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Pilot with Starr, Emma, & Crystal
128 Plays1 year ago
In this episode, we will share how we each made small changes in our classroom practices to assess students on their actual learning while still fitting within the requirements of our traditional grades schools.
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Transcript
Podcast Introduction and Hosts
00:00:00
Speaker
Welcome to the first ever episode of Building Learner Centered Spaces podcast, sponsored by Mastery Portfolio, a company that focuses on helping schools transition away from traditional grading and assessment practices. We have an EdTech tool that helps schools in this process help track learning, and most importantly, it helps them empower students.
00:00:23
Speaker
Our hosts are Star Saxton, Emma Chapeta, and Crystal Frommert. I'm Star, and I'm so excited to share a little bit of my journey. I've been in education for over 20 years, wearing many, many hats. I'm currently the COO of Mastery Portfolio, which means I am the school-facing person with my team on here with me. I'm very excited to introduce you to Emma and Crystal now.
Host Introductions and Roles
00:00:50
Speaker
Hi, I am Crystal Frobert. I'm very excited to be talking to so many educators who are interested in creating classrooms that are more learner-centered. And that is why I became involved with Mastery Portfolio as a school liaison. It excites me to talk to schools who are interested in shifting away from traditional grading and going into more of a mastery-based approach. And I'm excited to be involved with Mastery Portfolio as a school liaison because I love working with schools who are interested in shifting
00:01:20
Speaker
the assessment toward the learner. I am a math teacher with more than 20 years experience. I've worked in public and private schools and currently work in an international school.
00:01:33
Speaker
And I'm Emma Chappetta. I'm also a math teacher. I teach at a boarding school in central Utah, where I also serve as the director of faculty development here. And with mastery portfolio, I'm a mastery coach. And across all of those different roles, I really see myself as someone who tries to find the strengths in all of my students and
00:01:55
Speaker
teachers and amplify those strengths to help them meet their goals. And so this work with mastery portfolio and with shifting assessment practices is really in line with my values there.
Challenges with Traditional Grading
00:02:07
Speaker
So I'm always excited to learn more about Emma and Crystal. And we've been working together for a little bit of time now. And I've been so impressed as a person with a humanities background, some of the biggest pushback I've always gotten when going to schools is from the math and science people. So I get super excited.
00:02:26
Speaker
when I hear and see the things that are happening in both of their learning spaces and how much they're able to create classrooms that really lower barriers where kids can feel empowered and excited to go to math class inside of their unique backgrounds in the schools that they're in. And since they've joined Mastery Portfolio, I think that our team has really
00:02:55
Speaker
been able to support more spaces in more holistic ways given each of our expertise.
Balancing Traditional and Ungrading Approaches
00:03:02
Speaker
Yes, as a math teacher, I agree with you, Star. I think that there are some traditional grading practices that might be tightly held onto in our field of teaching math and science. I am probably not a unique situation in that I work at a school that has traditional grades. I do have to turn in grades at the end of each grading term, along with a written narrative comment for each of my students. The narrative comment writing is
00:03:32
Speaker
A lot of work and it takes up a lot of time, but it's actually one of my favorite ways to assess the students because I'm able to actually write what I'm observing and write what their performance level is directly to them and their parents to read. So I have to
00:03:47
Speaker
Negotiate somehow this my values with ungrading and mastery approaches and looking at what you do know and then negotiating the whole idea of retake test all within a traditional grades school.
00:04:04
Speaker
Luckily, I'm at a school that is giving me the autonomy within my own classroom to assess how I would like to, but we still do pencil and paper quizzes and tests, but the way that I approach those is very much focused on the learning that you do and not so much the grade that you get. And so as we go into more episodes with
00:04:25
Speaker
Building Learner Centered Spaces podcast. I would love to talk to more educators about how they're doing the same thing. Maybe they are at a school that's traditional base grades, but also trying to emphasize a little bit more of the ungrading idea in their classroom. So I'm very much looking forward to learning more from each other and sharing some of the things that I do in my classroom that might help others as well.
00:04:49
Speaker
Yeah, I'm so excited about some of the same things as Crystal. I'm in a similar situation where I'm in a school that has traditional grades, but over time I just saw that the traditional classroom was not serving my students. I saw that particularly in math, there are so many
00:05:06
Speaker
different ways that students can express what they know that are non-traditional. And so my journey has consisted of definitely the ungrading process and giving students more targeted feedback that's aligned to standards and competencies, but also trying to give them more options in the ways that they are assessed.
Alternative Assessment Methods
00:05:28
Speaker
So using conferencing and using mounting evidence from observations in the classroom to kind of paint a fuller picture
00:05:35
Speaker
of my students and better understand what it is they know. I kind of see myself as like an investigator and my job is to just uncover any evidence that's going to help me understand where they're at. And so I definitely use conversation as a big tool in doing that. So I'm hoping to hear from lots of educators around the country in the ways that they view assessment and the ways that they empower their students to express their knowledge
00:06:04
Speaker
in kind of new creative ways. It's so exciting to hear about these math classes that both of you have created the classrooms
00:06:16
Speaker
Crystal, yours with middle school and Emma with high school.
Engaging Student-Centered Learning
00:06:20
Speaker
When I was in the classroom, I also had many similar challenges as an English teacher. My students were accustomed to kind of being told what they were reading and what all of that means. And I really tried to shift things in that space to make sure that they were really engaged in what we were reading. Conversation kind of drove
00:06:45
Speaker
the instruction in a lot of ways as did projects. Class was largely project-based learning with a lot of choice, a lot of practicing.
00:06:55
Speaker
And then really most importantly was getting kids to the point where they could talk about their learning in a meaningful way, because so much of learning is internal. I mean, we only see what we see, kind of like that iceberg picture, the little bit that does become visible to us. So having those in-depth conferences with students that give them opportunities to share what we don't see, particularly with students who
00:07:23
Speaker
may not have resonated with the particular assessment choice of the time was something that really helped me grow as an educator.
Classroom Control and Student Voice
00:07:33
Speaker
And it helped our learning environment become really student centered. And, you know, there's really nothing more exciting than watching kids get it. And I found that once I switched to this paradigm, I saw a lot more of that than I did when I was in control of everything.
00:07:53
Speaker
I think you're exactly right, Star. I think that there is a difficulty with letting go of a perception of control. And I say perception of control because it's not really control. It's what teachers perceive. And I was thinking about the other day as I was reflecting on my own teaching practice about how I used to be as a teacher and very strict with grades and very strict with the way the procedures ran in my classroom.
00:08:18
Speaker
And now that I've done a lot of reading, I've done a lot of following of others on Twitter who've helped me see this paradigm shift. I'm finding that I am listening more to my students and I am no longer controlled by this perception of control that I thought that I had in my classroom. So I love how you said that.
00:08:37
Speaker
Yeah, Crystal, I also really like that you said that now you can kind of see the paradigm shift through all of that research, because I think that a challenge that a lot of other teachers at my school faced when I made the transition to alternative grading practices, it was like a school initiative, but not all of the teachers
00:08:56
Speaker
changed their practices. And I think the biggest challenge was that they didn't have examples of what that could look like in their classes. So hopefully this podcast will give people a much stronger idea of what standards of a grading or alternative assessment could look like across disciplines.
Upcoming Podcast Guests
00:09:14
Speaker
And to that end, I think we have so many exciting things in the works coming up. Like we decided we wanted to start this podcast and we put the bat signal out to people we really respect who do this work, who we think we can learn with and hopefully you'll learn with as well.
00:09:32
Speaker
So two people I'm super excited about talking to coming up soon is Rick Wormaly who wrote Fair Isn't Always Equal. I think it's like his third edition that's out now. And that book was really instrumental in my shift. And also Angela Stockman who wrote Make Writing and various other books about writing instruction using the makerspace sort of format. And she does a wonderful job of
00:10:00
Speaker
inclusive, equitable writing practices. So those are two people I'm super excited to have a little bit more of a conversation with.
00:10:10
Speaker
Some other names that are coming up on the show this season that I'm also very excited about are Alice Keeler. If you are on Twitter or if you follow any social media that involves education or tech, you're going to know about Alice Keeler. And another famous name in my eyes, because this person's books and talks and videos that you'll find online,
00:10:35
Speaker
have really shaped how I feel about number grades versus standards-based grading, and that is Ken O'Connor. So those are two names I am so excited to hear more from. Yeah, and I'm really excited to hear from Aaron Blackwelder. He's kind of been on the ungrading scene forever, and I got to interview him
00:10:55
Speaker
a couple months ago, so I really am excited to hear more from him. And I'm also excited to talk to Tyler Rablin, because I've been following him on Twitter for quite a while, and he always has these really engaging threads with thought-provoking questions. Okay, well, we're really excited to share our learning with all of you, and we're hoping that this creates a conversation around different paradigms surrounding grading and assessment.
Audience Engagement and Interaction
00:11:26
Speaker
So we'd love your feedback and we'd love to hear from you. So find us on Twitter. You can search for master portfolio, which is at mastery for all. Uh, you can also find us on LinkedIn. So tell us what you're looking for for this podcast. And we'd love to hear about what you're thinking and what you're planning and what you'd like to learn more about. And we hope to include that in our future episodes as well.