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.

How do students react to Learning Maps? My students are just interested in their marks – “What did I get?”

Yes, grades and marks are the currency in our school system, and we do take some responsibility for our students’ focus on marks. As teachers, we’ve used the line “it’s for marks” many a time to get the attention of the class. The point we want to emphasize is that, when using the five-step approach to arriving at letter grades, students do continue to get marks – on tests or assignments, or whenever a number makes sense as evidence. We’ve not stopped giving marks; we’ve simply stopped relying on numbers alone. And we no longer add up a string of marks to calculate a letter grade.

Using a Learning Map as the basis for determining a letter grade helps students see the learning that underlies their grade. We’ve seen many of our learners move beyond being interested only in their marks and begin to pay attention to and talk about the link between what they are supposed to learn (Big Ideas), how they are actually doing (evidence and highlighted descriptions of learning), and what they need to work on next.

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