FIAE+Chapter+14+Block+2

Synthesis FIAE C14 B2

Chapter 14 of Fair Isn’t Always Equal talks a lot about the different report card formats. It talks about four main types of report cards and they are as follows: Adjusted Curriculum, Dual Approach which is grading how well they have done and the progress they have made as students, Creating Multiple categories for one subject, and lastly the Continuous Progress reports. Showing just the grade is not an accurate way of showing the student’s mastery. However, if you set up a way to show progress and provide enough feedback your personal report cards should show the student’s mastery.
 * **Names** || **Abstract** || **Reflection** ||
 * Barnes Mckell || In chapter 14 of the book Fair Isn’t Always Equal it talks about responsive report card formats. This chapter poses the idea of recording a symbol grade to mark a student’s personal progress as well as a symbol indicating where the student stands against the standards set for everyone in that subject. The chapter also says giving a continuous progress report to the student is a good way for the student to assess and recognize what they’ve accomplished. The chapter provides a very well thought out progress report that seems to be a great thing to use in the classroom. || In this chapter I feel like they were trying to base their ideas in a utopian society. Yes, I think it is important that we let our students know how well they are doing throughout the course. But I also think report cards should be used to give final grades. The progress reports should state how the student is doing in regards to the expectations set by the teacher. I guess there is always some grey area in between. But the idea of this chapter to me seems not to be very realistic. ||
 * Brennick Christopher || The next chapter goes over a format for report cards that is responsive. The book offers four different ideas for reports that we have to have more responsive reporting systems. The book first says that we should note if curriculum has been changed for a student this will provide a better picture on what a student is being graded on. The second idea is to grade both personal growth and achievement against standards. The next topic talked about in the book is multiple subjects within a content area so parents are given clear grade rather then one big one. The last idea is a continuous progress report, which tracks progress overtime. || This is another though provoking chapter because it question what is important to report to students and parents. I personally really liked the idea of subjects within subjects because it again gives students and parent clear feedback. The current report card format does not tell much to students of parent’s because they cover too much ground. These report cards would empower students and parents because they would give them tons of information to use. ||
 * Columbia Laura || Chapter fourteen continues on the topic of having grades on report cards show more than just a simple grade. One area discussed was adjusted curriculum. Yet, it is important to not just mark modified, this could be a red flag for parents and could go on the students record. What is modified needs to be explained. As well as the idea that it does not help anyone to have an untrue or inaccurate mark on their report card. Another really great idea was grading both personal progress and how the student achieves the standard. Using this method allows parents, students and future teachers to see how well they progressed personally, and how much material they have mastered. || I have found a lot of this information useful, but nothing compares to the idea of dual grading. I really love this idea. Yes, it may take more time, but the rewards would out weigh that. It is such a great idea. I think it is extremely important to mark how the student progresses personally. We are telling our students nothing if they work very hard, make huge progress but don't meet our standards. This way we are rewarding their hard work and showing future teachers what level the student is at in their mastery of the subject. ||
 * Coombs Kayla || Chapter fourteen, named “Responsive Report Card Formats” outlines ways to demonstrate students’ achievement in the differentiated classroom. The reading states: “as we look at the functionality and responsiveness of our report cards for differentiated classrooms, it’s important to remember our objective with such reporting: an accurate and developmentally appropriate rendering of mastery that is clearly communicated to students, their parents, and other educators” (173). Report cards need to be useful for everyone that is using them. For modified curriculum, students are graded against their own progression, and we may have to adjust the curriculum to differentiate instruction for individual students; this must be evident in some way on the report card. A different idea for report cards that was presented is to record a symbol or mark that represents the student’s personal growth and a separate symbol or mark that represents where the student stands against the standards that are set for all students in that subject at that grade level. This would often demonstrate a correlation between personal progress and standards achieved, which can be quite helpful. Another approach to report cards is to have multiple categories within one subject, which would be focusing on more specific areas of study within each grading period. This can help teachers get a better sense of where the student is achieving and not achieving, and how we can help meet their needs. || This reading discusses options and approaches to report cards that might and might not work depending how one instructs, approaches curriculum, and how accurately they are able to report on what matters and is stressed as important in their classroom. I would want my report cards to show when I have modified the curriculum, for example, because this is definitely something I plan on doing. Also, I thought it was an interesting idea to have separate marks or symbols that represent the students individual growth, and how they stand against the standards that are for all the students in that subject and in that grade. ||
 * Cummons Michael || This chapter is about report card formats. Report cards are all about showing students' progress and achievements. It is important to show more than just the grade. Comments and feedback are so important to let the student and parent know how the student arrived to a particular grade and how they are progressing as learners. Have multiple subjects inside a subject to show how a student progresses in all aspects of a certain subject. The main purpose of this chapter is to show that a report card is not just about grades, because school is not just about grades, and more needs to included in a proper assessment. || This chapter was really great. Report cards are so important. It can be (unfortunately is not always) as a great mean of communication between teacher, student, and parent. The more detailed the report card the better, in my opinion. Simply putting grades down a piece of paper is simply not enough to make a report card effective and useful. ||
 * Damboise Kelley || Chapter fourteens main focus is to continue using differentiation understandings to be reflective of what is sent home on a report card. Four styles are looked at in this chapter: adjusted (modified) curriculum, the dual approach: grading both personal progress and achievement against standards, multiple categories within one stubject, and continuous progress repots. Adjusted curriculum is where the teacher looks at the students progression from the beginning of the grading period to the end and grades basied upon the students growth. Another approach to grading assess both personal progress and achievement against standards. Basically students are grade in two different ways; one is a letter grade to demonstrate the grade-level standard that was met and the other is a numerical value to show the students progression. Multiple categories within one subject looks at grading students basid upon different categories such as ojectives or benchmarks. Lastly, continuous progress reports are used to show how students have progressed over a two year time period. || The report that I felt really showed a students ability to learn and what the student actually has learned would be the continuous progress report. This is because this method looks at a longer period of time and instead of like old fashion progress report cards, continuous report cards look all the aspect that allow for differentiated classes to achieve. It is important to look at what is being done in the classrooms and be reflective of there's styles of learning. ||
 * Kelley Kathleen || Chapter fourteen in Fair isn’t Always Equal discussed how to format report cards that are responsive to student experience and that reflect the differentiation within the classroom. Wormeli discusses the idea that all report cards need to be useful to those who will be using them, and that they need to show the students progress, and provide feedback on the student. There are four separate approaches addressed in the book in regards to report card format. The first is the adjusted curriculum approach in which students are graded by the progression that they make in their mastery of the subject. The author calls it adjusted curriculum because it may be possible that the material has been altered over the unit to better serve the students learning. If the student has benefited from this adjustment, the teacher would place a check or “X” in a box on the report card which tells the reader that they should view the comments. Placing “adjusted curriculum” could stir trouble in the future for some because they may place a negative stigma with it. The second approach is the dual approach. This approach grades both progress made within the classroom as well as how well they are mastering the standards set in place. In gradebooks, this format is shown as a number that represents progress (A) and a number that represents a rubric like meaning such as meets the standard (3). The third method is the multiple categories within one subject. The particular approach requires that you identify all of the objectives or benchmarks and then give a grade for each objective accomplished. The final format is an ongoing progress report. || I think that this chapter was extremely interesting and offered a lot of great suggestions that should be considered when determining a new format for grades. I think that it would be interesting to try each of them and see what the response was to each one. Overall, I think that all of the examples would be more beneficial to those reading it because they would be more detailed and would document progress made. ||
 * Knowles Christina || This chapter explains different methods of writing out report cards. The first option we are given is adjusted curriculum. This is a report on how much progress a student has made compared to where they started out. We also have the dual approach with not only grades ho much progress the student has made, but it also grades how the student compares to the standards they must meet. Next, we are given multiple categories within one subject which allows a teacher to give multiple grades. The teachers can clearly categorize what a student is good at and what a students is bad at. Lastly, we are given the continuous progress report. These show growth over a long period of time, sometimes years. || I feel the same way about multiple ways make report cards as I do about different ways of grading. I think it would make a lot more sense to have just one overall reporting system. I was also wondering if report cards were needed because most parents can check their student’s grades online. This question was actually brought up at on of the staff meetings at Mt. Blue Middle. ||
 * Mourkas Margaret ||  ||

I liked the way this chapter talks about the different ways to have a report card. I always hated it though in high school when teachers would only give progress reports when you were “earning” a horrible grade. It always seemed to happen when there was not much we the student’s could do about it. I will hopefully be a teacher that allows students to access their grades whenever they would like during the entire academic school year. I love the idea of giving students two grades, one based on growth and another on mastery. This way, students are able to see themselves progress in more than one way through out the year. It is also important to take growth into consideration. Wormeli offers an example of a student that does extremely well in the class and progresses a whole grade level, but at the end of the year is still a grade level behind the “regular” students. This students, while not on par with the rest of the class, has still shown amazing growth and that needs to be recognized. I really like the idea of giving feedback and grades on all of the benchmarks instead of one large subject. By dividing the overall grade into benchmark grades students will be able to see where they need extra assistance and where they are excelling in class. In my opinion it would be a far more effective way to document grades, even if it did take the teacher a little more time to do. Grading this way could also help the teacher better identify what individual students need to progress. || Responsive report card formats was the topic of chapter 14 in FIAE. The chapter started by talking about how teachers and parents view report cards. It says that teachers view report cards as tools to evaluate individual students and their performance. Parents view report cards as benchmarks to see how their child is doing compared to the other children in the class. The book said that report cards can show that the curriculum was adjusted for a student simply by putting an asterisk next to a child’s grade signifying that whoever is reading that student’s grade needs to look at the teacher comments. The chapter ends by discussing grading personal progress and achievements against the standards imposed upon them. I liked this chapter, particularly the part about reporting adjusted curriculums for students. I knew that my teachers had automatic responses they could enter into report cards if they so chose. But I feel like I would need to write something for each student to justify their grade to them and their parents other then some generic response generated by the school district. I can see the conflict between students and parents over what report cards are for but I think through a little education parents will realize the true purpose of the grades their children are receiving. This chapter raised some great points and definitely provided some great information, such as spelling out for us how parents love to hold on to the idea of report cards simply being an comparison of their child against everyone else’s child. The dual approach grading was also a good read and makes me want to give it a shot in my classroom. Content wise though I did not find this chapter to be quite as interesting or informative as several of the grading chapters before it. Though I have learned a bit about report cards and what is expected of them, I feel that this is mostly could have been covered inside of chapter 13 as an extension of gradebook formats. This chapter puts a lot of emphasis on report cards and how parents view the scores, and what it is that they are hoping to get out of a report card. The chapter tells us that differentiating on report cards is difficult due to the way parents interpret the marks. We read that the main factor that schools try to accomplish every year is to develop a wider variety of narrative comments that to help express each student’s individual situation. Part of this would to add columns for effort and work habits. One of the ideas thrown out for good report card formats is modified curriculum where much of the grade is based on student progression within the course. One of the suggested ways of doing this was to put a check mark next to a grade to indicate to parents and others that there is a place for them to go reference and gather a better understanding of how this grade was achieved. This chapter tells us that it does no good for the student, parents, or community to not differentiate on our report cards because when do not differentiate we do not tell the truth. One of the examples of this is given when he read about a child who has worked very hard and shown a lot of growth, but due to standards receives a low mark and they begin to lose hope. This is where we come into the dual approach grading where two marks are given, for example B3. B represents how the child met the standards for the grade level and criteria. 3 is a representation of how much effort, growth, and learning the child has demonstrated over the past grading term.
 * O'Neil Christopher || Chapter fourteen discusses responsive report card formats. Readers are introduced to four different types of responsive report card formats. The first format discussed was the adjusted (modified) curriculum. This format grades students against their own progression. The second format discussed was the dual approach: grading both personal progress and achievement against standards. This format records a symbol or a mark that indicates where the student stands against the standards set for everyone in the subject and a symbol or a mark that indicates a student’s personal progress. The third format discussed was the multiple categories within one subject format. This format grades students in each subtopic under the main subject. The final format discussed was the continuous progress report. This format marks the growth of a student over two or more years. || I feel that this chapter is a very helpful chapter for teachers. It allows teachers to see different ways to give students responsive report cards. I feel that I would use the multiple categories within one subject format in my classes. This format seems to be the most beneficial for students. Seeing as there are many different subtopics in history, this format will allow students to receive grades based on each of those subtopics instead of only the main topic. It will give students a better chance to succeed in the classroom. ||
 * Richardson Cassandra || Chapter fourteen focuses on the dreaded report card, and the different formats they can take on. The comment section on the report card can be a critical tool for letting students and their parents know how their efforts are affecting their grades. The book also suggests a dual grade system, where the traditional letter grade is accompanied by a personal progress measurement, usually a single number. This seems more effective because of the additional progress measurement; they eventually serve more as a guiding light for students who may not necessarily score the best grades. || I feel like the comment area of report cards are used only in dire circumstances, and should really not be overlooked as much as they are. Not only do they provide a means of communication for the teacher, student, and parents, but it gives a little personalization to a student’s report card. It allows them to take the feedback and use it to help them grow as a student and person. ||
 * Trundy Monique || In chapter fourteen Wormeli focuses on responsive report card formats. The first suggestion Wormeli gives is having teachers add asterisks or checkmarks next to a student’s grade when they have received some kind of curriculum adjustment. The asterisks or checkmark is used instead of writing in “adjusted curriculum,” as a way to avoid assumptions about student development. It is also possible to record two grades, one for general mastery and one for growth. Wormeli’s example is the grade A3, the student received the A for displaying mastery of the subject and a 3 for showing growth. He also discusses the continuous progress report. || I have to admit that I never, ever thought about the format of my report cards until now. I really like the idea of having the ability to write even a few sentences of notes to parents or fellow teachers on a report card, or on a separate document. The feedback allows grades to be a little more human, and also gives parents the reasoning behind their child’s grade.
 * Trundy Monique || In chapter fourteen Wormeli focuses on responsive report card formats. The first suggestion Wormeli gives is having teachers add asterisks or checkmarks next to a student’s grade when they have received some kind of curriculum adjustment. The asterisks or checkmark is used instead of writing in “adjusted curriculum,” as a way to avoid assumptions about student development. It is also possible to record two grades, one for general mastery and one for growth. Wormeli’s example is the grade A3, the student received the A for displaying mastery of the subject and a 3 for showing growth. He also discusses the continuous progress report. || I have to admit that I never, ever thought about the format of my report cards until now. I really like the idea of having the ability to write even a few sentences of notes to parents or fellow teachers on a report card, or on a separate document. The feedback allows grades to be a little more human, and also gives parents the reasoning behind their child’s grade.
 * Webb Christopher ||  ||
 * West Simon ||  ||