What I wouldn't give to be able to give a "traditional" test outside of my AP course. Or have a grade book where anything below a 60% is failing instead of a C or D. Or take notes more than twice a month without getting talked to about "skills" and how knowledge isn't a "skill" (guess why multiple choice is really frowned upon).
We're not that far from hearing "Welcome to Carl's Jr. Would you like to try our EXTRA BIG ASS TACO? Now with more MOLECULES!"
The worst traits of the Professional Managerial Class can be found in national intelligence agencies and public school administrations.
This grading structure is EXACTLY how I remember my middle and High school years used to be! Especially for my AP classes, there was more work but still measured along these lines. I went to Blue ribbon schools (IS/IB school) and a college prep STEM high school.
When I checked on the schools in my current state, they are nothing like how I remember. All work is done on their Chromebook.
I especially liked your mentioning of note taking, as I was just this past week thinking of how to teach my 3rd grader (by age, she's in 4th grade work and reading at an 8th grade level) how to take actual notes. Since we homeschool, there isn't as great a need to take notes because I know already where my kids are weak and where they are strong. We also constantly do oral review of their subjects but my eldest is very quickly marching through the grade levels. I think I will implement some form of note taking in her history books study, as I see more assignments being done via reading a section and referring to that section for the answer. She goes by memory, my kid got my brain but my brain now is not so academically strong! Have to poke through my old college notes and see what my note style was! 😄
I'm not a teacher (but an overly educated nerd and homeschool mom) - these are all amazing tips. It gives me such an appreciation for the years of training and theory that professional teachers have - and also encourages me to be ready to level up my homeschooling when my kids get older. Thank you!
I'm going to post an article soon on helping moms teach their children how to use Cornell notetaking. I think it's very, very valuable in home-based education.
I see to many worksheets and unit plans that aren't very good. Let your kid access the good stuff and let him pull what he thinks is crucial from it. That's a real education, but you need the check on their understanding that Cornell notes provides the non-expert parent (which I am in every subject, LOL.)
Thank you so much for this. As a newish mild/mod SPED Social Science teacher this has never been explained to me. I plan to study this and use it as a map for my curriculum next year. We don't give homework as a rule at our high school for sped classes but I want to incorporate some next,any suggestions?
Use Cornell notes. They work beautifully in a science classroom. You don't need to kkill yourself with worksheets, but you do need to worke REALLY hard in lecture to make sure you're breaking down concepts in ways that your students can understand. I'm working on a post on Cornell Notes that should be out very soon. You can subscribe for free; I'lll make sure I put "Cornell Notes" in the title. :)
Thank you. I am planning to try Cornell notes again (after reading your article on how to explicitlytrach taking notes). I teach History and Gov Econ (socialscience). I can see this working in Gov/Econ but for US and World History the information can often feel like I am putting them into cognitive overload. 😭
I taught two years of us history 7th/8th and my kids LOVED the notes. I promise; if you know your stuff and carefully plan your notes so the ideas are organized in such a way that the kids can see the connections between topics/periods, they will LOOOOOVE your class because you make it EASY for them to learn. 💙
There are so many points here that I would like to enact in the graduate program I teach in (blended format with flipped classroom delivery). My supervisor is unfortunately of the persuasion that all quizzes should be outside of class time and that larger summative assessments unfairly increase student anxiety. We haven't had a program-level discussion about optimal weighting of gradebooks, but given our diverse teaching styles and content areas, I'm not sure how productive such a discussion would be.
Another great article in this series! Also could be useful for planning and reflection as a teacher even outside of whole school implementation.
If I chart this out for a history class, it sounds like the planning would look something like:
Monday: Pass out study guide, Do Now, lecture, exit ticket
Tuesday: Do Now, lecture, exit ticket, reading for homework
Wednesday: Reading quiz, reading notes/discussion
Thursday: Do now, lecture, exit ticket
Friday: quiz
Do this 2-3 weeks, then unit test.
Does that seem accurate? It seems like a lot of weekly grading (8 inputs per week per student = 600 inputs per week easily, or 10 hours at 1 minute per assignment).
Otherwise, could you outline an average week with this setup or explain what I'm not understanding?
Also tangential question: what do you think about peer grading for quizzes? I like that saves me time on grading and also gives students additional review with the material but I'd like to hear your thoughts.
I wouldn't grade both the Do Now and an Exit ticket, necessarily, tbough I think that would inform your teaching way more effectively.
The way I see it is the students "Do Now" and after I've taken attendance, I walk around and glance at kids' work, and, if it looks weak, I tell them to go back and review their notes from the previous day. (Generally, I try to get them to attempt the Do Now using only memory first, but go back to their notes as a resource when they run out of relevant knowledge so they can self-diagnose where the process/knowledge breaks down for them.)
Then we debrief it, usually starting with cold calls of students whose work I saw was good. I try to address common misconceptions or bring up things *I* could've explained better, based on the quick looks I took when I was circulating.
Then lecture -- and active notes including cues and summaries. Summaries are there to get them to review all the material covered that day. If I assign an exit ticket, it'd probably be two days before the quiz and would ask them to do the kind of work that will appear on the quiz so I could anticipate where they might score low on the quiz and remediate the next day OR postpone the quiz for more teaching.
I wish there could be a MTWThF set schedule, but it really depends on the formative assessments (the practice assignments) you're getting back from the kids. Generally, I'm only quizzing every other week, unless it's a novel unit, in which case I will do very simple reading quizzes for accountability. Otherwise, I'm quizzing when I know 70% of the kids have completed sufficient practice to pass the quiz.
And we 100% grade in class -- except sentence diagramming which is too niggly and requires my eye and judgment, and larger essay questions -- the scoring gets way too tricky as the questions get more complex.
When you're grading Do Nows and Exit Tickets it should be less than 30 seconds - you're reading it, and giving a check if they were right and a bracket or a x if they weren't clear or incorrect. This will take time, but what DT is suggesting is giving corrective feedback is one of the most important things that teachers can do, and thus should be a big part of how we spend our working time when not teaching.
Part of the advantage of note-taking is while there is some prep work, if you know your stuff it should save time instead of having to create and format worksheets that students fill out during class. Also helps with admin work like lesson planning.
- 5 min Do Now
- 5 min Reviewing Do Now, students fix errors and misconceptions
- 30 min Lecture and manual note taking
- 10 min Cornell Notes Summary
- 5 min Exit Ticket
I just made your lesson plan for at least 60-70% of your lessons next year.
I can't find your comment about minimum grade floors instituted by the District.
Tactically,, I'd handle it this way.
What the District wants is no zeroes pulling the kids GPA down.
So:
Kid doesn't turn in a practice assignment, I'd mark it "Missing" in the online gradebook, but leave the box empty. This means they don't get dinged for the missing assignment, but I and the parents know it was never turned in.
If a principal asked me why the boxes were empty, I'd say, "Well ,since we use equitable grading practices here, I want parents to know the student still has the opportunity to complete this practice assignment, when he's ready, of course, (try to say that without sarcasm). I can't put a grade in that he hasn't earned, and I don't want to diminish his enthusiasm as he learns at his own pace by putting in a zero, especially since policy is that we accept late work from students. Every practice assignment I give is meant to grow their ability and knowledge, so I want him to see that empty box, know because there's no zero he can still turn it in, and be incentivized to attempt the work assigned there."
Now, when you have like a million empty boxes marked Missing and the kid takes a quiz and fails it, if you're obligated to put in a minimum, like a 5 or 6 or whatever, put that in, but make a note of the student's actual score in the box to the left. I usually put something like, "36% original; minimum grade applied)
Takes a few extra seconds, yes.
The empty boxes won't pull the kid's grade down, but will help a guardian understand that, at least in your class, doing the practice will help a student get better grades overall.
What you're actually up against is the number of teachers that assign homework but give little corrective feedback or give assignments that aren't well-suited to helping students learn the material. Either that, or school policies allow for lots of shortcuts to practice, like 1:1 devices. Parents look at that, think it's busywork, and say, "Eh. Why does my kid need to do that? Just let him take the quiz." If the kid can blow off all the homework and still ace the quiz (assuming the material is new to him/her) you have an assessment calibration problem, which, translated for normies means you are wasting the kids' time.
I do have some sympathy for parents here. This is why it's crucial that teachers are PURPOSEFUL in creating formative assessments, that we offer corrective feedback on 2-3 assignments a week that are practice for the unit test, and that we return assignments quickly and allow students to ask questions/go over them in class before moving on to another topic.
If you do that, what you find is that their practice assignments accurately indicate what their quiz scores will be. AND you'll see a kid who bombs quizzes and tests at first grow over time.
It's called learning, and it used to be our business.
Thank for your breakdown. I like your method, and I wish I could follow it at my current site. At my school leaving any grade box blank (even for missing assignments) is flagged in audits. We're required to enter a numerical grade, and no grade is allowed to be blank. That’s where our whole Frankenstein system breaks down: the district mandates a 40% floor for every assignment and simultaneously insists on hard deadlines after a few days and no blank grades, while also weighting all practice work at 60%. The kids learn pretty quickly that practice ought to be a perfect grade (since it counts the most), and if it's not their grades suffer.
I think tactically the angle I could take would be to start complaining that weighting daily work at 60% is extremely inequitable, because it incentivizes kids to cheat.copy on their practice work to avoid any mistakes. Of course like you said the real problem is we're pushed and incentivized to grade practice work *for completion* by our administrators, not actually grading it for accuracy.
Nope. A kid can bomb tests and quizzes. Very low scores happen, but they're rare. Generally, I'll only have a handful of Ds and Fs -- the scores cluster in the C to B range. As also tend to be relatively rare. It's not a perfect bell curve, but I know when I've done my job adequately because an average student tends to get an average grade.
Ds and Fs happen for kids who are either chronically absent or fail to to process notes in class or do homework/reading.
I know all of this. This was originally on Twitter as my last good faith effort to explain what could be done to fix schools. I’m also very very clear on the incentive structures and gatekeeping at the district, state, and federal levels that mean it will never happen. This series was a goodbye to the mostly pointless reform discourse on X; I assume you’ll understand that. If you read more of my stuff on Substack you’ll understand I am very clear on the structural inefficiencies prevalent in k12 which preclude instructional effectiveness.
I don’t use AI and I’ve never read TLAC, but I’m familiar with Lemov’s work. He’s doing the best he can from within.
I think it will most likely burn to the ground and I wasn’t going to let it take my kids.
I wish I could buy you a beer, Mr. Olson. I lived it for 20 years.
I haven’t read Lemov BECAUSE he thinks the system should be saved. I was excellent at my job, at great cost to my family, at great benefit to thousands of kids in Title I schools — and admin wanted me G O N E goooone.
That’s a system that’s not worth saving.
I left anyway to save my own children from their fecklessness, but I feel for you, enormously, more than i could ever express in writing.
What I wouldn't give to be able to give a "traditional" test outside of my AP course. Or have a grade book where anything below a 60% is failing instead of a C or D. Or take notes more than twice a month without getting talked to about "skills" and how knowledge isn't a "skill" (guess why multiple choice is really frowned upon).
We're not that far from hearing "Welcome to Carl's Jr. Would you like to try our EXTRA BIG ASS TACO? Now with more MOLECULES!"
The worst traits of the Professional Managerial Class can be found in national intelligence agencies and public school administrations.
This grading structure is EXACTLY how I remember my middle and High school years used to be! Especially for my AP classes, there was more work but still measured along these lines. I went to Blue ribbon schools (IS/IB school) and a college prep STEM high school.
When I checked on the schools in my current state, they are nothing like how I remember. All work is done on their Chromebook.
I especially liked your mentioning of note taking, as I was just this past week thinking of how to teach my 3rd grader (by age, she's in 4th grade work and reading at an 8th grade level) how to take actual notes. Since we homeschool, there isn't as great a need to take notes because I know already where my kids are weak and where they are strong. We also constantly do oral review of their subjects but my eldest is very quickly marching through the grade levels. I think I will implement some form of note taking in her history books study, as I see more assignments being done via reading a section and referring to that section for the answer. She goes by memory, my kid got my brain but my brain now is not so academically strong! Have to poke through my old college notes and see what my note style was! 😄
I'm not a teacher (but an overly educated nerd and homeschool mom) - these are all amazing tips. It gives me such an appreciation for the years of training and theory that professional teachers have - and also encourages me to be ready to level up my homeschooling when my kids get older. Thank you!
I'm going to post an article soon on helping moms teach their children how to use Cornell notetaking. I think it's very, very valuable in home-based education.
I see to many worksheets and unit plans that aren't very good. Let your kid access the good stuff and let him pull what he thinks is crucial from it. That's a real education, but you need the check on their understanding that Cornell notes provides the non-expert parent (which I am in every subject, LOL.)
Thank you so much for this. As a newish mild/mod SPED Social Science teacher this has never been explained to me. I plan to study this and use it as a map for my curriculum next year. We don't give homework as a rule at our high school for sped classes but I want to incorporate some next,any suggestions?
Use Cornell notes. They work beautifully in a science classroom. You don't need to kkill yourself with worksheets, but you do need to worke REALLY hard in lecture to make sure you're breaking down concepts in ways that your students can understand. I'm working on a post on Cornell Notes that should be out very soon. You can subscribe for free; I'lll make sure I put "Cornell Notes" in the title. :)
Thank you. I am planning to try Cornell notes again (after reading your article on how to explicitlytrach taking notes). I teach History and Gov Econ (socialscience). I can see this working in Gov/Econ but for US and World History the information can often feel like I am putting them into cognitive overload. 😭
I taught two years of us history 7th/8th and my kids LOVED the notes. I promise; if you know your stuff and carefully plan your notes so the ideas are organized in such a way that the kids can see the connections between topics/periods, they will LOOOOOVE your class because you make it EASY for them to learn. 💙
There are so many points here that I would like to enact in the graduate program I teach in (blended format with flipped classroom delivery). My supervisor is unfortunately of the persuasion that all quizzes should be outside of class time and that larger summative assessments unfairly increase student anxiety. We haven't had a program-level discussion about optimal weighting of gradebooks, but given our diverse teaching styles and content areas, I'm not sure how productive such a discussion would be.
Another great article in this series! Also could be useful for planning and reflection as a teacher even outside of whole school implementation.
If I chart this out for a history class, it sounds like the planning would look something like:
Monday: Pass out study guide, Do Now, lecture, exit ticket
Tuesday: Do Now, lecture, exit ticket, reading for homework
Wednesday: Reading quiz, reading notes/discussion
Thursday: Do now, lecture, exit ticket
Friday: quiz
Do this 2-3 weeks, then unit test.
Does that seem accurate? It seems like a lot of weekly grading (8 inputs per week per student = 600 inputs per week easily, or 10 hours at 1 minute per assignment).
Otherwise, could you outline an average week with this setup or explain what I'm not understanding?
Also tangential question: what do you think about peer grading for quizzes? I like that saves me time on grading and also gives students additional review with the material but I'd like to hear your thoughts.
Thanks again for the help you've already been!
I wouldn't grade both the Do Now and an Exit ticket, necessarily, tbough I think that would inform your teaching way more effectively.
The way I see it is the students "Do Now" and after I've taken attendance, I walk around and glance at kids' work, and, if it looks weak, I tell them to go back and review their notes from the previous day. (Generally, I try to get them to attempt the Do Now using only memory first, but go back to their notes as a resource when they run out of relevant knowledge so they can self-diagnose where the process/knowledge breaks down for them.)
Then we debrief it, usually starting with cold calls of students whose work I saw was good. I try to address common misconceptions or bring up things *I* could've explained better, based on the quick looks I took when I was circulating.
Then lecture -- and active notes including cues and summaries. Summaries are there to get them to review all the material covered that day. If I assign an exit ticket, it'd probably be two days before the quiz and would ask them to do the kind of work that will appear on the quiz so I could anticipate where they might score low on the quiz and remediate the next day OR postpone the quiz for more teaching.
I wish there could be a MTWThF set schedule, but it really depends on the formative assessments (the practice assignments) you're getting back from the kids. Generally, I'm only quizzing every other week, unless it's a novel unit, in which case I will do very simple reading quizzes for accountability. Otherwise, I'm quizzing when I know 70% of the kids have completed sufficient practice to pass the quiz.
And we 100% grade in class -- except sentence diagramming which is too niggly and requires my eye and judgment, and larger essay questions -- the scoring gets way too tricky as the questions get more complex.
When you're grading Do Nows and Exit Tickets it should be less than 30 seconds - you're reading it, and giving a check if they were right and a bracket or a x if they weren't clear or incorrect. This will take time, but what DT is suggesting is giving corrective feedback is one of the most important things that teachers can do, and thus should be a big part of how we spend our working time when not teaching.
Part of the advantage of note-taking is while there is some prep work, if you know your stuff it should save time instead of having to create and format worksheets that students fill out during class. Also helps with admin work like lesson planning.
- 5 min Do Now
- 5 min Reviewing Do Now, students fix errors and misconceptions
- 30 min Lecture and manual note taking
- 10 min Cornell Notes Summary
- 5 min Exit Ticket
I just made your lesson plan for at least 60-70% of your lessons next year.
Do you have a grade floor for turned in tests and quizzes?
I can't find your comment about minimum grade floors instituted by the District.
Tactically,, I'd handle it this way.
What the District wants is no zeroes pulling the kids GPA down.
So:
Kid doesn't turn in a practice assignment, I'd mark it "Missing" in the online gradebook, but leave the box empty. This means they don't get dinged for the missing assignment, but I and the parents know it was never turned in.
If a principal asked me why the boxes were empty, I'd say, "Well ,since we use equitable grading practices here, I want parents to know the student still has the opportunity to complete this practice assignment, when he's ready, of course, (try to say that without sarcasm). I can't put a grade in that he hasn't earned, and I don't want to diminish his enthusiasm as he learns at his own pace by putting in a zero, especially since policy is that we accept late work from students. Every practice assignment I give is meant to grow their ability and knowledge, so I want him to see that empty box, know because there's no zero he can still turn it in, and be incentivized to attempt the work assigned there."
Now, when you have like a million empty boxes marked Missing and the kid takes a quiz and fails it, if you're obligated to put in a minimum, like a 5 or 6 or whatever, put that in, but make a note of the student's actual score in the box to the left. I usually put something like, "36% original; minimum grade applied)
Takes a few extra seconds, yes.
The empty boxes won't pull the kid's grade down, but will help a guardian understand that, at least in your class, doing the practice will help a student get better grades overall.
What you're actually up against is the number of teachers that assign homework but give little corrective feedback or give assignments that aren't well-suited to helping students learn the material. Either that, or school policies allow for lots of shortcuts to practice, like 1:1 devices. Parents look at that, think it's busywork, and say, "Eh. Why does my kid need to do that? Just let him take the quiz." If the kid can blow off all the homework and still ace the quiz (assuming the material is new to him/her) you have an assessment calibration problem, which, translated for normies means you are wasting the kids' time.
I do have some sympathy for parents here. This is why it's crucial that teachers are PURPOSEFUL in creating formative assessments, that we offer corrective feedback on 2-3 assignments a week that are practice for the unit test, and that we return assignments quickly and allow students to ask questions/go over them in class before moving on to another topic.
If you do that, what you find is that their practice assignments accurately indicate what their quiz scores will be. AND you'll see a kid who bombs quizzes and tests at first grow over time.
It's called learning, and it used to be our business.
Godspeed, Mr. Isaak.
Thank for your breakdown. I like your method, and I wish I could follow it at my current site. At my school leaving any grade box blank (even for missing assignments) is flagged in audits. We're required to enter a numerical grade, and no grade is allowed to be blank. That’s where our whole Frankenstein system breaks down: the district mandates a 40% floor for every assignment and simultaneously insists on hard deadlines after a few days and no blank grades, while also weighting all practice work at 60%. The kids learn pretty quickly that practice ought to be a perfect grade (since it counts the most), and if it's not their grades suffer.
I think tactically the angle I could take would be to start complaining that weighting daily work at 60% is extremely inequitable, because it incentivizes kids to cheat.copy on their practice work to avoid any mistakes. Of course like you said the real problem is we're pushed and incentivized to grade practice work *for completion* by our administrators, not actually grading it for accuracy.
I don’t know where you work, but this is worse than what I’ve experienced in California.
Or maybe they were just afraid to tell me what to do? Can’t rule that one out. 🤣
Literally designed only to increase ADA.
Nope. A kid can bomb tests and quizzes. Very low scores happen, but they're rare. Generally, I'll only have a handful of Ds and Fs -- the scores cluster in the C to B range. As also tend to be relatively rare. It's not a perfect bell curve, but I know when I've done my job adequately because an average student tends to get an average grade.
Ds and Fs happen for kids who are either chronically absent or fail to to process notes in class or do homework/reading.
I know all of this. This was originally on Twitter as my last good faith effort to explain what could be done to fix schools. I’m also very very clear on the incentive structures and gatekeeping at the district, state, and federal levels that mean it will never happen. This series was a goodbye to the mostly pointless reform discourse on X; I assume you’ll understand that. If you read more of my stuff on Substack you’ll understand I am very clear on the structural inefficiencies prevalent in k12 which preclude instructional effectiveness.
I don’t use AI and I’ve never read TLAC, but I’m familiar with Lemov’s work. He’s doing the best he can from within.
I think it will most likely burn to the ground and I wasn’t going to let it take my kids.
Take from what I’ve written whatever you will. 🤷
I wish I could buy you a beer, Mr. Olson. I lived it for 20 years.
I haven’t read Lemov BECAUSE he thinks the system should be saved. I was excellent at my job, at great cost to my family, at great benefit to thousands of kids in Title I schools — and admin wanted me G O N E goooone.
That’s a system that’s not worth saving.
I left anyway to save my own children from their fecklessness, but I feel for you, enormously, more than i could ever express in writing.