Course Syllabus

Welcome to World History! 

2020-2021Course Syllabus

 

In Social Studies, we strive to follow where scholarship and research takes us - whether that be in the content we explore or in the instructional and assessment models we use. The movement towards standards-based grading fits this aspiration. More importantly, it more fully aligns with the values we bring to our work with you: wanting all students to succeed, fostering a growth mindset, and prioritizing the development of transferable skills. 

 

In 2021-2022, the core history courses at WHS will use a shared grading system.  We linked it here, and you will find it in other parts of Canvas and throughout our work together.  Remember that this type of system helps us orient our instruction and feedback to key competencies within the system. Remember too the importance of feedback - we worked hard over many years to bring more feedback into major projects and papers, and understand the value of conferencing with you when work is on-going. These feedback loops remain, and will be combined with frequent, targeted, and often verbal feedback during class time. It is going to be important for you to distinguish between feedback - those suggestions, affirmations, and questions we offer to you when work is on-going and formative - and scores - when the work is evaluated with the rubric. Rubric scores are what will be used to determine your grade within a standard, and 3 of the standards will factor into your term grade.  One last point, and this practice will be new: if we do not have evidence of learning approaching a standard, likely through non-submission of work, PowerSchool will show an Incomplete within that standard. Unresolved ‘Incompletes’ at the end of a quarter within a standard will become a D or an F when the school requires us to translate that ‘Incomplete’ to a fixed letter grade. 

 

Several points in the previous paragraph bear repeating, as we want them to be clear takeaways:

  • there is a distinction between feedback and grading, and we plan to keep them separate in our work with you
  • this approach relies on determining grades when we can, rather than on calculating and averaging every piece of submitted work
  • you need to resolve any incompletes with as much urgency as possible, as their presence at the end of a marking period leads to poor grades

 

Schools historically and typically provide students with numbers, percentages, and letter grades on each individual assignment within a course, resulting in an averaged score when reporting a singular grade. A standards-based system moves away from such averages and towards the determination of when/where/how often a student’s work meets standards, to provide feedback and information about work in relation to these standards. This year, we adopted a blended approach to best align our values to quarterly reporting requirements and the separate functions of Canvas and PowerSchool. You will notice that this blended approach

  • distinguishes between feedback and grading
  • stores its rubrics and any scores in Canvas
  • offers letter grades for each standard in PowerSchool, based on an aggregate of scored rubrics associated with that standard
  • calculates a quarter grade, represented by a letter and number,  based on prescribed weights assigned to each standard
  • will be used in all history surveys here at WHS

If reading some scholarship that informs our practice helps, we’d encourage your reading of this overview from ASCD, or perhaps a review of a collection of pieces/excerpts that our department leader, Mike Reidy, shared with us last spring. If questions remain, or you wish to discuss ‘why’ we adopted this practice, please contact him at reidym@wellesleyps.org.  Of course, if you have questions about your student in this class, I’m here to help. Before we speak, I might suggest talking with your student about feedback received, and working with your student through their Canvas portal periodically. We find that most uncertainties are best addressed in these open conversations at home.



Course Summary:

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