Creating a Self-Directed Learning Environment

Standards-Based and Social-Emotional Learning

Greg Mullen

• Publisher: Corwin
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781544384245
• eBook ISBN: 9781544384252
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Educate the whole child—improve the whole school.

Implementing evidence-based and innovative teaching practices can feel like juggling: If you have standards-based learning in one hand and social-emotional learning in the other, what do you do with cognitive development? This book shows you how to balance all 3, combining these concepts into manageable, realistic plans for success.

In clear, easy-to-follow language, master teacher and educational expert Greg Mullen introduces a flexible, three-tiered, visual framework designed for schoolwide collaboration. He also offers:

• An integrated philosophy focused on self-directed learning and the whole child
• Research sourced from CASEL and state programs and initiatives
• Attention to academic inclusion, behavior intervention, and classroom management
• Numerous illustrations, tables, and graphics
• Tools and supplemental resources for implementation

Make innovation work for your school. With this guide, you and your colleagues will build on your strengths, discover the potential of your existing programs, and implement smart changes that make a real difference for students.

Part 1 Primary Concepts

The three primary concepts in this section are three exclusive components that are critical to creating a healthy, self-directed learning environment. Each concept is explored separately from my perspective as a classroom teacher addressing social-emotional learning through the vehicle of standards-based grading according to the human development needs of my students.

The first primary concept is an approach called Standards-Based Grading (SBG). It creates a classroom instructional environment of transparency and accountability for tracking academic growth.

The second primary concept is an approach to Social-Emotional Learning (SEL). It addresses behavior expectations through an awareness of scope that provides context for reasonable systems of behavior management.

The third primary concept is an approach to cognitive and psychosocial human development. It serves to understand the shared roles of general and special education and promote unity in shared responsibilities toward educating all students.

Chapter 1 Standards-Based Grading

There have been many books published on the topic of standards-based grading. This chapter is not intended to replace or revise the practices of those published works. My intention for this chapter on standards-based grading is to provide insight into the purpose and potential for positive uses of a standards-based grading approach. It has become part of my philosophy that standards-based grading is a critical first step to creating a self-directed learning environment. Each section of this chapter covers an aspect of standards-based grading that I feel is important to understand and internalize so as to gain a better sense of why a teacher would want to implement this first concept.

The traditional teacher that is not fully standards based will likely have some practices and beliefs that may need to wholly change. Yet, the value of a standards-based classroom will increase with this transition of the teacher’s perspective. The biggest takeaways for a self-directed learning environment begin to appear as the students internalize that same shift in their own perspective toward expectations, responsibilities, and the acceptance of their own capacity as a self-directed student.

Teacher Mastery of Standards

Standards-Based Grading begins with an analysis of academic standards for the grade level assigned to be taught. It is important to analyze where each standard is coming from in its development from prior years. It is as important to also know where each standard is heading in its development in later years. This analysis provides several beneficial allowances.

First, this allows the dissection of standards of which students will expect their teacher to have insight and mastery. It is not enough to know what the standard expects of the student but how the student can master each standard in various ways. This takes time on the part of the teacher to fully understand the myriad of possible tasks and strategies that can develop a skill.

This also allows each standard to align with prior grade-level standards and provide insight into academic strategies that may have been taught to students in prior years. Past strategies may be useful at the grade level they were taught but may require adjustment to account for an increase in complexity to the current expected academic outcome. By considering the development of a skill according to the standards across grade levels, strategies may be used as scaffolds that give students more ownership of approaching problem solving in a way that will benefit them in later grade levels. This requires that both the teacher and the student communicate not only the strategy but the value and awareness of purpose for a strategy with respect to a given skill’s development.

Most important, the teacher’s mastery of standards will eventually provide students the freedom to move on or go back to any grade-level standard and have the confidence that instructional guidance for any skill will be available to them from the teacher or other available resources. This will become a major component in developing a self-directed learning environment.

Standards and Grading

Determining which grading practice is appropriate for each standard is a process in and of itself. This determination of grading practice connects to how teachers break down tasks that develop the mastery of grade-level standards.

Percentage-Based Grading

There are a number of common grading practices to consider when grading different standards. The most prevalent practice is the percentage-based grading practice. Any approach that relies on a calculation of student work correct over a total amount of correct work possible can be considered a percentage-based grading practice.

For example, if an assessment has seven questions and the student correctly answers four of them, regardless of what the questions entail, the result can be communicated as a score of four out of seven (57 percent). This becomes a serious concern when the assessment is not designed such that missing any three of those seven questions would validate a failing score.

A more reasonable use of this grading practice might involve large quantities of work such as fluency speed tests for math facts or spelling (presuming that such tasks have been deemed appropriate for assessing proficiency). However, keep in mind that if an assessment has twenty math facts to be completed within a particular amount of time, a student who correctly answers more than ten (50 percent) but less than fifteen (75 percent) may consider themselves failing that particular standard. Because of these quick and convenient uses of percentage-based scoring, it is easily the most misused and miscommunicated form of grading.

My own experience with percentage-based grading is that students become obsessed with bringing up their percentage score by ignoring the content they didn’t master and seeking to complete other extra assignments or projects unrelated to standards not mastered. I also find difficulty using a single percentage score to communicate results of an assessment that may contain more than one skill or standard.

Pass-Fail Grading

Another common grading practice is the pass-fail method. This is common for basic skills and standards that have little to no gray area of process or concept. Memorizing a fact for recall is a low-level cognitive task for which I may grade as a pass or not pass. I may use this when students are learning phonics or describing in one sentence a main idea of a passage. Lower elementary has many standards at this basic recall level but, as students reach higher grade levels, they may see less of this grading method as the cognitive complexity of tasks increase. Skills or standards that build on sections of a procedure or concept may need a grading method that accounts for these higher-levels of cognitive complexity and rigor.

Rubric Grading

Another common grading practice is the rubric. This practice becomes useful as the cognitive complexity of tasks increase. Points-based rubrics may be used to communicate objective expectations of growth in student learning with any number of points to be considered for grading purposes, depending on the skill or standard.

Today, I see four-point rubrics being used often but have seen up to six-point rubrics applied to specific tasks. Rubrics for writing often have several sets of expectations separated into a multi-point rubric to account for grammar, content, voice, and other such writing-related skills. I’ve also seen five-point rubrics used for projects that have five distinct components that must be completed for full credit. It is important to recognize how easy it is to use a rubric as a point-counting system that does not specifically and objectively reflect student learning according to the standard being addressed. Point-based rubrics can easily become a means of calculating points earned over total points possible—which then becomes a percentage-based grade.

I often have students who will receive two out of four points on a rubric and reinterpret that as 50 percent and tell other students that they have failed. These students have learned to equate their learning with a percentage and associate that percentage with their proficiency of a skill or standard. This goes against the intended beliefs of a standards-based grading system that promotes high-quality feedback for students to interpret as progress toward mastery. Rubric grading will more often be used with a multi-standard task that, when giving feedback on each rubric item, may seem like more work but can be time-saving in the long run.

Letter Grades

Traditionally, this is the most popular form of grading. Letter grades are essentially a glorified percentage-based grading system that organizes ranges of percentage scores and simplifies each range of percentage scores to assigned letters such as A, B, C, D, and F.

The simplicity in writing a single letter to represent student learning has become a common expectation for teachers and parents. It seems receiving a letter grade represents a percentage score within a percentage range to communicate content mastery. As a student growing up, I never felt that my own mastery of a skill was up to me and that the letter grade I received meant only what the teacher told me I had learned. When I received a ‘C’ on an assignment or report card, I only knew it was enough to pass. I saw other students who received a ‘B’ as having learned more than me but less than those that received an ‘A’. At no point was it made clear to me what those letters meant beyond my own interpretation of learning or not learning. Today, I see students going through this same percentage-based letter grade system and realize that they, like me, have little to no idea what those letter grades mean with regard to their own learning.

Transfer of Scales

The particular grading scales chosen by a teacher for marking individual assignments and assessments will likely involve multiple grading scales. Each mark must only communicate to what level of proficiency a student has or has not mastered a particular standard or skill. If a student has shown mastery of a required standard, that should be the only information used to develop a final grade. When it comes to students almost mastering a standard, this is discussed in more detail in the next section: Defining Proficiency.

It is critical that individual assignment scores avoid transferring between scales. Every grading scale is used to provide feedback on a particular task. Proficiency is set according to that task. Marks students receive communicate the level of mastery for that task and that standard. Transferring a score from one grading scale to another can confuse the level of mastery a student has acquired for a standard.

At the end of a grading period, it will be the mastery of each skill or standard that will be communicated, not the averaging of pseudo-equivalent percentage scores for each assignment. Whatever grading scales are chosen, they must be specific to the task and communicate mastery appropriate for each standard.

When using any grading scale, address the specific learning task with a specific range of learning outcomes based on the specific scale for grading. The purpose for this strict adherence to the use of grading scales communicating mastery of standards is to help students learn how to describe what they have and have not learned based on the expectations of a particular skill or standard. This becomes critical in a self-directed learning environment.

Defining Proficiency

Proficient is a word widely used but rarely defined. It is my opinion that a single definition for this word would set an extraordinarily unrealistic expectation for standards in subjects across all grade levels. It is also my opinion that the word proficient should be defined such that it is relevant to the skill or standard being mastered, in each subject, at each grade level. It is also my opinion that words synonymous with this term such as Mastery, Competency, “At Level”, Meeting Expectations, and the like, are not to replace or reassign its purpose. To define proficiency, a standard must be referred to as it relates to the development of a skill within and across grade levels. For this approach toward defining proficiency, I prefer to use the language associated with the four levels of Webb’s Depth of Knowledge, as noted in the following figure.

As will be explained in this section, a standard can be assigned as a Level 1 Proficiency standard if that standard is written such that it requires only recall or reproduction of basic information. A different standard could be written as a Level 3 Proficiency standard if it requires insightful communication of an idea through which evidence is provided as reasonable and relevant support.

The purpose of defining proficiency this way, as will be discussed in detail below, is to not only define the expected level of proficiency of individual standards but to be better prepared to communicate expectations for proficiency with students, parents, and colleagues.

The goal is to target and shift reporting lang...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Acknowledgements
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• About the Author
• Introduction
• Part 1 Primary Concepts
• Chapter 1 Standards-Based Grading
• Chapter 2 Social-Emotional Learning
• Chapter 3 Cognitive and Psychosocial Human Development
• Part 2 Secondary Concepts
• Chapter 4 Self-Directed Learning
• Chapter 5 (Part 1) Behavioral Coaching
• Chapter 5 (Part 2) Behavioral Inclusion and Intervention
• Chapter 6 Academic Inclusion and Intervention
• Conclusion
• Sources of Motivation (Resources and Citations)
• Index
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