Monday, 7/30/18, 9:57 p.m. MT
By the time you read this, I'll be done freaking out.
See, I'm trying something I've never done before: I'm leading a small panel as part of a district professional-development day (
#innovateBVSD). One local colleague and three Twitter connections accepted my invitation to participate. We're planning to swap ideas about the current state of grades, grading, and assessment in our -- and our students' -- respective worlds, and we're going to see what other educators in the area are doing and/or wondering about these critical topics on the verge of a new school year.
These can be topics fraught with both meaning and baggage. Probing them often involves questioning school status-quo, which explains one source of my anxiety. At the same time, I'm trying to imagine (or
not imagine) the litany of technical and logistical difficulties that might befall juggling face-to-face participants with those joining remotely via Google Meet. "What could go wrong?" I wonder. "What couldn't?" my inner defensive pessimist jibes.
And yet, I'm excited, too: for dialogue, for collaboration, even for the mundane chance to attach voices and faces to what have until now felt like wise, disembodied avatars in my learning network. Stay tuned for what happens next...
Tuesday, 7/31/18, 9:42 p.m. MT
So. five of us formed a panel this afternoon. Sarah and I were there as flesh and blood while Carla, Amy, and Monte had their mortal coils rendered digitally from afar. The rendering worked pretty well, with sometimes spotty audio. The thinking we shared along with contributions from a dozen participants was anything but spotty in my opinion. In fact, I expect the ways our thinking converged -- across roles, levels taught, physical distance -- are going to stick with me for a while.
There was Sarah making the case for students' integral roles in the assessment process, in particular how that's borne out word-for-word in our district's teacher-evaluation criteria. There was Monte sketching out his distinction between the value in students' ongoing
learning versus the finality of what they've
learned in the past tense. Mastery, he suggested, might be more mirage than construct worthy of aspiration. There were Amy and Sarah, both, tying Monte's thread to the notion of growth and wondering how our reporting responsibilities as teachers might accommodate that shifty moving target. There was Carla championing portfolios as a potential bridge in this endeavor. There was Kelly noting her own child's ambivalence about changing the game of school that he's in the middle of playing even as Kelly's professional side endorses alternative instructional paradigms. There was Kiffany wishing for innovative efforts in higher education that might lever change throughout PK-12 systems. There were more thoughts, too, of which I know I lost track, but Sarah wrote down a bunch. There was also frustration expressed with traditional applications of grades, apparent in this temperature check captured via
AnswerGarden:
Our conversation lasted less than an hour, nowhere near enough time. I can still feel its ripples continuing to spread, and I realize my first sentence written 24 hours ago in this blog missed the mark. Now I'm freaking out for a new reason: There's so much more to do.