Frau Dee's Grading

Notes about grades

1. The only official grades are those posted in Powerschool. Google Classroom grades are only there for tracking or reminders to the students. THEY ARE NOT OFFICIAL GRADES!

2. There are three different types of grades: Daily Work, Formative(quizzes) and Summatives (Tests).

3. Proficiency grading (sometimes called standards-based grading) is used, based on the Texas TEKS for LOTE (Languages other Than English) or Discovering Languages. Students will be expected to SHOW what they know for their credit.

A course-specific Learner Proficiency Tracker will be used to help students track what standards they have met versus what standards they still need to meet. You can explore what those trackers look like at the links below.

Proficiency Explained:

Because our language classes are proficiency based and using communicative language, students are expected to USE and PRACTICE actively with the target language. So YES, student will be expected to SPEAK using the target language, READ using the target language, LISTEN using the target language, and WRITE using the target language. However practices are NOT PUNISHED! This means that 99.9% of the practice and daily work we do will be a completion grade. So if the student participates and tries, even with errors, it is possible to get a fairly high grade for this class. These practice activities will fall under the Classwork/Homework in the Powerschool gradebook. This is the majority of our grades.

Formative checks of proficiency are completed at the end of each lesson. At IGNITE we call these Demonstration of Learning, or DOLs. This is a quick check done by the teacher to see if the student "got it" or if more instruction is needed. These grades are determined by the masters/meets/approaches/not yet scale laid out in the Learner Proficiency Trackers. These grades are entered in the Classwork/Homework section in Powerschool but will be double weighted (counts twice) so it is important for students to seek help/more practice if they are not able to meet the proficiency expectation.

Summative checks are the "tests" in our language class. These tests will ALWAYS be connected to specific TEKS are are the students chance to demonstrate their ability TO DO a given proficiency benchmark. Scores on the tests will also be scored with the scale laid out in the Learner Proficiency Tracker using a rubric to holistically evaluate the students performance. If a student demonstrates a higher level of proficiency on a summative task than they scored on the practice or formative work, the previous grades will be adjusted to demonstrate the students true proficiency.