Shifting Grades

12/3/2017

🤔Imagine a world where students never asked whether this is formative or summative. Think of teaching a class of students who are focused on the learning, and not the number they would receive at the end. Think of the student who, rather than panicking because the due date was Friday, was focused on producing the best work that he or she could. Think of the world, where a student always knew that the learning continues, and there’s a teacher who is going to support him/her, until he/she has mastered the standard.🤔

🌟🌍🌟That’s the world I want. 🌟🌏🌟

My perfect vision is entirely possible. I honestly don’t believe that huge shift would need to be made. I even think that both students and parents would understand and embrace it! Not taking away all grades, that is probably not an option - yet. There are district rules, school and hallway policies. And I do what I can to negotiate changing from the inside, but I also need to be aware that I need to work with what I have. Is that being a pessimist? No, I believe that that is being a realist, working with in the known parameters, working to make change and doing the best for my students with the situation I have.

I have a couple of different ways I’d like to do things, a couple of different options for change.

Putting a number on an individual standard rather than grading an assignment.
Collaborating with students to consider their body of work to determine a grade.

📝📚💯💯💯💯💯📚📝

Grading the STANDARD not the ASSIGNMENT

This, I believe would be the easiest to implement - doing what I honestly believe we should be doing anyway, grading by standard.

Grading by mastery of standard.

By breaking down every assignment to specific standards, this would allow me to truly see were each student is at. More importantly, it would allow each student to see where HE or SHE is at.

By taking a rubric, and giving separate grades according to the individual standards embedded within the assignment, I would actually give clear opportunities for where relearn and retake needs to happen, and make it far easier for student to be able to change a grade 3 months later once a concept finally takes root! After all, we don’t all learn at the same pace.

Let’s say for example, we are talking about the standard:

🤓ELAGSE6RL3: Describe how a particular story’s or drama’s plot unfolds in a series of episodes as well as how the characters respond or change as the plot moves towards a resolution.

So let’s say the beginning of the year, we have an assignment where the student has to write about how a character might respond to a certain situation, and how that might change from the beginning of the book/story, to what might’ve happened at the end of the book/story. The student’s goal would be to show how the way the character has changed would affect the decisions made. At the beginning of the year it’s a disaster. They maybe scraped a passing grade. Later on in the semester, we are reading a different book, and we have an assignment on how the character has changed. It could be a completely different assignment. But this time, the student knocks it out of the park. How easy it would be to go to that ONE standard, fix that one grade, and show that that student has not mastered the learning. I can’t do that when a bunch of standards are embedded into one grade, at least not with fidelity. But in this scenario, it would be easy. Sure, I would need to learn to take good records, but I think I’m capable of that.

Shouldn’t we be doing this anyway? It makes me think about Rick Wormeli’s article, Calling for a "Timeout" on Rubrics and Grading Scales. https://www.amle.org/BrowsebyTopic/WhatsNew/WNDet/TabId/270/ArtMID/888/ArticleID/539/Rubrics-and-Grading-Scales.aspx Rubrics aren’t always the answer - and when they are, they must be used far more carefully than we are...but that conversation aside, I could still use the same rubrics as others, I would just apply a grade to each section. I would simply need to talk about editing the criteria so that each fit a standard.

Then think about how much better conferences would be, think about how we could actually look at the numbers, and have them mean something. Instead of the student panicking because they had a 69, they could see the one area they needed to work on. Does this really need to be a dream? This seems very realistic to me.

Each semester we would have summative grades for every standard. Oh, WOW! Talk about a double check that we are TEACHING every standard! Yes, we built our curriculum carefully, starting with the standards, but this would be a stark reminder of just where our focus should be.

In Ditch That Homework (Keeler and Miller, 2018), Alice Keeler talks about how taking away the need to ‘talk about the past, go over homework, and more’, has freed up time to allow students more time to talk - ‘whoever talks the most learns the most’ - time saved = more time for me to conference. More time to talk about LEARNING, less time to have to answer questions about GRADES.

📝📚💯💯💯💯💯📚📝

Tell Me Your Grade - Let’s Collaborate

The second idea - One of my admin shared this idea, and my recent reading delved more into the concept. I’m not sure that I’m ready for this one though - it might be a battle that I fight once assessing my standards is in place and I have a clearer vision.

I could call this STEP TWO.

This would revolve around collecting a body of evidence, then discussing with the student what they believe their grade should be. Together we would look at the work and the standard, together we would agree upon a grade.

This concept involves better teaching of individual reflection, using feedback in multiple ways, and truly involving students in their learning. So, yes, a big picture of everything I want to achieve in our room 🙄🙃. BUT much harder to accomplish. Now, I’m not scared of ‘hard’, but I do have parameters to work within....

Joy Kirr's thoughts on grading processes:

Integrating the Ideas

The bottom line is that I believe that grading standards and not assignments is where I want to be. I think that with communication and explanation, parents would be on board with that. Talk about personalized learning! I could being in the official quarterly conference to discuss evidence for grades. It might not yet be a conversation about students determining their grade, but it would be an opportunity for a student to see their weak spots in black and white, and to come up with a plan to make change.

Problems? Solutions?

So, what’s stopping me? Well, my ideas for shifting won’t happen overnight and will take some work. We are required to have ‘like’ summatives across our CPT (collaborative planning team), and I would assume that would mean the same number of summative grades. I haven’t had the conversation with my team yet, but initial feelers have had mixed response.😉

???

If the team sticks to current practices and I grade assignments MY way....I could maybe get by that with averaging, but we all know that, pedagogically, averaging does not work - there is no true picture. However, it would be a start. Kids would know how they got their final grade and be aware of what needed relearning and retaking. 👍

???

Could I keep two grade-books (ugh), one for conferences, one for the world? Might be a practical solution, but we all know which one the parents and students will care about, so it would create a lot of effort with (I believe) minimal change. There is so much wrong with this picture.

This Year So Far

I have made SOME changes re:grading. It just needs to be more wholesale to really do great things for my kids. I’ve:

Shifted feedback and emphasis on learning.
Feedback before the Grade (need to improve this).
Increased reflection

This is all good, but the focus is still in the number - and the way I’m doing things now, students still find it hard to look beyond a number.

The kids hear me say, “It’s not about the grade, it’s about the Learning,” and, “It shouldn’t make a difference whether it’s a formative grade or summative,” .... but of course the way we work now they are more than encouraged to play the game. And we teachers buy into it too - “It’s so much work that it should be a summative.” I hear that a lot. In fact I had to make something a summative that I believe strongly was ALL practice - and I am still ashamed that I didn’t have the words to express what I was thinking.

Practice should be more work than proving mastery - grades should not be a reward for compliance. That’s what I wanted to say, that’s what I couldn’t explain to my team, the words never came clearly through the emotion and frustration. As a result, my kids had their practice graded. To be fair to myself, I did come back from that nicely. They had 10 questions to answer, so as we went back over our evidence-based answer strategy, I told them that they had to answer all 10, but to pick their best two for grading purposes. At least they had both practice and an opportunity to show mastery.

So, time to make a plan. I need to talk to my administration and gather their thoughts, learn from their ideas and experience, and develop a strategy to implement.

I can do this, and my kids will be better for it.

My New Mantra

**Practice should be more work than proving mastery - grades should not be a reward for compliance.

**If we have to put a number on work, it should be clear precisely what that number represents, and what needs to be learned or practiced, in order to make change.

Slide by Bill Ferriter ~ The Tempered Radical

blog.williamferriter.com @plugusin