Dear Virginia,

I'm School Loop's CEO. I normally don't do this, but since you are just starting out, I'd thought I'd make a suggestion that you consider whether weighting your grades is really the right idea.

Many teachers use weighting because it seems like a fair way to allocate scores proportionately based an the value/importance of the category. This can be accomplished with straight points as well, though weighting is cleaner and more exact.

The downside, though, of weighting can be significant, and since with School Loop we address questions from thousands of teachers and hundreds of thousands of students, we've seen it all.

There are two primary problems. One is the empty category problem. If there are two categories, one worth 60% and the other 40%, and one is empty, the other will be scaled to 100% until the empty one has a scored assignment. What happens is that a teacher will have one category with 1000 total points in it, and 0 in the other, and then add one assignment worth 5 points in the empty category, and give a number of students a 0. If that category is worth 40%, even if those students have 100% in the 60% category, they now are showing nearly a failing grade.

This is a dramatic example, and it happens with disturbing regularity. It also highlights the other problem, confusion among students and parents. This example is so dramatic, it raises big red flags. But normally, kids and parents get confused because they see no connection between their point scores and the effect on their grade. This is particularly acute if a student consistently does well in low value categories.

This would be difficult but possibly comprehendable, but then multiply this by the six or seven classes taken by a student, each with its own grading scale and weighting scheme. Most students just give up

When I was a student teacher, I started with weighting as well, but one day I added scores and a student's average went down despite the score on the assignment being higher than his average. The culprit: Weighting. Shocked, I abandonned weighting. I'm hoping that sharing my experience and perspective you might consider the same.

Mark

But my first trial by wackiness was tame compared with the finale of student teaching.  A few weeks before the end, my master teacher decreed that I was addicted to technology, and that I was to go one full week without.  No technology?  You mean no whiteboard? How about desks? Lights?  She said no, she meant the projector and my laptop.  I asked how this idea would benefit the kids I was teaching.  I was nearly  thrown out of the system.

Then it hit me, all this nonsense was actually the point.  I would have to learn how to be happy in this world if I was going to have a chance.  Working in a school is about being certifiable: You have to love working with kids enough to put up with all the stuff that gets thrown in your way.  It's amazing that so many do.

But this was different: Instead of the anticipated three-notes-and-a-wounded-duck cacophony, there was complicated music. After a time if became clear why: A few of the student played exceptionally well, they had a motivated leader, and that raised the caliber of the whole band.

Afterwards, arms-crossed waiting by the cookie fund-raiser table, I kept hearing the same comments. Weren’t those kids talented? And the soloists, what talent!

This hardly seems surprising. After all, When it comes to the arts, we applaud talent. But if those students were in a math competition, or even a spelling bee, we would admire their intelligence.

Intelligent, not talented. Talented, not intelligent. This matters because labels matter. We practice to develop our talent; we learn to develop our intelligence.  Since school is for learning, we prioritize around the skills we label as requiring intelligence. After all, you can always practice at home.

So long as we think about the arts this way, they will always be undervalued in public education. The downside of this is that smart, artistic students become marginalized, forced into curricular tracks that devalue their skills at best, or undermine them at worst.

Last year, my youngest came home upset because she had been reprimanded…for her artwork. She had been asked to draw a picture of what she would look like at 100, and she drew a picture of a tombstone and some bones. The teacher took offense and told her, loudly, that it was inappropriate, took it away and made her do another. When I talked to the teacher about it, I asked her what she would look like at one hundred, but that’s another story.

This story is representative of so much that is wrong it’s hard to know where to start. Talk about a brilliant way to kill a kid’s love of school. But more deeply, it speaks to the power of the arts as a reflection of a student’s intellect and insight, not a talent that needs to be fed once in while so long as it stays within a narrow bandwidth of expected outcomes. My daughter thought about that assignment and made a visual expression that fit her idea, with irony no less. That sort of lateral thinking is an invaluable skill, the type of smarts we need to cultivate and celebrate in school.

So many creative breakthroughs come from thinking about things in new ways, seeing them, hearing them, sensing them, visualizing them as concepts and then connecting them to other ideas. But until we in the K12 world stop thinking about artistic creativity as talent, then we will never find a way to tap into the sort of intelligence that was on display this weekend at the marriage of my cousin, David.

David is a brilliant historian and engineer. He’s MIT’s Director of Program in Science, Technology, and Society. But this isn’t about David, it’s about an exchange between two artists who were his guests, Lana Caplan , a photographer and film-maker, and an accomplished concert pianist who played a beautiful piece by Chopin during the wedding.  While most of us heard the music, Lana shut her eyes and saw it in the image of a woman tenderly kissing the face of someone she loves, the eyes and eyebrows, cheeks, and nose. The pianist was floored: Lana had described exactly the images she had in mind. Lana is so intelligent she can see what musicians think. Damn.

What can we do in school to tap into that sort of intelligence, to celebrate it, to make its power evident, to develop it in every child? It’s so much more than a group project that includes the drawing of a flag. How about a project in which students have to visualize and depict information relationships in maps that show their relative position, importance, and validity? One in which they instruct someone to successfully complete a task only using four notes on a keyboard? One in which three teams use the same set moving images and sounds to create three different narratives of an event. 

Try this: For the next week, whenever you find yourself about to say talent, replace the word talent with intelligent. And if you see a kid drawing a cool picture on his notebook or another banging out a song on her keyboard, tell them how intelligent they are, ask them what would make school more interesting for them, then shut your eyes, and like Lana, see.

Mark Gross
CEO/Founder
School Loop

 "Many of the emails that come from the students are impolite and rude.  Nine out of ten are from failing students.  They tend to be disrespectful in the email and write as though they were talking to a friend via instant messaging.  I’d like to see an option to receive email from parents only."

While much of the focus on technology in schools today is centered on data-driven decision-making, a digital revolution is taking place. Students, living in world of text messaging, gaming communities, and simultaneous AIM chat sessions, are reaching out to their teachers in new ways, breaking down traditional barriers in both the style and nature of student-teacher interaction. Some see in this the future of education:  Engaged, empowered students interacting openly with adults in neutral digital settings, working together, challenging each other. Others see a threat to their most precious resource, time, and a breakdown of the respect and decorum that many believe creates a functional learning environment. Caught in the middle are administrators, reform leaders, and technology directors looking to strike a balance that works. One thing is for sure, there is no turning back.

When I first read this email, I almost cried.  Here's a teacher complaining that his failing students were reaching out to him.  Geez...isn't this what we all had hoped for?  Finding ways to engage failing students and helping them to  take an interest in their success.  As I struggled to understand the teacher's concern I realized that this was deeper than an overworked teacher concerned about more work.  Rather, this is an example of how far we have to go for the promise of technology to really impact education.

From this teacher's perspective, the issue isn't the content of the messages, it's the style and place.  Had the student approached him in class respectfully, he would not complain.  He would review his gradebook with the student and explain what was needed to be successful.  But rather than a formal, structured, hierarchical encounter, he got a informal, unstructured, peer-to-peer communique, in vernacular!  It's like a message from another planet.  It breaks all the rules, uncurtains the Wizard, and threatens the foundation of the historical teacher-student relationship.  In that world, students follow a well-trod path in these encounters, right?

The problem, of course, is that most failing student haven't trod that path -- ever.   They don't have the skills, confidence, or interest to engage in that sort of dialogue.  But online, it's easy, safe and non-threatening to flash out a message, and it's easy to flash that message in the informal language student's use online.  So they do, and they wait.  Sometimes their teacher's engage, and it's often wonderful. We get tons of messages from teachers talking about the new type of relationships they have developed, how much more deeply they understand their students, how well they are able to coach and teach.

So is this teacher wrong?  Yes and no.  Clearly if the student is failling and reaching out, perhaps engaging in this environment might help turn things around.  But he's right that the language of AIM is not appropriate in this setting.  So why not make this a teachable moment, a chance to help students understand that different styles of communication are needed for professional conversations online, that the power that they have to reach out comes with a responsibilty to do so in a way that engages both parties. 

To me, this sort of exchange is at the heart of reforming education.  First, particularly at the secondary level, we need to find ways to connect with kids, to build a network of adults they can talk to, adults who care about them and their lives.  If some of those relationships are digital, so be it.  We also need ro help students see that school is relevant to them, not by lecturing them on the connection between a degree and earnings, but by helping them to master the technologies they value, and by using those technologies on our turf and in our way, to help students mature into responsible adults who understand the value and sophisticated use of different types of media, from texting to chat to eamail to blogs and to use those tools in a way that helps them make their way in the world.

Mark Gross, CEO/Founder School Loop (and a former teacher)

The students grades were accurate but unintended.  The culprit: Weighting.  The teacher weighted two categories, one 40% and one 60%.  The 40% category contained one 10 point assignment, and most student earned 5 points.  The other category contained hundreds of points. Hmmmmm...

The purpose of using points is to motivate and provide feedback.  This is based on the assumption that people understand the meaning of a point.  It's easy to see if you imagine that a point equals a dollar. A student earns $10 for getting everything right on something worth ten points, and $100 for 100 points. It's obvious that something worth 100 points is more valuable and worth a greater time investment than something worth ten points.  Right...well, not if those points are in given in a system of weighting.

In a weighted system, something worth 100 points isn't worth $100. It might be worth $10. Or it might be worth $150. It's impossible to tell.  The weighted value of an assigment is a function of 1) the value of the category 2) the number of points available and 3) the number of assignments given in the category.

For example, pretend that all homework and tests are worth 100 points. Homework is weighted at 25% and tests 75%. If there is one test and one homework assignment, and the student scores 70 on the test, and 90 on the homework, the weighted score is 75%.

Now, let's say there there was still one test and twenty homework assignments. The student still scores 70 on the test, and 90 on all twenty homework assignments. Does the weighted score go up or down? Neither. It stays the same.  Weighting multipies the percentage earned by the weight regardless of home many points are involved.  With weighting, a student can get a score that is better than his current average, and his average can go down. Try explaining that one.

Why does this matter? Points are both feedback and stimulus: They suggest to students how much time to spend on something.  The suggest relative worth.  And not just in a given teacher's class because students are comparing pulls on their time from ALL their classes.

A student's workday is a collection of classes and assignments. Imagine a student trying to make time-investment choices across multiple classes, some of which use weighting, and each with 100 point assignment due the next day.  How should they make that choice?

What about our teacher with the low scoring students?  She had given most students a 5 of 10, 50%, on one assignment, and then counted that result as 40% of their grade.  She didn't intend to do that, but that's what happened. 

 Here's a simple test -- Ask students to guess the impact on their aggregate score of earning 100% on assignment in a given category.  If they can't predict the outcome, what does that suggest?  At best, it makes grading seem arbitrary, and at worst  we get an email from a perplexed teacher.

What can staffs do?  One idea is to collaborate on scoring systems so that, at a minimum, the math all works similarly.   This way, at least if people weight, they all weight and the math is relative  Better would be to have the same weighted categories, so that math might approach being comprehensible.  Another path would be to contrast the merits of weighting with the downsides, and make a choice based on criteria of student understanding and clarity.  

 At School Loop, we get so much email from teachers confused about the impact of weighting that we sometimes joke that teachers should need to pass a test before they can use the weighting tools.  Maybe it's not as funny as we think.

Jan 17, 2005

To: My Colleagues at Evergreen Valley High School
From: Mark Gross
Re: A Farewell Note

Left teaching today to see where School Loop will lead. Normally, when you leave a job, you get to say goodbye because you work with people in close quarters. But schools are different: We work more the idea of people than with the people themselves. Sure we see each other around, and some of us are friends, but we do our jobs apart, and most of what we know of each other is a construct, an idea built on the occasional war story, passing visit, and my personal favorite, worksheet left in the copying machine. So I guess it's fitting that, in the end, alone, I said goodbye to the one who knew me best, who saw it all: My room.

I love my room. It was my first room, and it was all mine.  I loved its windowlessness, its little hideway where the folding doors contract, it's soft glow in my Christmas lights, its smart cart whose printer was always coming tomorrow, its mind-of-its-own thermostat, its metal closet that I never had a key to open, its wobbly chairs and oh-so-petite garbage cans. So I said good-bye to my room, and it, in its own room-way, to me. My room will find another, of course, and another and another and another. But I was its first, and my ghost, the idea of me, will always linger in its memory, as I hope I do in yours, because so many of you will in mine.

One of my kids had an issue this year that required us to work with our school on some testing.  There is probably not a couple in the universe more equipped to deal confidently with a school.  We're college educated.  My wife taught Special Ed in NYC for ten years, I was a high school teacher, and I run School Loop. The people we worked with in our school were warm, accessible and supportive.  And it was one of the most intimidating experiences I've ever had.

If we have trouble dealing confidently with schools, imagine families with poor language skills, without the confidence formal education brings, without the experience to understand their rights and the school's obligations.  Sure Internet access might help, but it's not the answer.

Confidence is part of the divide, widened by language, education, status and so on.  But what about information flowing out of schools?  Parents and students need four sets of information: What they are supposed to know; how they will be measured; what specifically are the deliverables; and how they performed.  But homes WITH Internet access today don't often get all that information on a regular basis.  Our mission, of course, is to help solve that problem, but we're very, very small in a giant sea of schools.  The fact is that Internet access doesn't bridge the information divide; on the main, information is still closeted up inside schools.

So what's the answer?  First, let's just try to  reframe the question.  How can teachers or a school help bridge the information divide?  What can we do to increase parental involvement by raising their confidence (or making it less intimidating) regarding interactions with school?  Different questions might generate different ideas and programs that leverage real resources and capabilities today. 

Reality is that in a few years, people will need to fight to get off the grid -- there will be no digital divide.  At point the real divides will emerge.  Maybe we should start bridging them now.

Mark Gross
School Loop CEO and Founder

 A Learning Home is one in which parents and students have access to the tools, information and support they need to be successful.  In this case, I had the information and the skill to process it.  But in many homes, there are moments where this is impossible.  (Take mine, for instance, when it comes to helping my daughter in Chemistry).   Sometimes it's content knowledge; sometimes it's language; and sometimes it's just a lack of information - what actually is the homework?

 I'm a teacher as well as a dad, so I know it from both ends:  We want our kids to become responsible adults, and you have to ask yourself at what age we cut the tie.  The answer is never, because the definition of responsibility is accountability to oneself, but in our society, the reality is that we thrive on accountability to each other.  Interdependence is a founding principal of a democratic society, and is the basis for most modern businesses.  We need to help our children be accountable before they can be responsible.

What can schools do to help parents create Learning Homes?  That's the question this blog seeks to address and we'd love to know your ideas.

Mark Gross
Teacher, Dad, CEO and Founder of School Loop 

Teacher, Dad, CEO and Founder of School Loop