Friday, August 13, 2010

No Grades in Sweden (K-8)

Mark Olson teaches in Sweden. In April he wrote on his blog, Eight Falls, about how schools in Sweden do not grade students. Sounds good; I'll be looking for more background information on this.

He''ll be speaking at a webinar hosted by Maria Droujkova tomorrow:
Saturday, August 14th 2010 we will meet in the LearnCentral public Elluminate room at 11am Pacific - 2pm Eastern time. WorldClock for your time zone.
More information here.

4 comments:

  1. Sweden (along with some other countries in Europe) also do a much better job of training teachers:
    http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1713557,00.html

    Makes you wonder about if the whole Teach for America program is all that useful...

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  2. This is one of the things I love about homeschooling: no grades! I don't "grade" anything until high school. Lessons are either understood or repeated a different way until they ARE understood. We discuss things, we work together, and we know whether we understand or not --- so why do we need grades?

    Even in high school, many of my grades come from after-the-fact conferences with the student. They know I'm not going to give them straight A's ('cause how suspicious would that look?!), so we talk about which subjects they feel they mastered (and whether I agree) and which ones they feel less confident about.

    Also, my high school students take some classes at the local community college, so they have some grades on their transcript that are not from Mom. And they tend to do very well, despite having had very few papers graded up to that point...

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  3. Hey Math Mama!

    I know that I did not talk a lot of about grading of students ... unfortunately ... I did not get around to reading your post until this morning. Hope that you enjoyed the presentation.

    Maybe I should put something together dealing specifically with grading. Last nights presentation was really focused on simplifying algebraic expressions.

    Thanks for the mention :D

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  4. Mark, I am so sorry I missed it!

    Blame it on me being a single parent, or on my ferociously bad memory. (Or on my imminent return to teaching being the main thing on my mind these past few days.) I've only managed to come to a couple of the webinars...

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