Rick Wormeli on Standards-Based Grading
This is the third post in a series of short YouTube videos by Rick Wormeli, author of the book Fair Isn’t Always Equal. It begins to dig into the core of Rick’s work on differentiation and standards based instruction. Do you average your students’ grades? Warning: Rick calls that out as wrong practice in this video. His argument is well supported by other differentiation and grading experts such as Guskey and Tomlinson. So what to do to grade student work? Don’t worry – Rick has solutions too in his book. Just keep listening, thinking, asking, debating, and reading. After all, it makes sense in sports or an orchestra. We simply don’t learn at the same pace and it really is performance against the standard that matters… So how do we enter that in a grade book? Read more
Rick Wormeli on Late Work
So I’m half way into my first year as superintendent of #isd186 in Pequot Lakes, MN and I’ve landed on a theme for a series of much-needed posts to cultivate authentic, meaningful dialogue in our collaborative teams. Last night I pulled an olde but a goodie off the shelf – Rick Wormeli’s book Fair Isn’t Always Equal. The messages in this book – and the core arguments of @RickWormeli – are ones we need to read, understand, and wrestle with in the schools we are so proud of. The opportunity I had on MLK day to address the entire teaching staff about aligning our work to our mission – student achievement – rekindled a passion in me to be frustrated with mediocrity and to intentionally question the practices we engage in that compromise on best serving students. Wormeli gets it and we have much to learn from him. I just can’t settle for mediocrity… My children and your children deserve better. I’m guessing we can all agree on that much… Read more