JumpRope Blog

Rules of Thumb: Assessment

Thu, 14 Mar 2013 04:00:00 GMT

by Jesse Olsen

Rules of Thumb is a series in which we share best practices for JumpRope and standards-based grading in general. Jesse taught for five years and has helped dozens of schools and thousands of teachers implement standards-based grading, but knows very well that these aren't one-size-fits-all. Take a look, and let us know in the comments if you agree or have other related suggestions!

Over the last five years as JumpRope has grown, I've had the opportunity to speak personally with hundreds of educators about how they use JumpRope and other systems to organize their curriculum and give feedback to students. As you might imagine, there are a wide variety of philosophies and strategies that schools and teachers bring. Despite the rich variety, there are some best practices that have emerged as good guidelines and common elements of successful implementations of standards-based grading. In this series, I'll share these with you in short tidbits along with some reasoning behind them. I'd love any feedback or other ideas that you may have, and certainly don't believe each tip to be perfect or complete!

Rule of Thumb 3: Assess at least three times

Standards should be assessed more than once, preferably three or more times. If you aren't giving students multiple opportunities to demonstrate mastery, then your mastery-based gradebook is not "actionable" and you are simply telling students how they have done after the fact with no opportunity to improve or show growth. That's not the point!

Rule of Thumb 4: Rich Assessments

When you look at your planning tool, most of your assessments should be aligned to more than one standard. This encourages high-quality assessments that connect more than one learning goal such that students understand and can apply skills in real-world scenarios instead of just in isolation. Furthermore, it encourages you as a teacher to look more deeply at assignments/assessments for evidence of what students know on particular goals, analyzing the work at a deeper level than simply dividing the number correct by the number possible.

Check out our other blog posts and Help Section where you can find lots of informative tips and articles around the topic of assessment. We’ve included some of our favorites below:

Custom Assessment Types

Where does homework fit into a mastery-based grading system?

Could "Just Teach" Mean "Just Assess?"

Field Notes on Backwards Design

Wed, 27 Feb 2013 05:00:00 GMT

by Sara Needleman

I am a convert. It did not take long and it took no work on the part of anyone other than me to see how much sense it makes for us to use a backwards design model for teaching and learning. I think it is important though, in this era of standardized testing, to make the clear distinction between backwards planning and teaching to the test. Backwards design, as Wiggins and McTighe describe it, asks teachers first to consider, "What is worthy and requiring of understanding"? This is not the same thing as, "What will be on the test?" They go on to help us see that the concepts, skills and information "worthy of understanding" are embedded in essential questions, enduring understandings and critical thinking skills. Each of those, when thoughtfully designed, spring from standards. Let's look at an example. Here's a grade 8 Reading Literature Standard lifted straight from the Common Core State Standards (CCSS):

Determine a theme or central idea of a text and analyze its development over the course of the text, including its relationship to the characters, setting, and plot; provide an objective summary of the text.

An essential question I used as an 8th grade ELA teacher that easily would have anchored to this standard is, "What is just, right and good?" A corresponding enduring understanding was, "Students will understand that people should be valued for their merits and celebrated for their differences." One of the critical thinking skills I helped my students develop through exploration of this essential question was empathy. Looking at the CCSS, the literature our grade level had selected and my learning goals for the students, I was able to develop an assessment which helped students take Elie Wiesel's perspective upon reading Night and apply their understanding to modern day genocides.

When I considered Wiggins and McTighe's question, "What is evidence of understanding?" I was not thinking about teaching to a test but rather: "How will my students show what they know about being a compassionate and thoughtful human being in a world full of tensions born of difference and fear of those differences?" When I considered the question, "What learning experiences and teaching promote understanding, interest and excellence?" I planned for discussions and writing assignments about Night, reading about and researching the Holocaust, the former Yugoslavia, Rwanda, Darfur. We reached out to our own government and helped to raise awareness in our school and our community. We did this so the students could answer our essential question and develop empathy.

At first, in planning my Night unit, I used a backwards design model because that just made good sense to me. When all was said and done, though, the real reason to use this model is because it enables us to help students learn deeply. They learn to make connections, to think critically and creatively. How did they do on the test? Well, when our 8th grade graduation speaker chose to write a speech based on her experiences in my classroom and her classmates rose to a standing ovation at her finish, I felt confident they had passed the test.

Rules of Thumb: Common Core Standards

Wed, 13 Feb 2013 05:00:00 GMT

by Jesse Olsen

Rule of Thumb 1: Use student-friendly language with your standards.

Let's address the elephant in the room: the language used in the Common Core Standards is not exactly "student-friendly," and neither are most state standards. Students, parents, and teachers need to have a clear idea of what they’re supposed to be teaching and learning.

Because of this, we suggest rewording the Common Core or other standards that you use within JumpRope. Your standards will remain aligned to the Common Core but the language outlining each standard will be much easier for your students to comprehend.

Here are a few examples of some standards, rewritten in a "student-friendly" language:

1.CCSS ELA RL 6.2
"Determine a theme or central idea of a text and how it is conveyed through particular details; provide a summary of the text distinct from personal opinions or judgments."

Teacher: I can identify the theme of a text when I read and I can accurately summarize what I read.

2. CCSS ELA W 7.5
"With some guidance and support from peers and adults, develop and strengthen writing as needed by planning, revising, editing, rewriting, or trying a new approach, focusing on how well purpose and audience have been addressed. (Editing for conventions should demonstrate command of Language standards 1–3 up to and including grade 7 on page 52.)"

Teacher: I can identify the theme of a text when I read and I can accurately summarize what I read.

3. CCSS M 1.OA
"Solve word problems that call for addition of three whole numbers whose sum is less than or equal to 20, e.g., by using objects, drawings, and equations with a symbol for the unknown number to represent the problem."

Teacher: I can solve word problems that involve adding three numbers.

Note: These may not be perfect, and there are plenty of good resources to help you write clear and concise standards. The use of “I can...” as a prefix to the standards is something that I picked up in my teaching career, but is certainly not required. The idea is to phrase the standard in such a way that the student can say it with confidence once they’ve mastered the standard.

Rule of Thumb 2: Five to eight standards per unit.

Setting an optimal number of standards per unit is key to sustainable growth. Not only can too many standards be overwhelming to both teachers and students, but it can reduce a student's chance for multiple opportunities to demonstrate mastery. For teachers too many standards can mean an overwhelming flood of data entry. Too few standards means they aren't specific enough to be actionable. In our experience we've found that 5-8 standards per unit is a happy medium.

The amount of content within each standard can also affect your assessments. For example:

"I can solve equations." This one is too broad because it will be hard to figure out exactly where to take action.

"I can solve equations with one variable when the variable is on the right side of the equation and there is a positive integer involved." This one is too specific, as you'll likely assess it very few times and you'll have to write a ton of standards.

"I can solve equations with one variable" This one is just right.

Defining Standards-based Teaching and Learning

Wed, 30 Jan 2013 05:00:00 GMT

by John D’Anieri

"Some men are born mediocre, some men achieve mediocrity, and some men have mediocrity thrust upon them." Joseph Heller, Catch 22

At JumpRope, we think standards are the antidote to mediocrity in schools. Not "standardization," which in fact is something of a precursor to mediocrity, but standards—clearly defined statements of quality, as in the old fashioned meaning of word "standards." As in "standards-based teaching and learning" or "mastery grading" or "proficiency-based learning," or any of the other functionally interchangeable terms that, while by no means new, are only now getting widespread attention. As with much educational jargon, these terms can be confusing. Here is our attempt to define what a standards-based approach looks like in practice.

1. Students have to have a clear idea of what they’re supposed to be learning. This usually starts as a state (or more recently Common Core) "standard," such as:

"Refers to details and examples in a text when explaining what the text says explicitly and when drawing inferences from the text."

At JumpRope, we strongly recommend restating such gobbledy-gook in student-friendly language i.e.,

"I use details and examples when I explain what I've read."

Standards-based schools develop clear rubrics that describe what partially meeting a standard looks like, what mostly meeting it looks like, and what actually meeting it (the goal, after all) looks like. Any student should be able to meet that goal with enough time, hard work, and coaching.

2. Teachers need to be able to ASSESS student progress towards those standards, rather than just grade students—and they need to be able to communicate clearly what needs to be done to reach the standard. What does a "C" mean? What does it tell a student about what they need to do differently? We use the term "descriptive feedback," an example of which might be:

"Your explanation sounds correct in a very general sense, but a specific example would help."

In almost everything that matters that we do as adults, we get better gradually over time, with experience and coaching and often by setting goals. In a standards-based environment, we can break down the complicated, long-term series of skills and subskills that make up competency, we can name them so that the student sees them too, and we can coach the student in the area they need coaching.

3. Grades are useful for grouping and sorting, but perhaps do a better job when used for eggs or credit ratings or other situations where a clear set of "standards" can be decided on and people can be trained to apply those standards consistently. Without getting into a debate about whether we should have a common meaning for an "A", the fact is that we’re so far from that that the experience for students often becomes figuring out how to play the game—a game for which the rules are often entirely in the head of the individual teacher applying them on that day. In some cases, an "A" means:

"I handed in all my work neatly and on time." or
"My work is of near-professional quality." or
"My teacher believes every student should get an A so that their self-esteem isn’t damaged.

By the same token, a "D" can mean:

"Handed in the bare minimum of barely legible work, but too nice a kid to make him repeat the grade." or
"Handed in no homework, but scored 99 on the regents exam."

In a standards-based world, all of those things are separate. For the standard:

"Hands his work in on time." I might be assessed as: Rarely.

However, for the standard:

"Can solve algebraic equations in a timed context on a mostly multiple choice exam." I might be assessed as Nearly always.

4. Standards-based feedback is more useful in other contexts as well. In the example above, my report card would indicate—to the parents trying to help me succeed, to my teachers next year, to a college, to an employer—that I struggle with deadlines but learned what I was "supposed" to learn. This has important implications for making learning relevant and effective: if a school decides that meeting deadlines is important, the school can make demonstrating that ability important. We refer to these as "habits of work," and we assess them, give feedback on how to improve them, and hold students accountable for achieving them. This approach not only makes the unspoken standards explicit, but often gives the school a chance to raise those standards—making school "harder" in the right way. Giving a student zeros and making him take a class again, and again, has one fairly predictable result—dropping out, or seeking increasingly less challenging learning environments. "Passing" the student who has not met meaningful standards has an equally predictable effect, usually discovered when a student tries to attend college or get a job and finds themselves cripplingly unprepared.

We hope you find this written definition helpful. Those of us who’ve worked with these concepts for years get to see what a huge difference they make, especially for teachers who want to give themselves, and their students the greatest possible opportunity to neither achieve mediocrity nor have it thrust upon them. As Mr. Heller also wrote in Catch-22, "[They] agreed that it was neither possible nor necessary to educate people who never questioned anything." The promise for those who are willing to question—and it is a promise, one that JumpRope can help make good on: learning environments where the standards matter more than the grade.

Life Hacking JumpRope

Thu, 27 Dec 2012 05:00:00 GMT

by Rodney Gibson

Rodney is JumpRope’s newest team member. He has worked in business development for the likes of Go2Net, InfoSpace, and Yahoo!. After getting his MBA at Wharton he served in advisory roles to financial services firms and social enterprises, and now leads strategy and sales for JumpRope.

Full disclosure: I have never written a blog post. That said, I’m a voracious reader of popular business authors and thought leaders so I consume more online content every day than I care to admit.

Whether it’s reading about the latest design innovation that is making life better for the poorest of the poor or researching which compression socks will best aid my recovery from CrossFit workouts, I am constantly absorbing information.

Jesse, our CEO, calls me a “life hacker”. (I had to look it up to verify that this was a good thing...) From what I gather, it seems that this means that I’m always on the lookout for tips, tricks and technologies to get things done—I’d add better, faster, cheaper, and more fun to this definition as well.

I absolutely love being a part of the process to take an idea, product, organization, person or team from one chapter to the next. A little fix here, another tweak over there...it brings me great joy to watch the improvement process.

After my first pass of this blog post, our Director of Marketing joked that this is actually a pretty good description of what I do all day: I life hack JumpRope. I’m constantly on the lookout for ways to make JumpRope more refined, efficient, and awesome as a business.

One of the things I appreciate the most about JumpRope is the way it equips teachers to life hack in the classroom. Taking attendance is wicked fast. Data capture in our gradebook is rich and highly personalized. Full transparency and real-time updates means that teachers can collaborate better and triage more quickly. Reports are beyond robust (check out the Mastery Pivot Table if you haven’t already -- mind blowing) and students and parents get instant feedback.

While JumpRope’s core capabilities aid in teaching the brightest of the bright just as well as those who need a little extra help, I’m most excited about the personal stories I’ve heard from teachers who share about the student who often lags who is now engaged and reenergized about the learning process. In my mind, this is what it’s all about.

When a student gets excited about learning, potential becomes possibility. When possibility begins to manifest, dreams take shape and expand. When dreams take shape, vision increases. When vision is presented with opportunity, lives change and potential is realized.

Educators are in the trenches where the action happens. We are here doing everything we can to equip you– to help your students be motivated by learning and open their eyes to even greater possibilities for their lives. It’s an honor and a privilege to partner with you all.

Why should a parent be excited about Standards-Based grading?

Tue, 18 Dec 2012 05:00:00 GMT

by Sara Needleman

Sara is a mom of elementary and middle school students, educator and former middle school teacher. She currently works with graduate students in the University of Southern Maine’s Teacher Education Department and consults on teaching and learning for JumpRope.

We have been reporting grades for as long as we have sent kids to school. Grades have always told parents where their kids land along a certain spectrum. Why change that?

Traditional grading systems fail to tell parents, students and teachers what the students have actually learned. Rather, they show us, according to any specific teacher's system, how our kids measure up to one another. Parents have seen report cards with A's and have praised their kids for those high marks, but with little understanding of what those marks mean. Similarly, other parents have held their heads in their hands as they look at a column of D's or worse and ask, "what now?"

Standards-Based Teaching, Learning and Assessment systems empower parents and students because they encourage teachers to be very explicit about what a student needs to learn in order to earn an A. Such a system helps teachers and therefore parents and students celebrate what has been learned as well as identify the student's gaps in learning. So, for the student whose report card shows a column of D's, the old mantra of "study harder" becomes "you can add fractions really well, but I see you are struggling with subtracting them." Speaking as a parent, I would much prefer this second conversation starter because now I have a sense of what my child needs to do to turn those D's around.

In addition, how many times have we had the conversation about the "demanding teacher" on one side of the hall and the "easier teacher" on the other side of the hall? Traditional grading paradigms have teachers working in their own spheres, designing their own systems for arriving at grades. While those systems generally reflect fair-mindedness and clear thinking, they are individual systems and so, a "B" in Ms. Smith's class might be equivalent to an "A" in Ms. Brown's class. Standard-Based systems help schools engage in mindful conversations about learning that focus on questions like "what constitutes an A?" and "what do good work habits look like?" As a parent, I want the teachers in my kids' schools to agree on the answers to those questions.

And one of my personal favorite features of Standards-Based systems is they encourage teachers to distinguish between academic achievement and habits of work. Students earn grades in academic subjects based on their understanding of that subject, not, for example, their homework completion in that class. The really cool thing, though, is that teachers can still report on things like homework completion, time on task and preparedness. They just do that reporting in its own place. As a parent, I would be thrilled to see those things reported separately because I know mastering things like preparedness and organization are true keys to success. In fact, author Paul Tough suggests in his latest book How Children Succeed that indicators like those typically found in a habits of work report are far better predictors of success than the the traditional indicators like IQ or test scores.

I want my kids to succeed. I think it's safe to say parents in general feel that way. Standards-Based systems provide more specific feedback on strengths and weaknesses, empowering students with the tools they need for success.

New Features and New Jumpropers!

Mon, 03 Dec 2012 05:00:00 GMT

by Jesse Olsen

With the beginning of a new school year and JumpRope more than doubling in size, the last few months have been very busy at JumpRope HQ! We're happy to say that our new schools are settling into their shiny new mastery-based gradebooks, and scores and other data are flowing at record rates. More importantly, we have dozens of innovative schools working with us that continue to expand our understanding, making our product even better. Thank you to everyone for the continued work and support!

I'd like to take this chance to re-cap a number of important events and milestones that we passed in the last three months:

We hired Nathan full time! Nathan, who in his ten years in the industry has developed a habit of working so effectively that the rest of his team gets laid off, is our Chief Technology Officer. He manages our development process and is hard at work on new product and improvements. Check him out on the team page!
We hired Rodney! Rodney, who brings some much-needed maturity to our office culture and looks very good in a suit, is our Chief Strategy Officer and Head of Sales. He will be helping us expand nationally and internationally in the coming months and years. Welcome, Rodney!
Our free gradebook came out of beta and is now available 100% free for any teacher that wants to sign up!
The number of student & parent logins has exceeded the number of teacher logins in our system, signaling the immense value of real-time feedback in our modern culture. In support of this trend, we have released several new features for the Student & Parent Portal including giving students the ability to see and download upcoming assessments, more detailed attendance history, and print their own mastery reports. Keep coming kids, and we'll keep making it better!
We have developed the ability for schools to design their own custom grade conversions, based on either numerical mastery values or on threshold-based metrics (known as "percent passed"). Now, teachers and schools can give meaningful mastery feedback and make sure that it fits neatly into existing transcript systems!

We have the strongest group of schools ever this year, and we're excited to continue our work with them. Let us know if you have any questions or comments!

Standards, Not Standardized

Sun, 21 Oct 2012 04:00:00 GMT

by John D’Anieri

If you're like me, you welcome the Common Core standards as a pathway to "less talk (about what we believe students should learn) and more action (directed at actually getting students to meet those standards.)" Used thoughtfully, they should be the building blocks that enable many approaches and models to thrive—without the constant drag of redefining the words we use to accomplish what we (almost) all agree we should be able to accomplish. My vision of the highest and best use of the standards is a team of teachers who develop and implement interesting, integrated, and adaptable learning experiences that are ANCHORED. Instead, though, we're already seeing districts or schools adopt overly lock-stepped curricula where "everyone's on the same page," so that standardized test scores, rather than assessment of real standards, become the defining data.

One of the reasons I'm so excited about working with JumpRope is that our planning tool both empowers and compels teachers to avoid that trap. Inspired by the work of Marzano, Wiggins and McTighe, and others, we ask our teachers to plan backwards from the Common Core. But we also ask them to plan FORWARDS into the kind of case studies, integrated modules, and long-term projects that are relevant and meaningful to students. Once we have the big Common Core concepts framed and a meaningful context in which students can practice and master those targets, our teachers begin the difficult but rewarding work of planning, scaffolding, and designing learning experiences (lessons) and formative and summative assessments. If we do this work well, we have not grades, but assessment data that can become feedback to students and parents. To some extent, we’ve known all this—and been able to jargon-ize it as I have above—for quite a long time. What’s new about JumpRope is the potential to harness technology to turn jargon into actual results for kids.

Imagine an 8th grade student in a Humanities classroom where the two teachers are responsible for meeting Common Core Language Arts standards (and the state Social Studies standards, which in this state put "systems of government" in the 8th grade scope and sequence.) In a JumpRope school, what the student sees and strives to accomplish/avoid is NOT a number on a scale of 60-100, nor is it the disembodied language of the Common Core, but a teacher-written, student-friendly "big" learning target (one of 5-8 per unit of learning). Rather than “RL8.1 Cite the textual evidence that most strongly supports an analysis of what the text says explicitly as well as inferences drawn from the text," an 8th grader would see, on the board in the front of the classroom something like this:

"I can explain the big ideas of Animal Farm and connect those ideas to specific events in 20th century history."

"I can make an argument that the US is becoming more or less like Animal Farm."

The teacher has linked (with JumpRope's one-click Common Core alignment feature) his student-friendly target to the Common Core equivalent, but every day for six weeks, the student sees not the Common Core, but these two "teacher-written, student friendly" targets as among the 5-8 that she must master.

Eventually, these Common Core linked targets are the ones that "count." But since every meaningful larger skill or concept is made up of many smaller or component concepts, the student should also see—and the teacher will track in JumpRope—supporting learning targets that change daily or every few days. At the beginning of this unit—BEFORE students dive into Orwell's language, such targets might be,

"I have a working knowledge of the most important concepts Orwell's attempting to address."

"I can create a simple story where animals represent ideas and people."

Because it is unlikely students would have much hope of making sense of Orwell without this prior knowledge—and because the teacher is interested in making sure that as many students as possible have a fighting chance of getting something valuable from this unit—he's planned a workshop for day 1 and day 2 of this unit on each of the above supporting targets; he's assigned and assessed student work that tells him which students have accomplished those supporting targets...and he's planned on a "reteach" period for day 3 that teams up students who've mastered those targets with those who have not. Those students will have another chance to show what they know at the end of that period...and if one or more student still has a partial understanding, the teacher SHOULD have at his disposal structures and strategies that can help that student accomplish that target before (or parallel to) engaging in a reading experience that depends on those supporting targets having been accomplished.

Now the situation above may NOT be how most schools and classrooms work now. Many schools that have high levels of student engagement and teacher autonomy struggle to produce the measurable academic progress that students deserve. Many schools that boost test scores significantly struggle to produce the meaningful context for learning that students deserve. At JumpRope, though, we have the pleasure of seeing more and more schools move to and benefit from this approach. Like most either/or questions, we end up coming down on the side of both/and: high levels of teacher ownership and creativity linked to carefully scaffolded, measurable, Common Core standards.

JumpRope Hates Grades

Wed, 10 Oct 2012 04:00:00 GMT

NEW YORK, October 10, 2012 — Jesse Olsen is the founder and CEO of JumpRope, which offers tools and professional development that challenges schools and teachers to innovate in their practices and culture. This is the story of his company and insight into the question on everyone’s mind: what’s wrong with education these days?

by Jesse Olsen

The history of JumpRope reads a bit like the plot of a tear-jerking movie about teachers and the students who taught them; but having lived it, I can say that the important part is hidden behind the drama. I was teaching math at a public high school in the Bronx, and found myself in the middle of a powerful cultural revolution as our school attempted to reinvent education—at least in our little corner of the world—to become relevant.

The problem that we were trying to solve was daunting, and our solution was equally ambitious: we wanted to shift the learning paradigm from telling students what they’ve done, to showing them what they know. Our plan involved throwing out traditional grades completely in favor of a system that was more specific, more timely, more proactive, and ultimately more honest. Educators label this new system standards-based grading, though the term can have more than one meaning. My view was and is that traditional "grades" are a relic from times past, and that the broken system of motivation that they prop up is in fact one of the most significant cultural barriers that education must break out of before it can begin to be relevant in the 21st century. We not only needed to change the nature of the feedback that we gave to students, but we also needed to gather and communicate more specific and frequent data.

My background in computer engineering made it abundantly clear to me that such a revolution would require some serious systems to stay organized and efficient. A survey of the technology available to us, however, was not encouraging—tools were either static monoliths that did a lot more to maintain the status quo than they did to innovate, or they were too far from the reality of public schools to be practical.

Seeing as how I had a few weeks off every summer, I did what any crazy person would have done: I wrote my own standards-based gradebook. Like many similar projects, it began as a heavily scripted and web-connected Excel spreadsheet, then it grew and grew as my fellow teachers demanded more. The program evolved into a cross-platform installable application, and eventually emerged as a web application. Dozens of staff and hundreds of students quickly began to rely on it as the the primary data system in the school, and I began to learn what it meant to operationalize a mission-critical system the hard way... and without pay!

Amazingly, and to my enduring pride and humility, our efforts began to work: we successfully changed the language and motivational structures in our school such that students and teachers alike were more informed of academic strengths and weaknesses, and each had clear next steps towards learning. Of course, the technology system was only a small part of this shift... but it was something that I could share. Over the next few years, as more and more schools visited and asked us how, it became abundantly clear that the program I created was not just a time-saver and a nifty feature, it was a game changer. With JumpRope, schools could take their goals to the next level and use the tools to leverage cultural change, for the sake of the students. It was on this energy with a devotion to standards-based grading that I began to build JumpRope.

Much like the story that brought us to this point, the story that continues at JumpRope is ambitious, risky, and revolutionary. The change we see coming in education is what brings us into the office every day, keeps us on the phone and in the classroom, and forces us to ask every day: how can we do it better?

About JumpRope
JumpRope helps educators implement standards-based grading in every classroom through innovative assessment and feedback. We provide the web-based platform that great teachers and schools need to engage students with active pedagogy, purposeful planning, and authentic learning experiences. With the tools to make standards-based grading easy, teachers are freed to create, propel and inspire; and students become lifelong learners.

Contact
Justin Meyer
Co-Founder & COO JumpRope Inc.
PH: 646.450.0309
justin@jumpro.pe

A Better World by Design

Tue, 09 Oct 2012 04:00:00 GMT

by Justin Meyer

We're entrepreneurs. We run on caffeine, late nights and big vision. We are passionate about our work and love to talk about it. That's why I was so excited to have been invited to participate in an entrepreneurialism panel at the 2012 A Better World by Design Conference, in Providence this past weekend.

If you haven't heard of A Better World by Design, check it out. The conference was started in 2008 as a collaboration by students at Brown University and RISD and connects students, professionals, and individuals from a variety of disciplines in order to build a global community of socially conscious and passionate innovators.

I participated as a member of the advisory panel at Barnum's Transforming Ideas into Enterprise workshop. It was kind of like speed dating. Entrepreneurs pitched their big ideas and business plans to the panel and we in turn provided helpful feedback drawing from our collective experiences. The conference draws a diverse crowd, so the presentations covered a wide array of topics, but each one rounded out with a big vision that focused on the greater good of humanity.

At JumpRope, we've spent a multitude of hours defining our vision and mission, lining out our business plan and marketing plans and we've learned a few things about ourselves. We've realize that defining ourselves as a tech or software company is not the whole picture. The software that we develop is merely one solution to our big vision. At the end of the day our goal is not to create a better gradebook, our goal is to empower teachers and students and improve our systems of education. Whether that happens by providing software or selling lemonade; we'll be out there doing what we can do to fight the good fight.

So, thanks to all the entrepreneurs and go-getters we met this weekend. It's a pleasure to be working along side you in the quest to better our world.

----

And here’s a quick run down of the three ventures that presented at the workshop:

Benevolent Media is a social enterprise dedicated to celebrating storytelling and design for good. They focus on people, organizations and projects that compel audiences to care about a cause, take action on an issue, or promote a point of view through strategic and inspiring multimedia.

Cleverhood is a small company in Providence with the will to sell a superior product made in the USA. We’ve created the eponymous Cleverhood, a smart-looking, high-performance rain cape. The ‘hood has been designed, crafted and manufactured in the US, putting good people to work. And every single, high-quality material that we could get, like zippers, trim and tags, are local too. Some of our fabrics are from overseas. But we’ll change that if it means we can still provide a superior product.

POP is asking the question, what if anywhere in the world every designer could be an entrepreneur. POP’s goal is to curate designers & goods from across the globe into unique pop up shops and exhibits that travel the world in order to connect consumers with design entrepreneurs.

Could "Just Teach" Mean "Just Assess?"

Thu, 09 Aug 2012 04:00:00 GMT

The Choice – Part 2 of 2

by John D’Anieri

Last week, I wrote about Paul Zavitkovsky’s challenge from an article in Catalyst Chicago “Now we have a choice. Do we double down again, or do we let go of some comfortable intuitions and start putting our money on a different horse?” I left off with the idea that treating standardized testing as either the enemy or the end goal misses the point. JumpRope can help schools use data they are required to collect in service of their actual mission—educate each child well.

Let's say a standardized test tells us that a particular 6th grader struggles to meet the Common Core standard, “cites textual evidence to support analysis of what the text says explicitly as well as inferences drawn from the text.” Assuming we could parse that standard in a way that would actually make sense to a student, let alone a teacher, such information can and should be an encouraging starting point rather than a damning end point—in a school that values formative over summative assessment. Did the student comprehend some, all, or none of what he read? Does he know what evidence is? Has he seen models of what showing evidence looks like? Is he perhaps perfectly capable of comprehending challenging texts and citing evidence, but didn't really make an attempt because he was bored to tears by the completely decontextualized reading sample he was given to demonstrate this skill?

We'll need to be able to ask and answer those questions on a student-by-student basis. We’ll need to be able to adapt our teaching constantly based on what we discover. Among the “intuitions” Zavitovsky does not question is our hunch that the best way for kids to learn is to put them in a room with one adult and 20-40 peers. While JumpRope can track that approach better than a typical gradebook, it can also help us see whole class, age-based instruction as only one way among many to engage with students. Imagine a JumpRope school that gets really good at tracking learning across grade levels and subject matters, where well-thought out Common Core-based information travels with the student to many kinds of learning experiences.

In my case, I don't have to imagine it; I've seen it in practice in schools where I've coached. The aforementioned "cites textual evidence standard" can be made to show up on JumpRope not just in Language Arts, but in Social Studies and Science. This school can not only focus on that standard for a defined period of time across disciplines, but special educators, tutors, and others have access to data collected from ALL of the learning experiences where that skill has been taught/assessed.

What might it tell us if a student is meeting that standard consistently in science but never in Language Arts? Is is that the standard is being assessed differently (which should then have implications for the teachers)? Or is it that the student really "gets it" when reading a scientific text, but struggles to transfer the conceptual understanding to literary, history or generic decontextualized standardized testing texts? If so, we now have a way to link successful work with one teacher—the science teacher who, traditionally, will NOT be responsible for certifying that student can meet the "cites textual evidence" standard—to the teacher who IS responsible for certifying that.

That is only one example of the way that having such data available in a common (core) language enables schools to compile, analyze and share information in ways that shift practice and create results. It is NOT something that's going to work if all that data is stuck in a gradebook—paper or electronic—as a number that means something only to the teacher who put it there.

Zavitkovsky writes that by “failing to let go of what we already know,” we’ll “kill the Common Core.” He's right, but the fact is that some of what we already know can work, if we're just willing to go where our new knowledge takes us.

The Implications of Standards-Based Grading

Tue, 07 Aug 2012 04:00:00 GMT

by John D’Anieri

The Huffington Post recently published an article entitled Standards-Based Grading Slow To Take Effect In High Schools. At JumpRope we believe in the positive solutions that standards-based grading can bring to the modern classroom. So, we wanted to address this issue—why has standards-based grading been slow to take effect?

As a former teacher in a standards-based high school, a long-time consultant to schools and professional development organizations, and now as parent of a high school student in a standards-based system, I’ve seen the trends mentioned in this article from nearly every possible angle. The real question is not whether such systems work, they do, but whether our communities are willing to deal with the implications of a much more honest system.

Done well, such work genuinely transforms how young people are held to both academic standards and the “habits of work” that undergird all meaningful accomplishment. That is not what most of us experienced, at least not consistently. We’ve all negotiated the often byzantine systems used to come up with a grade in a particular class, or to calculate a grade point average or honor role with every manner of “weighting” system imaginable. If we are to have any hope of our education system actually working for our communities, we’re going to need to gather and report data on real standards that are much more closely linked to the skills and dispositions our young people need. This is true both for students who’ve learned to game the system—only to find out that when they “win” they actually don’t know how do much of anything—and for those who’ve been gamed by the system and have given up, even though they know that they have much of value to contribute.

To be sure, such transformation is not just a matter of a new sheriff riding in and announcing, “We’re going to use standards-based grading now.” In fact, such an approach is almost certain to do more harm than good. But we now have educational models (exemplified by organizations such as Expeditionary Learning Schools, my former employer) that—when combined with the most capable of Learning Management platforms (such as that of my current employer, JumpRope) can give teachers, students, and parents the tools and support they need to fulfill such an ambitious promise.

The question again, is not, “will this work in high schools?” but rather, “Are we as a culture ready to admit what we all already know to be true?” Can the school committees that approve such policies admit that in most high schools, grades rank the desire to earn grades—and possibly the relative amount of parental pressure or the lack thereof— but not much more? And if we can admit that, are we ready to rethink the systems that will come crashing down when we do?

Ultimately the objections to standards-based grading are not about a fear that they won’t work, but that they will. That’s OK. As K-12 schools get better at adopting this system and educating their communities about it, the fear will dissipate and the benefits to kids and communities will become clearer. In the schools in which I work, many students have had previous experience with schools where they handed in a perfunctory first draft, got it back with a “D” or “C” on it, and “passed” the class. Our students know that will not fly. I talk often to kids who are re-working an assignment for the fourth, fifth or sixth time. Whether they are trying to make their work “exemplary” or are struggling to ensure that it “meets the standard,” they are learning something that they’ll remember long after we’ve forgotten their GPA—that perseverance and quality matter.

Could "Just Teach" Mean "Just Assess?"

Tue, 31 Jul 2012 04:00:00 GMT

The Challenge – Part 1 of 2

by John D’Anieri

At JumpRope, we believe in collecting data on what students have learned, as opposed to what they have done. In reality we believe this will guide the successful implementation of Common Core standards. In a Marshall Memo summary of an article by Paul Zavitkovsky from Catalyst Chicago, Getting Assessment Right in the Common Core Era, he makes the point that we’ll have to dispense with some conventional wisdom in order to do so.

Zavitkovsky offers this challenge: “Now we have a choice. Do we double down again, or do we let go of some comfortable intuitions and start putting our money on a different horse?” One of the "intuitions" we need to question is that "the best way to improve assessment at scale is to do that job for teachers so that teachers have more time to 'just teach'.”

If "just teach" were the answer, then we'd not be reading articles like this. One could argue that’s what we, as a profession, did for years before the assessment mania of No Child Left Behind — and it wasn’t working. But what would it look like if we were to turn that sentence around: the best way to improve teaching at scale is to create more time for teachers to “just assess.” I’m not referring to the sledgehammer approach of NCLB, which often played out as "just grade," "just rate student work compared to other students," or “just rate the school compared to other schools.”

It does mean turning the focus from what the teacher says or does to what the student understands or knows. In order to do that, we need to be able to assess where a student is on a continuum of progress towards clearly defined goals, and then adapt instruction to help the student reach them.

JumpRope — employed as part of an overall approach to teaching and learning rather than as a glorified gradebook — can help teachers and schools do exactly that. In terms of the "intuitions" Zavitkovsky tries to debunk, standardized testing need not necessarily be the enemy, if used as one among many useful assessments of student progress.

Check back next week for "The Choice", John's conclusion to "Could 'Just Teach' Mean 'Just Assess'."

The Journey to JumpRope

Thu, 19 Jul 2012 04:00:00 GMT

by John D'Anieri

JumpRope is excited to be working with John D'Anieri and Sara Needleman, our new consultants and leadership coaches. They are both Maine educators with long and varied experience in standards-based teaching and learning.

Our journey to JumpRope goes back to almost to the beginning of what is now 25+ years of trying to redefine public education in terms of relevance, rigor, and relationships. In the early and mid-90's, both Sara and I worked at schools affiliated with the Coalition of Essential Schools, which founder Ted Sizer led through a conversation that resulted in the CES Common Principles. Looking back now, two of those principles read as the philosophical blueprint for the vision for education that JumpRope champions.

Less is More, Depth Over Coverage

The school's goals should be simple: that each student master a limited number of essential skills and areas of knowledge. While these skills and areas will, to varying degrees, reflect the traditional academic disciplines, the program's design should be shaped by the intellectual and imaginative powers and competencies that the students need, rather than by "subjects" as conventionally defined. The aphorism "less is more" should dominate: curricular decisions should be guided by the aim of thorough student mastery and achievement rather than by an effort to merely cover content.

Demonstration of Mastery

Teaching and learning should be documented and assessed with tools based on student performance of real tasks. Students not yet at appropriate levels of competence should be provided intensive support and resources to assist them quickly to meet those standards. Multiple forms of evidence, ranging from ongoing observation of the learner to completion of specific projects, should be used to better understand the learner's strengths and needs, and to plan for further assistance."

Ted referred to CES as "a conversation among friends." For me, that conversation played out first in pioneering standards-based approaches in three Maine schools. That led to work with several Gates Foundation-funded initiatives—through the National School Reform Faculty (see also the School Reform Initiative), the Great Maine Schools Project, and Expeditionary Learning Schools. My work with the EL network focused, among other things, on developing the practices that turn standards-based theory into classroom practice at schools like Casco Bay High School in Portland.

This past fall, I came across JumpRope (which grew from Jesse's work at Validus Prep in the Bronx) at the Greene School in Rhode Island. Having helped school after school try to shoehorn standards-based practices into data-managment systems that blunted or negated their transformative power, I was hooked. I began to think of ways that I might build a practice around using JumpRope not just as a grading and reporting system, but as Common-Core backwards way of helping good teachers do what they really want to do—teach students, instead of subjects.

I immediately thought of Sara. We first worked together in the late 1990s when she was part of a National School Reform Faculty Coaches’ Training I was facilitating, and we’ve kept in touch over the years. She left the classroom more recently, after several years leading a team of middle school teachers that moved to a standards-based, interdisciplinary approach. Since then, she's worked to bring those approaches to the next generation of teachers at the University of Southern Maine — with a combination of fierceness and compassion that's necessary to do such difficult work well. We have in common something that is relatively rare: we've been working this way for so long—and with real success—that we can't imagine ever going back.

We agreed that the time to make a bold move might be right—a move that utilizes JumpRope to help schools implement genuine standards-based teaching and learning, rather than the many hybrid approaches that can sink under the weight of compromise and fear of change. Maine's Department of Education, led by Commissioner of Education Steve Bowen, is one of the first in the nation committed to making "graduation by proficiency" a reality. We know from experience that the REAL practices that drive effective standards-based teaching, learning, and assessment can be new and quite scary to schools, teachers, and parents—so implementing JumpRope in a truly transformative way will be a years-long process for most schools. But we also know from experience (the only way to really know anything) that the most important audience—the young people in our schools and classrooms—not only "get it" pretty quickly, but rise to the challenge of real work and meaningful accountability.

Which brings me back to Ted Sizer. In Horace's Compromise, he wrote: "Good schools focus on habits, on what sorts of intellectual activities will and should inform their graduates’ lives. Not being clear about these habits leads to mindlessness, to institutions that drift along doing what they do simply because they have always done it that way. Such places are full of silly compromises, of practices that boggle commonsense analysis. And they dispirit the Horace Smiths, who know that the purpose of education is not in keeping school but in pushing out into the world young citizens who are soaked in habits of thoughtfulness and reflectiveness, joy, and commitment."

JumpRope, as both a functional tool and as a vehicle for social change is the logical and technological offspring of the networks of educators that sprung from the challenge Ted set out for us. We're thrilled about joining the innovators and visionaries at JumpRope to keep pushing the boundaries of that challenge.

I thought summer was supposed to be for relaxing!

Fri, 06 Jul 2012 04:00:00 GMT

What is this "exciting new product," you ask? We are working hard to unleash JumpRope's brand spanking new Classroom Edition for Teachers Soon, single teachers who are looking to break out of the mold can have JumpRope even if the entire school isn't plugged in quite yet. Once the community sees how helpful JumpRope is in your classroom, it'll catch on like a wildfire, we're sure.

Our Classroom Edition for Teachers can serve as a test run before the whole school takes it on. Or it can serve the lone innovator with flying colors, we turn your dreams into tangible, reportable data- that's what it's all about! Empowering teachers with useful data and helpful technology is what we love to do, and we are excited to get JumpRope into the hands of individual teachers soon.

We plan on having this out in August. If you can’t wait that long and want to see JumpRope in your school immediately, don’t hesitate to get in touch!

To track our progress and stay in-the-know with everything mastery-based grading, follow us on Twitter (@jumpropers) and hook up with us on Facebook. We will keep this blog updated with lots of cool info about our shenanigans, progress and mastery-based grading.

Please, enjoy your summer. Don't worry, we'll make it out to the beach soon, as they say, all work and no play... drop us a line if you have any questions! Au Revoir!

Can you count to 1,000,000? We can!

Wed, 23 May 2012 04:00:00 GMT

At JumpRope, we are proud to be part of the daily lives of our users. As a mission-critical, professional tool, JumpRope often gets more usage than email (unless this gem is floating around.) Teachers, administrators, and students log in multiple times per day to enter or analyze attendance, mastery, and other data.

On May 9th, 2012 we hit a major milestone (drum roll, please): our one millionth login! As you may expect, we’ve been steadily adding users over the last few months. Not only this, but the average amount of time users spend with JumpRope is increasing as well. Keep'em coming, and we’ll keep spinning up new servers in the cloud to meet the demand!

In the next few months as we race towards 2,000,000 we would like to highlight some of our happy users on this very blog. So if you're thrilled with JumpRope and the superhuman powers it's given you reach out to us at info@jumpro.pe and we'll get your story up here lickety split. Thanks go out to our users and supporters, and here’s to the next million (which should come more quickly!)

We Speak Your Language at JumpRope

Wed, 09 May 2012 04:00:00 GMT

Having taught at more than one school and worked with dozens more, I've come to know that each school works very hard to build and maintain its own unique culture. This extends from the students and families up to the staff and administration, and is a crucial part of a school's success. When JumpRope begins working with a school, our goal is to enhance and supplement the culture with powerful tools, not to replace or force our own culture upon them. It is for this reason that I have worked very hard to ensure that our system is fully customizable to your school.

As with any culture, language is an important aspect. Within JumpRope, there are many individual words and phrases that can be customized by school staff to fit in with the school culture. This is a terrific and powerful feature, but has the interesting downside of making it very difficult for us to write help documents that everybody can understand! In our help documents, you'll see us using the "generic" term for many aspects of the system, and in some cases you may not be sure what we are referring to. In these cases, take a look at the list of "generic" terms below (in bold) - following each are some examples of common customized terms that our schools have used. Feel free to add additional language below in the comments, and I will update this post to reflect your school's choice of words.

Standards-Based Grading - Mastery-, Proficiency-
Unit - Case Study, Investigation, Expedition
Standard - Learning Target, Objective, Outcome, Learning Goal / LG, CCS
Assessment - Evidence, Assignment, Test
Advisory - Crew, Leadership Group
Course - Expedition
Administrators - Principals, Deans

As time goes on, we will create more opportunities to customize the software and we will collect and post additional variations in an attempt to keep this information current. Let me know if you have any comments, questions, or additions below!

JumpRope Sponsors Best-in-the-Bronx Double Dutch Team!

Sat, 28 Apr 2012 04:00:00 GMT

Did I ever tell you that I used to coach double dutch while I was teaching high school? In fact, it's one of the reasons that we changed our name to JumpRope last summer! We are excited to announce we've chosen to sponsor the Bathgate Double Dutch team in the Bronx by helping them purchase the uniforms and shoes that they need to compete in this year's NYC PSAL double-dutch season.

On Sunday, I was able to join Coach Fields and the team for a match at Martin Luther King High School in Manhattan. Wearing their new digs, they stepped outside of the gym to grab a photo with me after they finished their freestyle. Congratulations, girls!

Last year, Bathgate was number one in the Bronx in their second year as a varsity double dutch team. I remember two years ago when double dutch was first accepted as an official sport in the PSAL here in New York - the interest and skill that poured into the sport was incredible to watch! I've always believed that sports play an important part in schools as source of exercise, discipline, and community. No matter how hard educators work to improve academic instruction, some students will always be more connected to the school through their teams.

Many schools in New York City struggle in this regard because space (fields, gyms, tracks, etc.) are in short supply as schools are often crammed into city blocks. Double Dutch is especially exciting to me in this regard because it is a high-exertion sport that can be done in limited space with limited equipment... and (while co-ed) it appeals to girls who statistically are less engaged in sports.

It is an honor and a privilege to be able to continue our support for the efforts by students and coaches this year by helping Bathgate enter their third season with uniforms and equipment. I plan to visit them (and maybe even help coach) throughout the season and update you when they take another trophy this spring!

The Fate of Civilizations lies in your hands & it's fun!

Fri, 27 Apr 2012 04:00:00 GMT

JumpRope is excited to share with you a fun and intoxicating educational tool produced by new friends of ours, Joe Ballou and Jonathan Ng of Fate of Civilizations, a history-based board game – Glory. Glory allows students to learn about world history in a playful and engaging way, and aligns with universal standards so teachers can gather mastery data and track student progress.

JumpRope and Fate of Civilizations share the same heart when it comes to education and innovation: school should be fun and personalized for students, progressive and joyful for teachers- only creative technology can get us there!

Joe and Jonathan just launched a Kickstarter Campaign to fund their first round of game distribution. JumpRope is a proud backer – we hope you will become one too. For real change to happen in schools the communities they're a part of have to lend a helping hand – here's your opportunity.

To learn more about Glory and Fate of Civilization's other awesome products follow the links in this article and read this great write up.

When Glory arrives on our doorstep we'll have a gaming party – I get to be the Top Hat!

We're in the zone, the iZone

Thu, 19 Apr 2012 04:00:00 GMT

It's exciting to sit down with a teacher or administrator who has never heard about JumpRope's standards-based grading technology and watch their nods quicken and grins widen as they learn that we are exactly what they've been looking for their entire career. So the opportunity to see this revelation many times over the course of an entire day fuels my efforts to keep fighting the good fight. This was our experience at the iZone meet up in Long Island City. Justin, Kyle (our new writer, who got a crash course) and myself hopped on the train (throwback: I quite-literally took the D to the E to the L.I.C.) and arrived at a Department of Education building fully caffeinated, ready to meet some innovation-hungry educators. iZone is an initiative of the New York City DOE to equip and support schools with innovative strategies and the practical tools to apply them (that's us!) We are proud to be a part of iZone, as their goals and solutions are right in line with JumpRope's:

Clear goals, clear feedback, and flexibility to learn at their own pace. Courses are designed around developing the real-world knowledge and skills that students need to meet their goals.
Learning from experts throughout the world. iZone students use video conferencing and other tools to interact with scientists, politicians, engineers and other professionals.
Using real-time data to support each student. Teachers use computer-based, personalized learning systems to apply real-time data on student progress, strengths and areas of need.
Students working in many different ways. Teachers use creative ways that enable students to master the knowledge, skills and habits of mind they need to be successful in college and careers.
Collaborative peer to peer learning. iZone students communicate with peers in and out of the classroom for new perspectives.
Access to a wide range of courses Students have access to expanded learning opportunities through online courses offered trans-burrough and nationwide

We ran into some old friends - quality folks from Big Picture Learning, Authentic Education, and Teaching Matters - and got to know lots of wonderful educators. We gave our new friends a sneak peak into our groundbreaking scheduling technology and received their feedback about how we can serve their schools best. What groundbreaking scheduling technology, you say? You'll have to stay tuned. For now, I'll say this- no longer will students be saved by the bell, instead they will be freed by their mastery. Okay, admittedly not my best pun, but at least I look as good as A.C. Slater, right?

Looking forward to working with the iZone and their schools for years to come.

Switch to Mastery, And Do It For Real!

Sat, 14 Apr 2012 04:00:00 GMT

Think back to your old gradebook. What did the numbers mean? What were they used for? If you're anything like me, grades were essentially an ongoing way to motivate and penalize students. They sometimes worked, and sometimes didn't, but one thing was very clear: grades depended heavily on what students had done, and less heavily on what students had shown that they knew.

I know that I don't speak for all teachers in this, but I certainly speak for part of my teaching career (and know many others who would similarly confess,) The message and feedback to students in most grading systems comes down to something very much like the following:

Homework? Turn it in mostly correct, and you get credit - even if you copied it from your friend, I really just care that you got some practice.
Classwork? You grade has more to do with behavior, collaboration, and time-on-task than anything else.
Tests? Mostly about what you know, but only at a specific point and it will rarely include any information on which specific standards you did or did not master.
Products, Papers, and Projects with Rubrics? Great feedback that was never really captured in a grading system that had any accountability or long-term usefulness.

Agreement? Perhaps at least some? If so, I'll power forward.

The primary goal of a mastery-based grading system is to gather reliable information on what students know. Our history of trickery in grades to balance carrot and stick may have worked some of the time, but I think we're all reading this right now because we know that it doesn't work most of the time. Typically, in fact, it works only for those in the top-tier and sends a very problematic message to those who struggle with grades: you are out of range of an A, but you can at least try to pass! Ever said that to a student? I'm guilty, in not quite-so-many words. This leaves a good portion of students in a place where they receive consistently-negative feedback and never truly feel capable of reaching the higher levels of mastery that all good teachers hope to see.

So let's retire our out-dated notion of forever tuning our gradebooks in hopes of motivating students into real learning, and embrace a new idea: if we are honest, transparent, and timely with feedback about their progress that matches up with their own observations and comes often enough to be associated with their hard work (or lack thereof), students begin to connect work with learning instead of work with grades. Students who are used to failing (or nearly so) begin to see areas or strength and weakness that are honest and manageable. Students who are used to excelling can identify areas that they can still improve in. Teachers can see which things are well taught, which are well learned, and what any student or group requires help with. Stated simply- mastery-based grading empowers students.

The good news is- mastery-based grading is practical with JumpRope. Teachers finally have the support and affirmation they deserve, and students, tired of walking towards success, can now leap towards their goals with focused and helpful guidance- everyone wins!

More work? A little. Hard to explain? At first. More useful to the teacher, student, school, and family? Absolutely. Going to transform education? Well... it's worth a try, right? Join us.

JumpRope as a Tool to Defend and Justify Mastery

Thu, 29 Mar 2012 04:00:00 GMT

Recently, the Urban Assembly School for Music and Art (UAMA), a high school in Brooklyn, NY, contacted us with a fascinating request: their annual Quality Review - a day-long inquiry and audit of the school's overall quality - was approaching, and they needed our help.

As a truly innovative school, UAMA has been working for years to implement the Key Cognitive Strategies college-readiness model at their school. This model encourages schools to assess student learning in terms of five key learning strategies that are essential for success in college and career, and the school was diving in to implement full-school feedback based on KCS that completely replaced traditional grades.

I still remember their excitement when we first introduced them to JumpRope and our mastery-based grading tools many years ago - they saw the solution to the logistical issues that they'd been grappling with as they implemented their plans, finding themselves further and further from the safety of pass/fail credits.

While the quality of the implementation is undeniable when you walk through the school (classrooms have the language front-and-center, and students speak in terms of the KCS's), they needed some specific data to justify their implementation to the official review board. I believe that innovation must be accompanied by accountability, and that New York City's Quality Review system is quite good at giving schools an opportunity to present a holistic picture as opposed to a limited set of test scores or attendance data. That said, they're still very interested in data that backs up a school's claims of success - as they should be!

UAMA was in a terrific spot - they had years of professional development under their belt, and they had invested in our system to help collect, manage, and report on data related to mastery of the KCS strategies. For the last 18 months, every single assessment and score that teachers have given or entered - and thus, every piece of feedback given to students - has been entered in terms of these KCS strategies. Not only that, but each is associated with a course, a teacher, a date, and even a description of the assessment and the specific learning goal that was being assessed. To date, JumpRope stores over 250,000 individual scores for their ~600 students!

The Quality Review - often a source of anxiety to innovative schools that lack data - was suddenly an opportunity for them to shine! We helped them design a number of reports, based on authentic data collected over time, that helped them demonstrate the degree of mastery of various KCS strategies over time, student demographics, and even by department or teacher.

While I'm not at liberty to show the actual reports that we were able to provide, here's a couple of quick examples:

1) KCS Mastery by Student (filterable by marking period and student gender/grade/etc.)

2) KCS Mastery by Department (filterable my marking period and/or individual teacher)

3) KCS Mastery by Month (filterable by student demographic or department)

4) KCS Coverage (how many times was each KCS assessed in each department?)

I can't express how exciting it is for the school and for those of us at JumpRope to be able to support innovation within a giant educational district in this way, based on real classroom data! If your school or district is in need of practical tools to implement mastery-based grading, we're very interested to hear from you.

A new way to tell when your scores are saved!

Thu, 02 Feb 2012 05:00:00 GMT

Because we know that mastery-based grading inherently brings its own challenges, we have had worked hard to make grade entry as easy and intuitive as possible. We built in auto-saving into the gradebook from day one, behaving much like Google Docs. As you enter scores, JumpRope will save your scores every few seconds in the background (typically every 10 seconds, but it depends on how many changes you're making at a time). Over time, some teachers have told us that they are confused about whether their scores are being saved, and which scores have been saved at any given time. We have a few features to help you make sure that you're scores are saved, and a new feature in our latest release!

The number of scores "pending" is always displayed in the Save button in the top-right.
At any time, you can manually save your scores by clicking on the save button.
The save button will tell you when an auto-save is in progress.
A pop down "flash message" will appear at the very top of the screen when your scores have been saved, indicating the number of scores that have been successfully saved.
If you attempt to close the browser (or browser tab) and/or navigate away from JumpRope to another website while you have unsaved scores, JumpRope will attempt to warn you. (Please note: this does not work in all browsers, but works in Safari, Chrome, Firefox, and Internet Explorer 8+.)
NEW! JumpRope now highlights un-saved scores in yellow until they are successfully saved, making it easy for you to know when all of your scores have been successfully saved. Take a look below!

This update is rolling out to all users over the next couple of days, so keep your eye out for it. We hope that this helps you enter scores with confidence. As always, please let us know below if you have any questions or comments!

Thanks,

Jesse

NOTE: This post is also available to users on our support website.

Happy New Year from JumpRope!

Fri, 30 Dec 2011 05:00:00 GMT

The JumpRope team would like to wish all of our users and supporters a very Happy New Year. 2011 has been a busy one at JumpRope, though many of the changes have been behind the scenes. Much of what we've done is gearing up for some exciting new products and features in 2012. Let's take a look at some of our bigger accomplishments in 2011:

1) We released three brand new products: The Charter School Common Application system, the Post-Secondary Tracking module, and the Network Dashboard. Each of these products is in active use by organizations working to improve education around the country.

2) We hired Nathan and Jenna to help with development and customer support. While Nathan's role was temporary as a consultant, his contributions were invaluable to improving our technical infrastructure at JumpRope. Jenna, as her bio indicates, continues to be the nicest person that you'll find on the other end of your email!

3) We moved into our new office space on 27th street and Manhattan. Not only has this boosted our productivity, but many more of our clients can come to visit us (our apartment wasn't the most inviting location, given the empty pizza boxes). Our new hosts at Barnum are much cleaner and more hospitable.

4) We changed our name! As many of you know, JumpRope used to be known as Impact. We were so excited to change our name that we revamped our entire design and created this fancy website (thanks to to NOMADIC by design).

5) Database upgrades! For years, JumpRope has been hosted on a combination of Google App Engine and Zoho. Both have been and continue to be amazing partners, but we have added a third leg to our data hosting in the form of a relational database cluster hosted by Amazon Web Services. This new database system allows us to offer fast, reliable, and powerful analytics to our customers.

6) We introduced new consulting services. Having identified "progress report time" as a particularly high-stakes and stressful time, we now offer Process Consultation and a Progress Report Print Service that can bring some sanity to the chaos. So far, our customers love it!

7) We're taking over Teach For America Institute. As many educators are aware, Teach For America offers intense training to its incoming corps members over the summer before they start teaching. This data-driven crucible of knowledge and strategy is requires powerful tools to track student and teacher growth. Having worked with TFA for nearly two years, JumpRope has become an important part of their instructional data strategy. In the summer of 2012, the majority of incoming corps members will be using JumpRope (and thus standards-based tracking) as their very first "gradebook!"

...and that's just what I can remember off the top of my head. Of course, the new year isn't just about reflection - it's also about planning for the future. At JumpRope, we are making one very important New Year's resolution:

We will blog at least once per month about our product, customers, partners, and industry.

To date, this blog is rather pathetic... but you can expect great things moving forward as we spend some time sharing the work that we and our amazing clients are doing. In fact, now is as good a time as any to subscribe to our blog so that you're always in the know.

Happy New Year from JumpRope, and we look forward to seeing you come around more often!

Jesse

Say hello to JumpRope (and the team!)

Thu, 25 Aug 2011 04:00:00 GMT

JumpRope provides solutions for teachers, schools, and other educational organizations. Though you could call us a bootstrapped web-based startup (we are), we've stayed pretty far from the startup world as our business has grown. Instead, we've been deeply embedded in the education world working with dozens of schools and networks to learn as much as possible about designing and implementing systems in the exciting, chaotic world of education.

I can't express how excited I am to finally launch with a public presence (along with a new website and a new name!). It will take quite a few blog posts to introduce you to each aspect of our business and product, so I thought that I'd start simply by introducing our team. Before I do, though, I'd be remiss if I did not take the chance to shout out to the many members of our "extended team" that we've worked with over the last few years and who have truly helped us become what we are today.

New York City Outward Bound

Expeditionary Learning Schools

The Urban Assembly of New York

Teach For America

New Leaders for New Schools

The Young Women's Leadership Network

Nomadic by Design

And now, a little bit about the people who we actually pay on a regular basis...

Jesse Olsen
Founder & CEO
Most would call Jesse the brains behind the outfit, but in reality he's just super stubborn. Admittedly, though, his knack for coding and ability to not have a life are probably the company's two most valuable assets.

In his early life, Jesse went straight from geek to teacher as he studied engineering in his beloved northwest and moved across the country to teach high school math at Validus Preparatory Academy in the Bronx (that's NYC, as he quickly learned). During JumpRope's founding years, he continued to teach full time, and only recently did he start to focus allof his energy on JumpRope. He remains the chief academic officer, chief product officer, developer, and general pain-in-the-butt around the office.

Justin Meyer
Founder & COO
Most would say that Justin was crazy to drop his engineering job in beautiful Portland, Oregon to move to New York City to be sole full-time employee-owner of a bootstrapped startup... but we strongly suspect that he was crazy to begin with.

Before becoming a the educator/engineer/accountant/lawyer/salesman/manager that he is today, he already had a number of roles under his belt: snowboard instructor on Mt. Hood, travelling wakeboard salesman (not to mention semi-pro wakeboarder), power-supply specialist, and fashion aficianado. From this life, he jumped right in and began faking it 'till he was making it as our beloved COO. In fact, we strongly suspect that he is still faking it.

Jenna VanLooven
Customer Support Specialist
Just-married Jenna is, by a significant margin, the nicest person that works at JumpRope. Being talented managers of human resources, we suspected that she would do quite well in the role of customer support.

Jenna is on the other end of the line if you ever need help or experience a problem with our tools - as if that ever happens... While you're at it, feel free to ask her for a farm-fresh recipe, a suggested wine pairing, or some free-range eggs from the chickens that she keeps. She's so nice, she must just give them away for free!

Nathan Patton
Developer
I suppose that it was only a matter of time before we needed to hire an actual grown up. As Jesse likes to say, he's best-in-class at making things work "the first time." With years of industry experience and far more discipline and knowledge of software best-practices than Jesse, it's safe to say that Nathan is the reason that our product works every time. But fear not, Nathan is still young enough to jump rope!

Stay tuned for more as we introduce you to our product, mission, and solutions!
Jesse