Wicked Problem Project Part D: Findings and Implications

 So far, my project is still in the initial stages. Students have set up notifications to their new Gmail accounts from our gradebook, Pinnacle. This involved using their parents’ usernames and passwords to set up the notifications. Students could then set up what grade “threshold” they wanted to be notified for. I had all my students set up the notifications for a grade below a “C”.

My secondary step for my project – posting grade pdf documents to my website – has not come to fruition, however. I decided that this was going to take up too much time to do on my end (updating grades and uploading 6 different pdf documents every week or even every other week is just too much for me). If my goal is to help my students be more responsible, I need to put less of the responsibility on me. Instead, I have implemented weekly grade checks on the computer using the parent log-ins on Pinnacle. Every Friday I am going to have my students check their grades and look for missing assignments (we’ve only had one week of this so far). They have a grade form to record this on and I will check this when I do binder checks (usually twice a quarter).

As far as evidence of students success, this is a little difficult to track. However, I have noticed significant improvements in my students’ grades overall (although this could be due to a combination of factors such as our recently upgraded lunchtime homework room policies). I certainly have more “A’s” in my 8th Grade classes than I’ve had at any time this year and that is encouraging!

If I were to approach another project of this type, I would make sure not to “bite off more than I can chew”. When I first set out my plan, I knew that uploading six different grade documents to my website weekly would be a lot, but I decided to include it anyway. I’ve learned that I need to be more honest with myself and realistic about what I can and can’t do.

There certainly have been some lessons learned. First, responsibility is a life skill and it is a noble goal to try to teach this and develop this in my students. However, there is only so much I can do in this area. There comes a point when students need to do just that: be responsible for themselves and their own grades. I’ve had several teachers point this out to me especially last year as a first year teacher. Some of my colleagues would ask me what percentage of the work I was doing and what percentage the students were doing. Honestly, some days it felt like 90/10 (90 per cent me and 10 per cent student). As teachers we need to remember that we cannot control our students and make them responsible, we can only give them the tools and encouragement to do so.

Another lesson learned is to get your technology coordinator on board whenever possible. With the grade emailing idea, our tech coordinator was able to pass on the info to the rest of the school which was so encouraging! I’m glad my idea could help other teachers and I was thankful for her help in setting it up.

I will definitely be implementing this project again next year. I will start with the notifications from the beginning of the year and have students check grades online weekly and write them in their binders. However, I am also looking forward to setting up a Moodle course which could facilitate the grade sharing process and make it even quicker. I will see where this summer and the next school year take me!