Category: The Learning Curve

I just got home from the last Assessment course and the celebratory dinner that followed. I got a lot out of this course, and I’m excited about the next one, Developmental Psychology, which starts in June.
My most recent journal entry is based on notes I made while reading Grant Wiggins‘ articles on assessment. Wiggins’ model of assessment is PBA – performance based assessment. Although this entry is late, I decided last week that I would rather suffer the late penalty than write something sub-par; my intention, once upon a time, was to compare the two Wiggins articles with the now-infamous Ramsden, Chapter 10. I’ll start, though, with my responses to the ‘Thinking ahead to assessments’ handout:

Continue reading “Assessment as Learning, Journal #4”

So today I took a deep breath and told Dawson thanks, but no thanks.
I was offered courses for the summer, y’see. This offer was the end result of a long, painful process which began in January, stalled for a while, and culminated in a phone call from the department chair.
I then met with the chair, who, it turns out, was the comfy chair. She tried to seduce me with all that Dawson has to offer (including its proximity to my house) while at the same time impressing upon me the importance of taking anything Dawson had to offer, lest they stop calling me.
I tentatively agreed to take the two courses, since there was no guarantee that Vanier would have anything for me for the summer.
I spoke with my Vanier coordinator on Friday and while there is still no guarantee that I’ll have anything this summer, I will have full-time work in the fall, and if summer courses open, I’m first in line.
Essentially, I had to make a choice, because if Vanier has summer courses it will be at the last minute, and I didn’t want to pull out at the last minute with Dawson.
Thankfully, it was an easy decision – I love working at Vanier. My colleagues are awesome, my students are enthusiastic (mostly), and my mood lifts when I step onto the campus. And now I’ve committed myself.
I walked home from Dawson, since today the weather is fantastic. I was just past the Atwater market when I felt something warm and liquidy hit my hand – for the first time in my life, I have been shat upon by a bird. I’ve heard it’s meant to bring the shittee good luck. So I’m taking the incident as a sign that I’ve made the right decision (and that whatever is out there has a twisted sense of humour, but we knew that).

My second journal entry for the Assessment as Learning course is comprised of questions upon which we were asked to reflect and my responses. The questions are about feedback and rubrics.
For the unintiated, a rubric is essentially a grid that indicates what the specific criteria are for a given assignment, cross-referenced with a description of what constitutes meeting the criteria. For instance:

Criteria	Excellent 8-10	Satisfactory 5-7	Unacceptable 0-4	Value
Sentence structure	Uses a variety of simple, compound and complex sentences correctly and effectively.	Uses an adequate mix of structures, generally correctly, but does not stray from ‘safe’ structures.	Uses only one structure, or uses more complicated structures incorrectly. Meaning is lost or obscured.	10%

So, without further ado…

Continue reading “Reflections on Rubrics”

Last Wednesday we began the fourth Master Teacher course, Assessment as Learning. Which means – more journal entries!!
Since the beginning of this new course, I have been rethinking my teaching philosophy. Way back in College Teaching, I formulated a philosophy based on the idea that “you can’t teach in a vacuum.” This philosophy – which I still hold to be true – states that neither teaching nor learning happens in isolation. Teachers and students must be aware of, and be prepared to exploit, prior knowledge, preconceptions, subsequent goals, and so on.
At one specific point in the last week, though, it suddenly struck me that I have a new philosophy, whether I wanted it or not. As a fan of analogy, this is how I see the birth of my new philosophy – an Ikea DIY leaflet…

Continue reading “New year, new philosophy”

Course number two put to bed. Grades submitted. Many, many essays read. Brain mush (that is, my brain is mush – not that the essays consisted of brain mush (only a very few of them were brain mushy)).
If nothing else, this post illustrates the effects of reading 36 essays about Canadian women writers.

One down, three to go.
The bad news is that the class I have finished marking – marked all the finals, calculated all the grades, and submitted all the final marks for – is the smallest one, and the one for which the final essay was the shortest.
The good news is that it’s also the class I took over part way through the term, so there are students who never showed up, others who just stopped coming, and a few who were more than a little cavalier about completing assignments – which means that the class average is 59.5%… OK, that doesn’t sound like good news, but the good part is that it’s done.
It’s depressing to give a student a failing grade, even if, in one case, the student never came to class – literally – but simply didn’t know enough to drop the class.
The three remaining classes, although they all have more students and longer final papers, will be (for the most part) rewarding to mark. Most of the students put a good deal of effort and thought into their final papers, reviewing drafts and outlines with me, emailing me with new ideas, and in the case of my Detective Fiction course, even writing their own stories.
So tomorrow, when I’m hip-deep in papers, remind me that I’m happy about them now.

The good news is that loads of students are asking which courses I am teaching next semester, because as one of them put it, “good English teachers are hard to find.”
The bad news is, the answer is no courses at all, unfortunately.
At this stage, I will be lucky to get a single continuing education course. Every winter, for a variety of reasons, college English departments have no choice but to offer significantly fewer courses than they do in the fall. So until I get tenure – which involves a number of retirements and/or unfortunate accidents – I am pretty much out in the cold come January.
Ah, well, at least I’ll be back next fall, for sure. And a few months off gives me a lot of time for planning unfortunate accidents next year’s courses.

Believe it or not, on top of the full course load + one that I’m teaching this semester, I am still doing the Masters program. This semester’s course is called Instructional Strategies, and as with the first two courses, we have to prepare four journal entries.
The following is a response to Maryellen Weimer’s article ‘Focus on Learning,’ which we read for the course. I’m still not sure if I wholeheartedly object to Weimer, or if my reaction is really just a gut response to what I perceive as her condescending tone. You can read the article first and judge for yourself, if you are so inclined.

Continue reading “Instructional Strategies, Journal 3”

In case it was keeping you up at night:
Instructional Strategies, Journal One and, of course, Journal Two