Grading behavior makes grades meaningless, being “good” or “compliant” doesn’t mean your knowledge of the material increased, which is the only thing grades should measure. #edusky

Predictability is the one of the most important parts of classroom management. I deviated from my normal lesson structure for few weeks between breaks to give students some easier work, and they actually said it was harder because they weren’t used to the structure and processes. #edysky

I know it’s Saturday, but, blaming children for not being engaged in your classwork is lazy. But, it’s easy, and it relieves you of responsibility.

It is your responsibility to find a way to engage all of your students in your content, even if that level is minimal. #edusky

Stop grading assignments, grade knowledge. Enter standards and topics into your grade book. Have students take a prior knowledge survey that covers all the topics in a standard, and you have evidence for a baseline grade to enter into all of your topics. Allow students improve from there. #edusky

Grading by standard and topics within those standards eliminates the problem of missing assignments. Simply enter your pretest grade for the standard or topic and let them improve from there. If, for some reason, they fail to complete the work, their grade is just what they knew before. #edusky

A 0 for a missing assignment allows teachers to pin the responsibility on the student for not being responsible, or lazy. In reality, the teacher hasn’t done enough to figure out how to engage the student and has entered a grade that claims to represent their knowledge without evidence.

It is essential that parents come to open house and conferences, they must know who is teaching their students. Because when I greet a student in public, and the parent gets a half second panicked look of “why is this 40 year old man talking to my child?!” I’m just their teacher! #edusky

Averaging out grades for quarters and semesters doesn’t make sense and hides valuable information. If report cards made sense in our modern age of daily grade checks with apps, they would include a breakdown of standards covered in the time period as well as how that student scored against it.

The best way to deal with missing assignments is to prevent them from happening in the first place. With a wide net of differentiation in your classroom, you can allow students of many different ability levels to engage with your content and prevent the formation of learning gaps. #edusky

I offer 5 levels of practice differentiation for each lesson in my class, based on the Types of Knowledge: “Crash Course”, Factual, Conceptual, Procedural, and Metacognitive. Each contains a set of 6 questions based on Bloom’s Domains of Knowledge. This is key to maximizing Ss success.