{"id":142,"date":"2016-08-15T18:36:29","date_gmt":"2016-08-15T18:36:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/cohort21.com\/jenniferweening\/?p=142"},"modified":"2016-08-15T18:36:29","modified_gmt":"2016-08-15T18:36:29","slug":"what-olympic-diving-judging-has-to-do-with-grading-in-schools","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cohort21.com\/jenniferweening\/2016\/08\/15\/what-olympic-diving-judging-has-to-do-with-grading-in-schools\/","title":{"rendered":"What Olympic diving judging has to do with grading in schools"},"content":{"rendered":"

Sometime in mid-July, I finally finished reading Tony Wagner\u2019s book <\/span>Creating Innovators, <\/span><\/i>which had been recommended to me by several Cohort 21 members as a starting point for re-imagining my classroom. While I planned to write a full review of the book, Garth <\/a>beat me to it (see his review here<\/a>). Instead, I began copying my favourite quotes from the book into my Goodreads account<\/a>, and doing so helped remind me of several of the main reasons I had wanted to redesign my Comm Tech course in the first place. <\/span><\/p>\n

This quote in particular stuck out to me: <\/span><\/p>\n

“Here again, we see a strong emphasis on collaboration (versus individual achievement); multidisciplinary learning (versus specialization); an emphasis on creating things and student empowerment (versus passively consuming knowledge); encouragement of intellectual risk-taking and trial and error (versus risk avoidance); and finally, a strong emphasis on intrinsic (versus extrinsic) motivation, with the absence of grades and the faculty’s focus on encouraging students to pursue their passions.” (184)<\/span><\/p>\n

I\u2019ve\u00a0also\u00a0been following Starr Sackstein on Twitter (@mssackstein<\/a>) who is a big proponent of removing grades from the assessment question, so I\u2019ve been thinking about that possibility in my classroom. See her TedX talk here: <\/span><\/p>\n