"...and Not to Yield": Explorations in English Education

My Instruction and Assessment Philosophy Over the past couple years, I have been reading into standards-based grading and “healthy” grading practices. Along with a variety of blog posts, @TG2Chat/#tg2chat and the #sblchat community, the following resources have assisted me in developing my standards-based assessment (and, in turn, instruction) philosophy: ·          Grading from the Inside Out by Tom Schimmer ( @TomSchimmer ) ·          On Your Mark by Thomas R. Guskey ( @tguskey ) ·          Assessment 3.0 by Mark Barnes ( @markbarnes19 ) ·          Standards-Based Learning in Action by Tom Schimmer ( @TomSchimmer ), Garnet Hillman ( @garnet_hillman ), and Mandy Stalets ( @MandyStalets ) I believe that students must seek learning, not points, and that their grade in my course should be a reflection on tha...

I titled my blog “And Not to Yield” from Tennyson’s poem “Ulysses”: …and tho’ We are not now that strength which in old days  Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are;  One equal temper of heroic hearts,  Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will  To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield. Suspecting that my delve into a workshop model may lead to challenges (see my previous blog ), I felt the reminder “not to yield” would be appropriate. I was right. My building is on an intensified block schedule, where I see students daily for eighty minutes for twenty weeks. Our semester ends on January 17 th and then schedules change and I receive new classes (one of the classes is my third section of looped sophomore English students, who my co-teacher and I taught in ninth grade English last year). This means that our end-of-course exam is approaching on January 10 th and 11 th . The State of Pennsylvania has three end-of-cou...