...thoughts

As the semester is getting further along, I am enjoying SBG more and more.  I truly do not remember what it was like to be on the other side of the grading fence. I know my first two years of teaching I spent my days “grading” endless stacks of paper. Usually I ended up putting “+”, “+-“, or “-“ on the papers which had nothing to do with the actual content mastery. If they finished the entire assignment they got a “+”. If they finished more than half but not all of it they got a “+-“. And if they finished less than half (but at least turned something in) they got a “-“. I had so many papers to grade that I never really gave any one paper a good review. I was basically grading participation—behavior.  I was the teacher at the parent conference that scrambled to defend my grades when a parent asked, “Why is my student failing if they keep getting 100s on all the homework and classwork? Doesn’t that mean they should know it for the test?” And then I would say something like, “well, um…yea…anyone else wanna talk?” Embarrassing. I knew it wasn’t a good practice, but I didn’t know how to really fix it. I am so thankful that I finally decided to jump into SBG this year. This system makes sense. I am still embarrassed at parent-teacher conferences, but the difference is that I am embarrassed for my colleagues that haven’t figured it out yet. I watch them scramble to justify silly grading practices just like I used to. I really want to help them, but this is a philosophy that you kind of have to adopt on your own before you are willing to listen to others ideas on the "how to do it" side of things. 

One of the principals at my school said, "If you just change the grading system but nothing else, it won't be any better than it ever has been. In fact, it might be worse." I agree with that statement. SBG is more than just a way to grade papers. It is an entire philosophy. It has changed the way I teach and assess. I truly believe it is making me a better teacher.  

First Assessment - Grading

My students took their first big standards quiz on Wednesday. I had no idea what to expect about grading. I didn't know how long it would take or how difficult it might be to score it correctly. So far I have finished two out of four classes and it is taking about twice as long to grade as it would have last year under the old system. However, last year I only used multiple choice tests. I could easily go through and mark off a, b, c, d, etc... This first standards quiz was strictly free response and essay. Therefore, I am not basing my "time it takes to grade" on this one assessment.

Overall, I like this system a lot better so far. The usual points or percentage systems never really made me too happy. Even though I have only graded two classes, I am pleased with the results. The kids who are currently failing are the kids who don't know what they are doing and that is a small percentage. I have one in each class right now that is failing. The rest are spread out As through Ds. The quiz scores match up perfectly, I feel, to what the students actually know.

Tomorrow I will be handing the quizzes back. The students are going to chart their own progress. They all have a "standards" tab in their binder (go me!). I will work on giving some valuable feedback to each student. I want them to know exactly what they should work on in order to improve their score.

I'm excited to give the quizzes back. I'm interested to know how long it will take for the students to really catch on to the grading system. I am sure once they fully understand it, they will appreciate it.

I'll keep you updated! As always, feedback is welcome.

The Plan

After much reading and research (and several years of chickening out), here is the SBG plan that I have settled on. My colleague David is using the same plan. We are on the same 9th grade team and we want to keep things as uniform as possible with the new system.

A general 4 point rubric:
4- Advanced, learning exceeds goal
3- Proficient, learning meets goal
2- Basic, learning below goal
1- Below Basic, student needs help to reach basic level
0- Student isn't successful even with help

This rubric I got primarily from Marzano's Formative Assessment & Standard-Based Grading. However, I do not plan to make a specific rubric per learning goal like the book suggests. I will only have the one generic rubric and just make my learning goals descriptive.

David and I decided to go with a 1/3 percentage scale score. That will come in a separate posting. We had to have a way to convert the rubric scores into something usable for our grading system.

Record Keeping:
In my "official" gradebook that gets entered electronically, I will only have one grade per learning goal and then the final exam. This grade will represent the summative score for that learning goal. So after I have written out all my learning goals for the year, it is possible that students will only have about 50 or so grades for the entire year. Each score will go into the gradebook out of 100%. So even though the students will have fewer grades than in the past, the "total points" will be about the same.

I will also keep a paper record of all formative (graded) assessments that I give the students. That could be homework, bell ringers, quizzes, mini-tests, ...anything that will inform me and the student of progress towards the learning goal. These formative assessments will be crucial to the student's progress in my class. I will have to find an efficient way to provide timely feedback to each student, otherwise I think my plan is going to flop. I haven't come up with the "efficient" part yet, so that will be reserved for a later post.

I really like this because it is going to completely remove "missing work" and "late work" and "zeroes" from the equation. I absolutely HATED giving a student a zero simply because they didn't turn something in...or worse yet, they turned it in but it was late. I want the grade to represent how much they LEARNED, not that they are responsible...or whatever.

Reassessment:
The other key point that I want to include in the system is the ability for students to re-assess. I don't want their grade to represent what they knew in August. I want it to be (as close as possible) representative of what they currently know or learned.

That being said, I realistically I do not have time to constantly re-assess every learning goal. This part the students are going to have to take some ownership. I will have two days a week that I will be available for re-assessing. The students will only have the re-assess the goals that they are wanting to improve. They will need to give me at least a school day's notice so that I can prepare an alternate assessment for them. They will need to sign in with the reassessment log so I can keep track of who has come in, etc... I may limit the number of students that can sign up per day. That may prevent the "mad dash" at the end of the grading period. I'll have to think that through a bit more before I decide.

I do not plan to put a time limit on the reassessments. If they want to re-assess a skill in April that they learned in August, that is fine with me. The only time limits I will put on them will be at the very end of the semester...I'll have to make some type of a cutoff date so I am not grading down to the last second.

Other thoughts:
I really like this because if a student's grade is crappy then all they need to do is learn the material. They do not have to do hours of makeup work. They are not ever "hopeless". They just need to study up and re-assess. As for now, I do not have a way that I am going to require them to study or prove they studied. I also do not have a limit on the number of times they can reassess a certain learning goal. Both of those things may change.

Anyway, so that is what I have so far. Questions, comments, and concerns are always welcome. Stay tuned...because I'm sure it will change before August arrives.

... and David

My name is David Hawkins and I am the other of two contributors for this blog. Ashley has already introduced herself and together we plan to tackle a problem that we have noticed in our classrooms over the past years.

I have taught science at the same school for four years and I am beginning my fifth with a significant change in my grading system. I have an undergraduate degree in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology and graduate degree in secondary education. This year I will teach Biology, Honors Biology and a co-taught Inclusion Biology to freshman with the exception of a couple of sophomores. 

As Ashley has described, our school has made some incredible adjustments to the structure over the past few years.  The looping, Small Learning Community creation, an extended day for students, dress code, multiple intervention strategies, and more have provided us supports and systems for implementing a standards based grading system. We both saw a need to improve how we were assessing our students learning and communicating it in a meaningful and useful way.  After listening to Ashley’s ideas about standards based grading and doing a little research, I decided to team up with Mrs. Walther and take on this endeavor. 

Our blog will serve as a sounding board for us and hopefully we can generate some useful feedback through comments.  Neither of us has written books on the subject and both of us are humble enough to take advice and learn from anyone.  As Ashley stated, this will be a good reflecting tool so that as we carry this on into the sophomore year of these students, making changes to our systems will be more effective.

Meet Ashley

I'm Ashley Walther and I'll be one of the two contributors for this blog. The other is my colleague, David. He will introduce himself shortly.

I am a fourth year math teacher at an inner-city school in Knoxville, TN. I have my BA in Mathematics and my MA in Curriculum & Instruction. I've experienced both middle and high school, but the majority of my time has been spent at the high school level. I've taught every grade from 6 to 12. This upcoming year I'll teach solely freshmen.

My school does what is called "looping". The teachers follow the students for two years. The ninth graders I have this year I will have again as sophomores next year. In addition to this set up, we also have core-academic teams. David is the science teacher on my team and I am the math teacher. Ever since we became teammates, David and I have struggled to find ways to make grades more meaningful to students, teachers, and parents. We independently started talking about things that were hovering around the standards-based grading category.  Once we realized we were both talking about doing the same types of things, we knew what we had to do. We got permission from our administrators and this year we are jumping head-first into standards-based grading.

This blog will follow our journey through the ups and downs of SBG. Hopefully we will detail our trials and tribulations so that others may benefit from our experience. I also hope that this will be a good record for us next year when it is time to make changes.

This blog will be strictly about SBG, but you can also follow my math blog here. Most of the posts on this site will be duplicated on my math site, but the math site will have more than just SBG.