Creating a High School Schedule and Culture in My TAB Classroom

Since moving to full time high school this year, I have been working to tweak how I run the curriculum, and what kind of culture I want to build. There has to be a balance of meeting the standards, and having fun. This balance is at a whole new level in a high school situation where students are not required to be there.

I have always struggled to be organized well in advance, but I forced myself to lay out my curriculum at a weekly level before the year started. This curriculum ended up being too much. There was not enough studio time, and too much lecture or large group time. I find that in my TAB classroom, I need students to be learning through their work, so I had to get them in studio time more than my curriculum was allowing.

Studio Schedule

I had backwards designed my curriculum off of the new national standards, and had about 15 standards (almost one a week). After talking with my curriculum director I decided to reduce it down so that I was only formally assessing power standards, ending up with about 9 power standards per semester course. The others are hit on within other weekly units, but are not formally assessed each semester.
I had to force myself to set a "studio schedule"; more for my students than for me. They were letting me know that they needed to have an idea what to expect each day. It also ends up helping me stay organized and not forget to introduce something. Here is a photo of our studio schedule each week.

I tended towards more studio time for a few reasons:

Our classes are only 50 mins
The teacher before me had almost all studio time (a few demos the first two weeks and a statement the last week) (Students are not loving my digital portfolios, reflections, critiques, etc, so I am easing them in)
It's hard to be creative for 50 mins, and turn it off...if I reduce it to 40, that is even more difficult

I have also been experimenting with assessment, because I needed to push students to a higher level than I was in middle school. I started out with a scale for each standard. I value these scales, and still plan to utilize them next year, but I need to tweak them; again, there are too many to manage. After a lot of self reflection, and talking with other teachers on social media I ended up creating a rubric that had some goals that I set, and some goals that students set. We use this rubric to check in several times throughout the quarter in a one on one conference.

Right now I am living a balance between traditional grading and standards based grading. In middle school I was able to run standards based grading within a traditional grading system, however in my high school with the high stakes GPA race, students have high anxiety about grades, and are used to playing the game of school, "how many points is this worth?" I am currently trying to wean them off of the game, and move them towards, "what did I learn?" It's a slow process right now, so I have some "completion" grades, and some that are standards based, with goals that are set. In this rubric I have one item that says: "I have taken detailed notes and completed all sketchbook assignments that we did as a whole class. They are in my sketchbook, organized by date". This does not necessarily prove learning, however students were not taking notes or paying attention if it wasn't worth points, and rather than fight that battle right now (in addition to many others) I decided to assign it points. I came to this conclusion after talking with Ian Sands, when he said: engagement and time on task will cause learning (sorry Ian, not sure if this is word for word). I decided that students would retain more if they actually took the notes.

I also am requiring my students to keep a digital portfolio. Because I run TAB, I had to let them know what a good portfolio would look like, without telling them exactly what to put in the portfolio. I decided to make an example portfolio at a level 4, level 3, level 2, level 1. We are using google drive for portfolios (after a bad experience with voice thread...it started out well). Here is what I have on my board as an exemplar portfolio: