Grade 9 math - Part Deux - Improving Retention through Spiraling and Descriptive Feedback

Every year I complain to myself quietly about two things:  1)  lack of retention and 2) kids at this school only care about marks, and not about learning.

Yes, yes, I know - at least they care about something.  I am lucky to be at a school where they care about school, whether it's extrinsically about marks or intrinsically about learning.

However, these are two problems that I would like to solve.

Retention

Quite often, what I taught in September was entirely forgotten about by the time January came; I saw this in some of my 9 academic/11 university-preparation students who did their homework everyday.  For 9 applied students who are less likely to do their homework, retention would become a bigger  issue in my class.  I looked around online and found that some people were also trying to solve the problem of lack of retention through designing the curriculum in a spiral.  Unlike the linear curriculum that I still prefer to implement for my academic/university prep students (maybe it will change), this style of curriculum allows my applied students to see math concepts a couple times repeated throughout the semester, sometimes in a different light  or through a different problem.  The hope was that by seeing the concepts repeated tweaked in a slightly different way after a few times with weeks separated in between, retention would increase.

Learning vs Attaining Marks

This year, while I am still spiraling, it led to the use of descriptive feedback only.  I had a discussion a couple of years ago with a colleague at Trudeau about a situation where if a student scored better on their exam than their term mark, I should consider making their final mark their exam mark.  Their argument was that if a student can demonstrate their learning by the end of the course, it doesn't matter that they couldn't do it in September.  I still am not fully convinced, as I believe that throughout the term there are other pieces like "thinking" or "communication" which are more fairly evaluated when there is more time than a 1.5 hour exam.  However, the colleague still had a key point that I could not shake off - the learning cycle ends with an exam and if students can demonstrate their knowledge and understanding by that time, that should be all that matters.   

Quite often when my students receive a their test, they always look at the mark first before any descriptive feedback.  While the majority of my students react to the actual mark first, there are fewer students that can get past that initial reaction to read the descriptive feedback and actually learn. This makes sense for a student because the test is a natural end and judgement to the learning cycle of a unit or a spiral.

So, I decided to try descriptive feedback only for the first half of the semester to extend the learning cycle.  This emphasizes to them that the first 1 or 2 spirals through the curriculum would be about learning only.  As a result, the principal and the superintendent have given me permission to give "I" as opposed to any marks on the report card for my students for both the interim and midterm report cards.  This has given its own sets of problems as my students really want to know how they're doing in terms of a mark.  I am trying to emphasize to them that learning as much as you can is all that you should be worried about at this time.

I just want to leave you with this final quote from my student.  The context was this - it was September when I was having trouble convincing my own students that there wouldn't be any marks.  There was a general consensus among the twenty of them that they would actually want marks just to know where they are.  I was about to lose them when one of my students said: "I get it now...school becomes more about learning than it is about passing."  All the students had an 'aha' moment given to them from another student.  It was one of the more impressive 'aha' moments I have witnessed in my 10 year career...and I wasn't the source of it.  What's more interesting, is that this 'aha' moment was more rewarding than any other.