article discusses practices that Angela Campbell uses in her classroom.  She wrote the short article in 2015 for edutopia.  I just happen to come across it this weekend when doing some online reading within my PLC (professional learning community).

To me PLC just means the people that I follow online/spend time visiting that help me in my profession.

Angela Campbell describes how she assesses students from start to finish for a unit or chapter in her Chemistry classroom.  The premise of her article was that she felt, in her classroom, failing was more work than receiving a passing score.  I just thought that reading the article would be good for all of us.

Maybe you can't/won't implement anything learned from this short read.  Maybe you already do many of these things.  But their is nothing wrong with reinforcing or looking at new ideas.  Especially within the are of student assessment of learning.  I have been reading a lot lately about "mastery learning," and this fit right into it.  (I will have a blog post on that real soon.)

Questions to Consider:
1.  Though you may not teach chemistry, can any of the information presented be helpful to you?
2.  She uses the phrase "guided practice opportunities"  as a way of measuring students informatively in low risk situations.  Does that make sense?  Is it too low risk for you?
3.  Angela Campbell has quit the method of having students show mastery on assessments.  Do you do something like that?  Would that be doable for you?  Does she really know what the students know?
Real Question- Do you know we have someone in our building that uses this very method....?


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