Drum Roll Please

Bless me blogger, it has been five days since my last post.  These past five days have been busy ones. The weekend was packed with coaching, training, lifting, cleaning, shopping, and cooking-- typical weekend for me. The week has been equally challenging but finally I have an unexpected moment to write, so I'm taking it.

Last week I talked about some pretty cool stuff and grades. I am happy to report that focusing upon novelty and formative assessment has had the desired affect upon my students' performance on summative assessments. Grades are due this week and Tuesday was the first summative assessment I gave my students. The results were very encouraging.

Before focussing upon formative assessment and incorporating novelty in the classroom, students would routinely crash and burn on Monday morning 10-point quizzes. The class averages would at best be 6/10 and at worst 5/10. This isn't even a bell curve. Tuesday's quiz was however a 25 point quiz that asked students to demonstrate vocabulary recall of  ten Greek roots, to demonstrate comprehension and recall of specific events in their novel by answering fifteen multiple choice questions about the plot of the first half of the novel, and to identify 5 prepositions from an excerpted paragraph in the novel.

The results are in. When I announced the class average for each class, after returning the graded quizzes, I encouraged my students to act like eigth graders. They gave me a drum-roll on their desks. Most of them did. First period averaged 85.7%, Second period 88.6%, Fourth period 87.7%, Fifth period 97.9% and Sixth period 84%. The average grade for all five sections, 88.78%. As anyone who works with averages knows, this does not mean that all my students performed well, but obvioiusly most of them did.

The best comment I received from a student, "That was an easy test, I knew all the answers." I smiled, thinking to myself: "All my tests are easy when you are prepared." I prepared them. Everything I had them do was calculated to make sure they had the recall and ownership of the material to perform well. The pictures reinforced the plot, the articles we read in the computer lab looking for root words reinforced the root words. Scouring a chapter for examples of prepositions reinfoced their ability to recognize prepositions.

Last week, I wrote that if this stuff was working, the kids grades should not sllip once we began formative assessments. I guess its working but my new goal is to see my classes average over 90 percent on the next assessment, the quiz about the second half of the novel next week.

Just like my dog Juggernaut, this old dog is learning new tricks.