Wading into the Muddle

or

How am I going to teach my astronomy class to take advantage of Standard Based Grading ?

I’m revising my course over the summer, and I started doing a little research. Turns out one idea I’d had already has a name: Standards-Based Grading (aka SBG, or #sbar on twitter). I believe it was this blog entry from Terie Engelbrecht whose blog  first clued me in. I’ve been reading a bunch about it, and there’s a good description by Jason Buell at his Always Formative blog.

So the grading part seems to make sense to me. I’ve got my objectives for the class already, I’m a big believer in objectives. (“Objectives” is the term I tend to use instead of “standards.”)  Now I’m chugging through my objectives, figuring out what exactly I expect students to be able to do to meet expectations, exceed expectations, and so on. In the process, I cut back on thenumber of standards

The class is an elective, and the students have very diverse prior experience and preparation. I expect some are going to whip through the standards at a high level, others are going to struggle to master a few. This worries me.

My half-baked solution is to add back a few of the objectives/standards, and somehow count those as “exceed expectations.”

So my questions are:

1: Have teachers had issues with running out of standards for their students? Maybe I don’t need to worry.

2: How do teachers using SBG handle extra topics?

While I let those percolate, I’ll be pondering how to actually choreograph the instructional and assessment parts of the class…

And that concludes my very first blog post. Thanks for reading!

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