Effort & Achievement

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Almost Finished!

Thanks to the math teacher and Hebrew teachers, I was able to steal two hours of work time today, Friday, the last day!

Students got to work finishing off the schach supports and the decorative Star of David out of rope that adorns the roof of the Sukkah. Meanwhile, others kept plowing away at decorations, including a 4′ x 8′ section of the Western Wall — complete with nooks for prayers.

At one point,  a few students were not being particularly helpful. Actually, they were making a huge mess out of the corn from the corn stalks that I had picked up for schach. Their excuse was that they had nothing to do. I reminded them that it’s their job to figure out how to be helpful and challenged them to figure out how to make use of the corn in a decorative way (rather than just destroy it). Two boys went to sit on the bench to “think about it” for a while. Honestly, I didn’t think they were actually working on the problem. But they sure proved me wrong! Their idea was to use the corn to spell out MJDS by drilling the corn into leftover pieces of OSB and hanging it in the Sukkah. Brilliant.

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At this point it’s down to the finishing touches — laying the schach on the roof, finalizing decoration and adding the tables and chairs! Chag sameach!

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Measuring Effort & Achievement

Back in my first teaching career (before I was head of school at MJDS), assessing students and ultimately giving them a grade was easy. Like just about every teacher I ever had, various assessment categories corresponded to a certain percentage of a student’s grade — e.g., tests were 30%, quizzes 10%, etc. Well, that doesn’t work for me any more, and I wonder if it ever worked for the students anyway.

I no longer care about tests and quizzes. While they might assess how much content knowledge a student can cram into her head, or even some level of critical thinking if there’s actually writing involved, they utterly fail to assess the learning process, nor do they provide much opportunity for kids to adjust midstream. And frankly, outside of academia, who gets assessed by a test anyway?

Now that I am in my second teaching career — let’s call it Teacher 2.0 — I care mostly about effort and achievement and teamwork (or collaboration…pick your synonym). So I introduced my students to the Effort & Achievement Rubric, which lays out the most important assessment standard in my class. And the best part is that the students will regularly self-assess based on this rubric.

Special thanks to the fantastic teachers at Birmingham Covington School for this rubric.