FIAE Chapter 13

Chapter 13 strictly discusses discovering the gradebook format that works best for your differentiated classroom. As the book so wonderfully states, "Flexibility, not rigidity, enables trees to withstand the changing winds; it's good advice for our gradebooks as well." This statement is a great way to be introduced to when thinking about gradebook formats. Using gradebooks to focus on the standards in which the student was assessed, instead of the assessment itself makes gradebooks more worthwhile, especially for reporting services. It helps make it easier to understand which topics each student hasn't fully mastered in relation to the standards, not to the percentages of what each assessment they completed. Once again, this goes back to the idea of differentiated instruction. Differentiated instruction is teaching everyone the same objectives but using different methods to get there. If you use a gradebook in the way that the book is suggesting, then differentiated instruction is being supported in the gradebook as well as in the learning process in the classroom. After all, how else are you supposed to actually use differentiate instruction if you aren't using it in assessment and grading? As the book also mentions creating a gradebook this way allows the teacher to weight their categories for each student for a more accurate representation of the student's mastery. The chapter also suggests using a median or mode as a more accurate representation of reporting a composite grade for an individual student, rather than using the mean when there is a higher difference in scores.