Let's Stop and Think a Minute

In a nutshell, good teachers think about what they are doing; bad teachers do something because they either did it last year or because everyone else is doing it. I'm surrounded with good teachers.

The Chem teachers at York began a new routine this year: daily reflections on that day's objective (see the link below). Each lesson has at least one objective - the key concept or skill for the lesson. At the end of the day, we wanted students to write down a reflection about how well they understand that concept or can do that skill. The idea was that this will act as a journal of sorts and give the students a snapshot of their progress as they look back on the lessons come test time. However, its also part of their progress grade, which presents us with a dilemma. Is it fair and to give the students a grade on their opinion of their own understanding? This would mean the overconfident student gets a higher grade just because he thinks he knows it all.

We needed to stop and get back to our original goal: do we want this to serve the students as a tool to help them study and learn the material (in which case it shouldn't be graded), or do we want this to be an assessment for us to gauge the students learning prior to the test (in which case it should be graded)?

I think we found some middle ground. We discussed replacing daily reflections with a end-of-the-section reflection in which we can gauge the students' understanding of the overall section and how all the daily lessons and objectives fit together. We still need to work out the kinks, which we'll discuss more tomorrow.