30 Days of Blogging: Day 9
Today I was in a meeting with some of my fellow computer teachers (they like to be called business teachers) and we went over our plans for something that our school district will be implementing over the next few years, Standards Reference Grading. We are planning this switch to better help students (and teachers) figure out what is the most important concepts that they should be learning and testing to see if they are proficient in these. We will still need to give the standard A, B, C, D, and Fs but these will hopefully be better aligned with what the students have learned and how the students are progressing.
I’m not going to go into the details of how Standards Reference Grading works but we spent today creating what is called Proficiency Scales which are 4-point scales to rate our students on based on the specific skills and abilities we want our students to leave our classes knowing. What has gotten better about these meetings, especially with our new teachers, is that we have been able to focus better on what are the most important things that we should be teaching. Before we had one teacher who kind of dominated the discussions and she would try to make us follow what she was doing even if we disagreed with her. She would often make it sound that we agreed with what she had suggested in a previous meeting (or even a few minutes before) when that was clearly not the case. Now I feel like we have some sanity for what is going on and I feel like I have some support for only working on the items that we should be teaching in computer class and not a lot of extra and in my opinion less important items.
Before we had these new teachers, we had a group of teachers who were really living in the past and want our computer classes to be only about typing and making documents (preferably business documents). Now while I feel those are important, there are so many more skills and knowledge that we could be giving to our students with computers. I felt that the road that we were heading down was a dead-end that would only have left us as a support class and not a separate subject in our own right. Today I have a better feeling about what we will be teaching moving forward so that we can make our case for why our subject area is still important and needed.
I think we should be building in more coding, 3D modeling and Digital Media skills but those will come with time. And I will always be able to work those into projects that I have the students do in my various classes.
Living With Computers 