"Critical Friend" Kevin

One of the great things about going to high school is the opportunity to be part of a team. Whether a student chooses to play a sport or not, he or she has the opportunity to show up and root for the team. When Borgia wins "State," we all win State. Especially at Borgia, team spirit is plentiful.  Sometimes, we have the opportunity to rally around other causes much like we rally around our teams. And in the case of the Pro-Life trip, the team is much bigger than our students experience with the other teams they support. The Pro-Life Trip experience, however, begins with Borgia rallying together as a team. This past fall, our campus minister Andy Halaz put extra energy into helping students to recognize that the Pro-Life trip is an opportunity to come together spiritually. We wanted to fill a bus with Borgia students going to Washington D.C. to march for this worthy cause. We succeeded! This was our first victory as a team.  In doing so, we had to remind students that a trip t

To best understand rubrics and how they are used in education, I encourage you to consider an activity that is routine, such as setting the table for dinner. Consider the different activity that goes into setting the table: placement of dishes, placement of utensils, and placement of napkins may be a few. Some of you might like to have a tablecloth down or candles lit, depending on the atmosphere you are trying to achieve. At my house, we all set the table on different days. Sometimes, my four year-old Cosette sets the table. On these nights, we sometimes have a legitimate amount of ice in our glasses, but other times we might just have a cube or two. Sometimes my fork is found next to somebody else's plate, but at least she gets it to the table. She also places napkins on the table, but those might seem to be thrown there, as opposed to how my wife might place them. When my wife sets the table, we obviously have all of our utensils in the right places, often our drinks are already

In a traditional grading system, the "zero" grade can have some relatively extreme effects. At Borgia, we don't want the effect of the zero to change student grades so drastically that they no longer have the letter grade that represents one's knowledge and skills.  For instance, "Matt" may be a very talented student who thoroughly understands physics. However, if Matt fails to turn in a couple of assignments, his grade wouldn't indicate this. Let's assume that Matt earned the following grades: Quiz A: 36 out of 40 Test A: 100 out of 100 Lab A: 75 out of 80 Project: 0 out of 100 Quiz B: 40 out of 40 Test B: 98 out of 100 Lab B: 80 out of 80 Matt has an "A" or "B" on all six of the assignments he completed, but that one zero changes his overall grade to a 79%, "C." In fact, if we eliminate that missed assignment entirely, he has a 97.5%, A. If Matt had turned in that assignment and got the lowest of passing grades (70%),

The term "reassessment" is a relatively new word at Borgia, but its practice is anything but new. Good teachers recognize when something was amiss at test time, and that's what the reassessment part of our grading policy is meant to encourage. We want our teachers to recognize whether... a. the whole class struggled with an assessment and material may need to be retaught. b. individual students struggled with an assessment and may need extra support. Not to take the responsibility off of students, we want them to be able to recognize the need to "re-learn" and then reassess material, too! I have heard some concerns that life doesn't allow for second chances, so we should not be allowing for second chances in our schools. However, I have two problems with that position. 1. Life does allow for second chances, quite frequently.  If I fail my driver's test, I am not banned from hitting the roads forever. Instead, I get as many additional chances I need, so l

Borgia's new gradebook policy states that our grades shall be composed of summative marks. Today, I would like to address what that means and why we have chosen to comprise our grades this way. In education, we have two different types of assignments: "formative" and "summative." In his book "Fair Isn't Always Equal," educational researcher Rick Wormeli best defines these terms with a medical metaphor. He writes that a formative assignment is an assignment "for learning," while a summative assignment is an assessment "of learning"...so a formative assignment is like going to the doctor for a physical, and a summative assignment is like an autopsy. Meaning, all of the formative assignments we give are meant to be opportunities to realize our current state of understanding (just as a physical allows us to know our current state of health), but the summative mark in the gradebook is the final mark: the learning is finished and it&#