In chapter 8 of Integrating Differentiated Instruction and Understanding by Design, it talked about grades. I am glad that there was a chapter about this because this is honestly something I was worried about for my future classroom. This is because often when I go on social networking sites I see many comments on how much students hate school and how they don’t want to go, and how they don’t want to do their homework and how they don’t want to study because it feels like they aren’t learning anything they are just learning how to say the right answers. This upsets me because I see this so often that it starts to worry a future teacher like me about will my students like my class and like what they are learning? I have heard from those same social networking sites that it’s not that they don’t like learning, it’s that they don’t like being graded on their learning; they just want to have the freedom to explore the things they are interested in. This is why I feel that grades should not be such a daunting, looming presence that is casting a blanket of dread over their learning.

Many students have a lot of anxiety over their final grades, so that is why I agree with the multiple strategies in this chapter to make the grades more comprehensive and freeing so they can focus on their learning instead of feeling so restrictive and final. Some of these multiple strategies include: project based learning, making assessments worth more at the end of the unit than at the beginning of the unit, not having points dedicated to inauthentic things, like making points based on having their name at the top or if their penmanship is neat. Other strategies include not making student achievement relative to others, not giving out a limited number of each letter grade, avoiding grades based on the mean, be hesitant on assigning zeros, and determining the grades instead of calculating them.

The other chapters in the set were from Multiple Intelligences in the Classroom. Chapter 8 of Multiple Intelligences is about using multiple intelligences when engaging in classroom management.  It was nice to see how my teaching strategies for dealing with students who are rowdy by engaging them with their specific multiple intelligence style. They are more likely to pay attention and get engaged if the way it is presented is interesting and useful to them Chapter 11 of Multiple Intelligences is about using multiple intelligences to help students with disabilities. They did this by focusing on the students’ areas of strength in the eight multiple intelligences, instead of focusing on what they are used to (which was their disability), the teachers used multiple intelligences to teach them or help them with the areas of intelligence that they have a disability in or they are struggling in. Lastly, chapter 12 of Multiple Intelligences was about cognitive theory relating to Multiple Intelligences. It was about how it was important to practice problem solving as well as use technology specific to their multiple intelligences to create products and show their comprehension. It is it important to remember these when I am brainstorming for my next unit.