SThere are a handful of pioneer principals throughout Italy who have launched themselves into “non-stop” schooling. Like, in Milan, the Liceo Bottoni, in Piacenza, the Volta school complex, in Florence, the Marco Polo. From this year, in all classes, they will start experimenting with the so-called “single period”. That is, they will abandon the mid-year evaluation, leaving aside the grades, which will reappear in the end-of-year report card. Not really a high school without grades but a high school without quarters. For a school that does not judge and reduces the stress and anxiety of young people. Or, at least, he tries.
Non-stop school begins. «No report cards mid-year, too much stress for students»
Basically only at the end of the school year, after having observed him for the entire learning period, do the teachers decide whether the student has reached the levels needed to move on to the next class.
“Like this,” she explained principal of Buttons Giovanna Mezzatesta in an interview with Corriere della Sera, «the kids will have more time to study in depth and in a more relaxed way, without spending, for example, the Christmas holidays sweating over books in preparation for the tests in January. They will learn to organize themselves better. And also to avoid “smart tricks”, such as studying little or nothing in the first quarter and recovering all the subjects below in the second. And then we hope to take them away the most annoying and counterproductive obsession».
The obsession with voting is counterproductive
The one for voting, in fact, which generates stress more than it generates interest in knowledge and personal growth.
The abolition of the mid-year report card is actually part of a broader research project for the innovation of the evaluation methodology in collaboration with the Faculty of Education Sciences of Bicocca University. «The idea is to give up numerical votes on tests and questions» explains Mezzatesta. «We will not replace them with “prefabricated” judgments, such as “excellent” or “severely insufficient” which would be the same thing, but with judgments that will be a sort of training accompaniment to improvement. We do not evaluate the product, i.e. the class assignment, but the learning process that the student is following, indicating if there are gaps or elements to be reinforced”.
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