Professional Learning for Busy Educators

Nick Sigmon first encountered the idea of “grading for equity” when he attended a mandatory professional development training at San Leandro High School led by Joe Feldman, CEO of the Crescendo Education Group. As a fairly new high school physics teacher, Sigmon says he was open-minded to new ideas, but had thought carefully about his grading system and considered it fair already. Like many teachers, Sigmon had divided his class into different categories (tests, quizzes, classwork, homework, labs, notebook, etc.) and assigned each category a percentage. Then he broke each assignment down and assigned points. A student’s final grade was points earned divided by total points possible. He thought it was simple, neat and fair.

When a colleague invited Joy Kirr to a professional development day featuring the Scottish design thinking expert Ewan McIntosh she didn’t think it would be life changing. She was flattered to be asked, and wanted to make the most of the opportunity, but her experience of professional development up to that point didn’t lead her to believe it would be Earth-shattering. But then, McIntosh gave the teachers assembled a simple task: Pick one problem in your school and start working on it today.

Kirr, like most teachers, can think of a lot of structural problems influencing her classroom, but she decided to focus on something she could control: reading. Kirr teaches seventh grade English Language Arts, and was troubled that the curriculum only required students to read one book per quarter. She thought they should be reading a lot more than that, and she thought the rubric her school used was designed to catch kids who didn’t read. She knew there were kids getting A’s on that test who hadn’t read the book. There had to be a better way.