Ian Ridsdale

EDUC 202
Cohort B

Part 1: Syllabus
❖ Student Growth Mindset:
➢ No grades are considered failure.
➢ Students are given sufficient feedback to improve their work in a timely manner.
➢ Students are allowed to complete alternative assignments in case they do not
match their learning style.

A. Grading
A 90 - 100% Exemplary work

B 80 - 89% Meets all standards

C 70 - 79% Could use improvement

D 60 - 69% Needs improvement

F 50 - 59% Not there yet

Weighting:
❖ Quizzes and Tests: 25%
➢ Reading Quizzes: 5%
➢ End of Unit Tests: 20%
■ Practice Tests: Up to 2% (See section D)
❖ Coursework and Activities: 15%
➢ Group Discussion: 5%
➢ Reading Reflections: 10%
❖ Research Project: 30%
➢ Thesis statement/Project Outline: 5%
➢ First draft: 5%
➢ Final draft: 20%
❖ Final Project: 30%
➢ First Draft Submission: 5%
➢ Final Draft: 20%
➢ Reflection: 5%
*Quizzes and tests will be given during each unit. Tests will become cumulative and increase in
weight (be worth more) as the year goes on. My retake policy is discussed in section C!*
 B. Access to Grades and Timeliness
❖ Grades can be accessed through our Google Classroom.
➢ Look for the panel that says “Grade” on the right side of the assignment screen.
❖ Grades and feedback for formative assessments (class activities and reading quizzes) will
be posted within a day of submission.
❖ Grades and feedback for summative assessments (end of unit tests and projects) will be
posted within a week of their submission.

“I will strive to return work with feedback in a timely manner to ensure that students have the
opportunity to revise and resubmit if desired.”

C. Retakes
❖ In this class, students will be given feedback on their assignments indicating how they
can improve.
➢ As many of the formative assessments in this course are designed to prepare
students for larger projects or tests, revising and drafting will often be a part of the
assessments themselves.
➢ Students who continually revise their work and strive to improve the skills
presented in this course may find themselves completing tests, research projects,
and other summative assessments with ease.

**If certain forms of summative assessment are not compatible with a student’s learning
style, alternative assessments may be decided upon by the student and teacher.**
➢ I realize that not all students have the same learning styles and some are able to
illustrate their brilliance or talent in other ways.

❖ In the case of summative assessments, revisions and retakes will be allowed for all
grades below an A and required for any grades below a C.
➢ The structure of this course is designed to promote a growth mindset and students
may be given up to two attempts to retake or revise tests and other summative
assessments.
➢ If by the second retake, the student continues to illustrate that they have not yet
fully grasped the skills or information being tested, they may have a conference
with the teacher regarding restructuring the assignment or developing a different
way to illustrate these skills.
➢ The highest score a student receives on a retake will be the grade they receive for
the assignment.

D. Extra Credit
❖ Students may receive extra credit depending on their scores on formative activities.
 ➢ If students do well on practice tests, they may receive a grade in the form of extra
credit.
■ A “B” score on a practice test will gain the student a raise in the total
grade by 1%.
■ An “A” score on a practice test will gain the student a raise in the total
score by 2%.
➢ Extra credit from these assessments will be added to the scores of the unit tests.

E. Late and Absent Work

❖ Late Work
➢ Formative work submitted late will receive no more than the minimum passing
grade.
➢ Summative work may be submitted late with the request of an extension.
■ If summative work is submitted late without the approval of an extension,
5% will be deducted from the grade per day past the due date.
❖ Absent Work
➢ In the case of excused absences, students will be given an equal amount of days
missed to prepare for or complete these assignments.
➢ In the case of unexcused absences, students will be required to attend prep periods
(or with the permission of caregivers, before or after school) to complete these
assignments for minimum passing credit.
➢ Accommodations will be made to allow students to complete absent work in the
classroom or at school.

F. Missing Work and Zeros

❖ Zeros will not be given to missing assignments.
➢ These assignments will be marked as “incomplete.”
➢ Students who continually and purposefully fail to complete assignments will be
expected to fulfil them during non-academic class activities (i.e. end of unit
movies or games).

** Every attempt will be made to help students accomplish all assessments in a timely manner as
it is my last desire to exclude students from fun activities in class. This includes but is not limited
to staying after school, arriving at school early, utilizing library resources, and providing a
quiet space during prep periods to complete the work. **
Part 2: Rational
Growth Mindset/Overview
One of the guiding principles in my ideas for class policies is growth mindset as
discussed by Ron Ritchart in chapter two of “Creating Cultures of Thinking.” I seek to create a
classroom environment in which students may develop their cognitive abilities and bounce back
from defeat through meaningful feedback and flexible assessments (Ritchart, 2015). As Lorrie
Shepard asserts in “Linking Formative Assessment to Scaffolding,” a major goal of learning is
being able to utilize skills in different situations. I seek to provide students with the opportunity
to view assessments as guides of where they are at in the learning process and how they can
improve rather than isolated indications of their skill or talent. In structuring my syllabus to
allow for retakes of assignments, gain extra credit for performing well on low-stakes formative
assessments, and develop new forms of assessment that better fit their learning styles, I seek to
facilitate a learning environment of self-motivated learners who seek to explore their own
cognitive strengths and work to develop areas in need of improvement.
Grading
With regards to grades, I sought to make my grading system clear and easy for students,
caregivers, and faculty to understand. When creating this portion of the syllabus, I took Joe
Feldman’s ideas from chapter seven of “Grading for Equity” and Thomas Gusky’s
“Computerized Gradebooks and the Myth of Objectivity” into consideration. The descriptions I
include next to the letter grades exist to communicate how I view grades in my class and provide
a more transparent method of feedback (Feldman, 2018). As I feel that the 100 point grading
system allocates more room for failure than success, I set 50% as the minimum possible grade
students could receive. In my grading system, I weigh quizzes and tests at 25% with the intent of
weighing later summative assessments more than earlier ones. I do this because I believe that
students’ most recent evidence of learning should be given a greater priority and weight in the
grading scale than previous assessments (Guskey, 2002). In this way, I seek to incorporate
Shepard’s (2005) idea of formative assessment as a dynamic process in which educators help
learners move from previous knowledge to facilitate learning, building new understandings of
what the students already know.
I weigh the grades to provide students with multiple opportunities to illustrate their
knowledge through different methods. I break down the percentages of the larger projects to
provide students with smaller formative assessments that would ensure that they understand the
skills required to complete these tasks and receive grades to provide them with task related
feedback on how they could improve these skills (Shepard, 2005). I also note that tests are
cumulative and will increase in weight during the year in order to give students multiple
opportunities to illustrate understanding of course concepts and receive grades that reflect their
improvement. In this way, I seek to illustrate learning as a progessive and incremental process
through providing more weight to summative assessments that include previous material
(Guskey, 2002). Although the scores for the tests are included in a single percentage, I believe
that my retake policy will allow students to avoid bringing this percentage down with poor
scores on a few tests. As Shepard (2005) notes that facilitating self-critiquing and metacognition
can influence motivation among students and give them a sense of ownership of the coursework,
I want students to understand the purpose behind these assessments beyond achieving a grade.
Access to Grades and Timeliness
In utilizing an application such as Google Classroom to distribute grades to students, I
seek to provide the students, their supporters, and other school staff with a clear understanding of
their performance on certain activities. As many online applications allow teachers to assign
points to individual assignments without affecting the entire class grade, they can be used to
provide students with specific feedback regarding how they can improve on these assignments.
In this way, my system of providing students and their supporters with access to grades and
feedback serves mainly as a means of “numerical record-keeping” that bypasses the
mathematical precision as discussed by Guskey (2002) through illustrating individual point-
based grades with task oriented feedback and a simple method of resubmission. With regards to
timeliness, I seek to provide students with feedback in a quick enough time that they can revise
and resubmit it if desired. This is informed by Ritchart’s (2015) idea of providing a steady
stream of ongoing feedback to the students to ensure that they are able to improve their
performance.
Retakes
The revision policy that I created seeks to give students the ability to illustrate growth
and explore the learning styles that work best for them rather than judging their abilities based
upon singular performances. Shepard’s (2005) ideas regarding the promotion of a learning
culture greatly influenced my decision to structure my retake policy in this way. I feel that
neglecting to allow retakes would facilitate a fixed mindset as discussed by Ritchart (2015),
presenting grades as static indications of performance on assessments rather than dynamic
recommendations for improvement.
I also feel that allowing for flexible revisions and retakes removes the focus on work and
achievement of grades. This is accomplished as the purpose of assessments is shifted from
focusing on grades to measuring students’ mastery as discussed by Rick Wormeli in chapter two
of “Fair Isn’t Always Equal.” This concept of mastery allows the students to develop a personal
value of course content and understand how they can utilize it in different situations. With
regards to the structure of my retake policy, I seek to utilize retakes as an equitable tool to allow
any student to grow regardless of their initial score on an assessment. In encouraging students
with scores below an A to retake or revise summative assessments and requiring students with
scores of D’s or below to work with me to create a new assessment, I seek to engage students in
thinking of ways in which they can use their cognitive strengths to illustrate mastery in a
particular subject that might not have been tested with previous assessments.
Extra Credit
With regards to extra credit, I want to provide students with more motivation to complete
the less-weighed formative assignments. Being that I weighed the formative assignments in this
course much less than the summative, I found that providing students with extra credit for
performing well on formative practice tests could not only motivate them to study for these tests,
but develop good studying habits. This system of extra credit seeks to engage students in
strategic knowledge as discussed by Paul Pintrich in “The Role of Metacognitive Knowledge in
Learning, Teaching, and Assessing,” gaining an idea of how they will need to think and what
strategies they will need to use in order to illustrate their understanding in summative
assessments. In this way, practice tests are designed to allow students to assess what cognitive
strategies work best for them while avoiding the stress of an actual test, while extra credit is
meant to provide them with motivation to engage in this process.
Late Work and Absent Work
In my late and absent work section, I distinguished between excused and unexcused
absences as to not punish students for circumstances beyond their control. As I give the students
the option to request an extension for large summative projects, I felt it appropriate to deduct
points from summative assignments submitted late without a valid excuse. I decided upon this
rule not to punish students, but to provide them with motivation to turn their work in on time, as
I hope to facilitate the values of timeliness and courtesy among my students through practice.
Missing Work and Zeros
My ideas for handling unexcused absences were influenced by Gusky’s (2002) ideas
regarding the handling of missing or incomplete work. I feel that requiring students to make up
this work in a timely manner on campus without interfering with their personal lives. I feel that
as an educator, it is necessary to hold students accountable for missing or late work in order to
develop skills of punctuality and studiousness that will benefit them in and out of school.
Although I am not opposed to giving students lower grades on assignments to help guide
revisions or communicate areas in which they could improve, I believe that grades should not be
used as punishments or indications of failure. I seek to not only provide students with
opportunities to improve their work, but encourage them to do so, as well as requiring them to
complete work rather than accept zeros. Guskey’s (2002) description of avoiding letting students
accept zeros without accomplishing the work greatly influenced my decision to provide any
reasonable opportunity for students to complete summative assessments for at least some credit.

Part 3: Reflection
In completing this assignment, I was able to illustrate my understanding of the
information that we learned during this course through creating a model syllabus. As I was
working on this project, I referenced a few existing syllabi to gain a better understanding of how
my project could best be organized. I made a point not to focus too much on the content of these
syllabi as I sought to create my own ideas of grading systems and class rules using the
information we gained from class discussions and readings. My experiences in secondary
education and university also greatly influenced my decisions while creating this project, as the
material in this course has reminded me of various examples of beneficial classroom policies I
experienced throughout my education. This ranges from my inclusion of an extension request to
avoid penalization for late work and receiving extra credit for performing well on practice tests
that would otherwise not affect a student’s grade. Although the process of translating many of
these theories and experiences into a clear and accessible syllabus was rigorous, I was able to
create an outline based upon what I saw in example syllabi and modify it to fit the structure I
sought to create.
As I completed this assignment, I was guided mainly by Thomas Gusky’s ideas in
“Computerized Gradebooks and the Myth of Objectivity,” as well as the excerpts we read from
Joe Feldman’s “Grading for Equity” and Ron Ritchart’s “Creating Cultures of Thinking.” These
readings contained many of the concrete ideas upon which I based my syllabus, including
refusing to give students zeros and ending my grading system with a minimum of 50%. Although
I did not agree with everything that these authors argued, including various aspects of Feldman’s
chapter regarding retakes, I found that my understanding of the texts, as well as our class
discussions allowed me to translate these theories into usable sections for a syllabus. In addition
to the ideas of Feldman and Gusky, I sought to apply as many ideas from other authors as
possible to gain a more well-rounded product. Other important ideas that greatly influenced the
reasoning behind items in my syllabus include metacognition as discussed by Paul Pintrich in
“The Role of Metacognitive Knowledge…” and Nancy Chick in “Metacognition,” as well as the
idea of mastery as discussed by Rick Wormeli in chapter two of “Fair Isn’t Always Equal.” As I
found it difficult to create equitable and reasonable policies for areas of the syllabus such as
timeliness and late work, I came to realize that these ideas were translatable into many of the
sections. I was able to reason that penalizing students for missing deadlines without excuses and
giving students the option to request extensions facilitated motivation, initiative, punctuality, and
other useful skills that the students could employ in and out of the classroom.
One of the most impactful takeaways I gained from this project was being able to embed
these ideas into my syllabus without explicitly mentioning them. I found this process to be
incredibly rigorous as I created many of the different sections of the syllabus, especially the
grading section. Designing a system to distribute the weight of grades in the class was among the
most difficult parts I experienced during this process as I realized that each method of structuring
this section would have benefits and drawbacks. As I created this portion of the project and
moved on to the others, I realized that the process of creating a syllabus requires trial and error
and that we must be flexible and open to changing our syllabi when we realize that portions do
not work in the ways that we intended. In this way, I feel that this assignment was an important
way to develop and gain a better understanding of the webs of belief we developed over the
course of this class. I feel that as we enter our careers as educators, we will learn what portions
of these webs work and which we will need to adjust through applying our ideas in practice. As
we gain more experience as educators, we will be able to address difficult or unfamiliar
situations through modifying our beliefs to accommodate these changes.