In-Service Reflection
During the last several weeks, the huge commotion at faculty in-service has been on the grading system at Middleton Middle School. The faculty feels that they are in need of a more technological grading system that will allow them to enter grades and access them more easily than hand written notebooks. Last year the faculty wanted to incorporate a new grading program that would help the teachers accurately grade student’s assignment. A majority of the teachers wanted to break up the grading into four categories for each subjects. The areas would be: 1. Work Habit, 2. Behavior, 3. Content Knowledge, and 4. Average Grade. The Average Grade is the overall cumulative total of points acquired in tests, quizzes and homework. The system that is now implemented has been giving the teachers a lot of difficulties within their grading system. At the collaboration meeting each Wednesday, the entire meeting time was spent trying to fix the grade dilemma. Many teachers have expressed their opinions that the new grading system is going to take more time than what they thought it would in order to keep it accurate and working affectively. In working with the 6th grade team, I have noticed that the new grading program is going to take more time than the teacher hoped for. The first thing is that the teachers need to keep track of the student’s assignments closely. Second the teacher has to keep track of the student’s work habit and behavior on a separate grading system. This in and of itself is an issue seeing as it can be difficult to have to keep backtracking from one form to the other trying to settle on a grade device. The third thing is that teachers need to find out the percentage of content knowledge that is obtained by each individual student. The problem is, how does a teacher assess content knowledge? How does one decide in a whole classroom the individual progress that each student as made in their content area knowledge? The system is very confusing and I believe all the teachers are feeling the same way. I have been watching and asking a lot of questions about the grading system for the last four weeks. To be totally honest, I am still confused and lost about how the grading system is configured and works out for the teachers.
In fact, I would love to enter the grades for the Flex: Atlas class I teach, but I don’t have a computer system that will enable me to do so. So I had to get a new grade book on Mrs. Warwick’s computer to help me keep track of students work the correct way without falling behind in the grading process. The grading process has been a learning experience. The in-service meetings seem to be a complete waste of time because the only true way to figure out the grading system is by learning it yourself or by having another staff member show you. I think the main problem is that the staff at MMS has not been told or explain to how to set up the system. I think that this issue would be easily solved with a technological expert on the program system coming in and providing a two hour meeting and walking the teachers through it step by step. This would allow for them to ask all of their essential questions while finding ways to work the system instead of having it work them.
