Kathleen + Caren

Are on the Map

Meet Caren and Kathleen, authors of the book Rethinking Letter Grades and master educators. Their goal, to provide the best learning environments for students, motivated them to create a five-step process of teaching and assessing using “Learning Maps.” This process, creating “big ideas,” describing levels of performance, and selecting and matching evidence of learning to descriptions, clearly showed students their strengths and helped them to succeed.

Building and using learning maps is the foundation of QUIO. Creating learning maps may be a new process for you, and you may have questions along the way. We have provided FAQ here for you, but if you don’t find what you are looking for, just ask. Caren and Kathleen are here to answer your questions.

What about students on an IEP? How does the five-step approach work for them?

For students who have IEPs and do receive letter grades, we make three changes on our Learning Map:

  • We include the specific support or adaptation that students receive on the Learning Map.
  • We focus the evidence of learning on talking with and observing learners rather than always requiring a product, such as a written task or an assignment.
  • We reduce the number of Big Ideas that the student is focussing on.

For those students who have an iep and have a modified program (not working on the prescribed learning standards of the curriculum and so do not receive letter grades), we make the following changes:

We make the IEP goals students’ Big Ideas.

We omit step 5, as students who have an iep with a modified program do not receive letter grades. Instead, we describe growth and progress for each of the iep goals/individual Big Ideas on the Learning Map.

The most important point for us is that our students who have ieps also have Learning Maps – just like everyone else.

This entry was posted in IEP, Learning Map. Bookmark the permalink. Both comments and trackbacks are currently closed.
Quio
Ask a question.

We aren't around right now. Please leave a message and we'll get back to you as soon as we can.

Questions, issues or concerns? I'd love to help you!

Click ENTER to chat