My goal was to write a blog once a week, but I've already failed at that. Week three didn't quite make it, but I'm back for week four and hopefully won't have too many weeks that I'll be missing. Last week was a very busy week, with work and school. I had a presentation for my Educator and the Law course, two lesson plans plus art work, and an exam in my Counseling for the Classroom Teacher class. I'm glad that things are starting to get more quiet now.
As well as school and work keeping me busy, I also had two Professional Development workshops that I attended. The first one, which I attended last Friday, was called the New Provincial Report Card. While out in my student teaching placement last term, I had the chance to get to use the new report card. While my Cooperating Teacher and I were working on it together, we ran into a lot of difficulties, mostly with the technology end of things. The most difficult part of the experience was getting the comments placed in the comment bank. Once we figured out how to do this part of the program, things ran quite smoothly.
One problem I had with the report card to begin with, was that I didn't like that there was a comment bank. I believed this made the comments much less personal and didn't give parents the information that they needed or would want in a report card. During the PD, however, I learned that a comment bank didn't need to be used. We looked at some of the comment examples that had been used for other students, and how they were both personal, and included all the aspects that the comments needed to include.
During my first week at P-School, we were given a quick introduction to the report cards. One of the things they mentioned to us first was that one of the main differences was that you could not include comments that had to do with behavior in the main subject area of the report card. A lot of questions arose from this, such as if a student does not attend class and therefore has a low mark, why can't you mention lack of attendance as a way to improve a mark. At the PD I attended, the two presenters mentioned that this would be listed in the specific behavior area of the report card, and that they also hoped that this would allow for better communication between parent and teacher, as any issues could be brought up at the parent-teacher interviews.
One aspect about the report cards that I really liked was that they encourage teachers to be jargon-free. The report card also discourages teachers from just writing about what units had been covered. I remember getting these sorts of comments on my own report cards in school, and I always disliked them because you could tell that the teacher had just copy and pasted it onto every one of the student's report cards. These unit descriptions often used a lot of jargon that parents really don't understand or care about. Making comments jargon-free and more simple allows parents to understand what their child is doing well in the course, and what they need to work on in the future. I think this is a great idea because parents who do not have a strong science background, won't be lost in the scientific jargon that a comment may include.
I went into this PD session not knowing a whole lot about the new report cards, and I left learning a lot! While this blog is just a quick overview of some of the things that I had known before and what I learned in the session, there is a lot more that I can learn, and I'm sure that once I have the chance to write my own report cards in my own classroom, I will learn a lot more.
So what is my final verdict on the new provincial report card? While I know that I will encounter a lot of challenges with working with these report cards, a lot of research has gone into the positive way these report cards will be for creating parent understanding and learning about their child as a student. Creating a positive parent-teacher-student relationship is important and creating greater ways to communicate is going to be great for teachers!
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