Innovation in Academics

Recently, a college student who was observing some of my classes shared an article with me that has had a profound impact on my plans for next school year.

Educational Leadership's "No Penalties for Practice" tells the story of a struggling school that worked to create an assessment model in which each department identified a handful of competencies that students had to pass each quarter in order to get credit for a class. No longer were grades artificially inflated by busy work, extra credit, completion or participation points, or assignments on which students could easily cheat. Grades were based solely on students' performance on the summative competency tests.

Now, lest you fear that this sounds like a new manifestation of traditional high stakes testing, let me explain a few more key points to this system. First of all, the competencies aren't just multiple-choice tests. They can include writing projects, group projects, creative projects, and other types of assessment. The focus is on students demonstrating mastery on key core skills. In fact, the focus is so much on mastery that if students didn't score a 70% on the competency, an interesting sequence of events followed.

After not achieving mastery on a competency, students are given two weeks to work with the teacher to retake the competency. If students don't take care of the issue on their own in that time frame, teachers contact parents, administrators, coaches, and other adults involved, and the student is not allowed to participate in athletics or extra-curriculars until they achieve mastery in the competency.

Another interesting point is that since grades were based on the competencies and not on homework, student completion of homework initially went down. However, the system was constructed so that students could not retake a failed competency until they'd completed all of the homework associated with it. So, homework completion initially declined, but once students experienced the intense consequences of not taking care of competencies in a timely manner, homework completion surpassed what it had been in the previous system where homework counted as part of the grade.

I believe this system sounds rigorous, focused, and meaningful. It takes the principles of backward design and applies them perfectly to help teachers stay on track with what is most essential and with what students should know and be able to do. Additionally, I appreciate that this system facilitates students' metacognition by giving them the option to think, "Hey, I get this and don't think I need to do the homework," or, "This is rather confusing, so I'd better do the homework tonight." By putting the ball of practice into students' court, we're giving them more meaningful opportunities to reflect on their own knowledge, and if they don't know what they know and don't know, there's a system in place to help them figure that out.

There's much more to school than pure academics, but I think this model is a new key for me in unlocking the academic component.