September 22, 2025

Greetings, BHS students, families and community. Incredibly, this Friday, 9/26, will already mark the midpoint of Quarter 1. At this point, we're back in the rhythm at BHS, and students are settling in to their classroom routines and really getting to know their teachers, each class's patterns and expectations and, in the case of our new students, the building itself. All educators have also been tasked with updating their gradebooks by end-of-day on 9/26 so that students and caregivers can get a sense of where things stand at the 1/8 mark. Please be sure to take a look at Schoology with your students this coming weekend for a progress check.

One of the topics that obviously comes up a lot at the start of the year, as classes review the course expectations, is the school's grading and reporting practices. As you may have heard from your student if they are a returning 10-12th grader, we made some changes this year to the way we assess student work. Specifically, through a combination of staff feedback, summer work, and a small task force made up of administration, teachers and our instructional coach, we've refined our grading categories and category weights. These determine how course grades are calculated.

While it's true that BHS is gradually moving toward a proficiency-based system of teaching, learning and assessment, we're not there yet and these changes are driven as much or more by the essential need to establish consistency across our school. Right now, BHS is focused on clarifying our assessment practices and refining our content area graduation requirements and priority standards -- both of which are critical in any school, with any system, not just proficiency-based ones -- because all schools should have a guaranteed, aligned curriculum and standardized guidelines for grading and reporting. The driver of our updated grading guidelines is not the end goal of proficiency-based teaching and learning in the future, but our present Purpose For Grading Statement, which was developed this year:

"At BHS, the purpose of grading is to clearly and consistently communicate academic progress to students and those who support them. Grades provide meaningful feedback that informs next steps for teaching and learning, and empowers students to focus on growth and take ownership of their learning."

In keeping with this purpose statement, the three categories you can expect to see in your child's Schoology gradebook, defined below, are:

• Formative Practice: Assignments placed in this category provide opportunities for practice and feedback without students fearing that they will be heavily penalized for making mistakes while learning. These tasks are part of the learning process, when we expect growth, rather than achievement. Formative scores/feedback should reflect a student’s progress toward the content area standard or learning goal. Teachers should offer timely feedback on formative tasks, regardless of whether a grade will be entered for it, so that they serve students as useful tools to guide learning. Students should not retake/re-do formative tasks; they are snapshots of progress.

• Summative Assessments: Tasks placed in this category summarize learning; they come at the end of a period of learning and are an opportunity for students to demonstrate what level of proficiency in a specific skill or content area they’ve reached as a result of the learning process, and after explicit instruction and multiple opportunities for formative practice in the skill to be assessed. Summative tasks should be designed to assess individual proficiency, and should allow for reassessment opportunities. Summative assessments can be big assessments to measure mastery of multiple standards, but they may also be smaller assessments that ask students to demonstrate proficiency in a single standard.

• Habits of Work & Learning (HOWLs): Students can be assessed on their responsibility and engagement. This category DOES NOT reflect teacher feedback on academic learning, but rather on habits and dispositions of a learner. A standard rubric must be used to assess HOWLs so students receive feedback based on consistent criteria.

BHS used to allow for broader ranges when it came to how to weight each category. We have significantly narrowed those ranges this year, and are also ensuring that even with the ranges we still have, all sections of the same course have the same category weighting so that, regardless of who a student's teacher is, their grades are being calculated in the same way. The ranges are below:

• • Formative Practice: 0-20%

  • Summative Assessments: 70-100%

  • Habits of Work & Learning (HOWLs): 0-10%

The goal -- I daresay our reason to do the work we do in schools -- is not to make "passing" harder or reduce learning to chasing grades. Rather, the goal is to ensure grades accurately capture what students actually know and can do. In so doing, we are providing the clarity, consistency, and routine communication needed for our students (and all those who support them, at school and at home) to know what skills and knowledge are essential in each course, where they stand in relation to skill proficiency, and what they need to do to grow as learners across academic disciplines. These updates, and the continued work we will be doing to also refine and align our late work practices and reassessment practices, help BHS and our hardworking teachers and learners get closer to that desired outcome.

As always, I'm happy to chat. If you'd like to learn more about our grading and reporting practices, have questions or concerns, or just want to get a better understanding of where we are and where we're going as a school, please don't hesitate to get in touch. In the meantime, I wish you a beautiful and fun-filled autumn!

With appreciation,

Sabrina Westdijk