Grading - It's been a highly debated topic and I'm curious to dig deeper into the issues. The JH made it a major focus of last year but because I was mostly stationed at the HS for inservice days, I missed most of the dialog. At the MS, it is something some folks have chosen to explore, via book studies, however I chose to read the book "Love and Logic" (to which I'll post a blog about later).
Therefore, in helping to prepare the staff development day on April 22nd, I went looking for intriguing articles on homework and grading - two very different but inextricably linked topics.
When I first started teaching, back in the day, I allotted participation points. Why? I suppose I thought I needed to hold kids accountable for bringing their supplies, being on time, and remaining on task. To me, the tracking of participation points became burdensome. It was a daily entry and required many comments in the online grading book. And, really......are those things something students should even be graded on.....this was my evolution of thinking at the beginning on my teaching years.
In reality, what items fell under participation were just a general expectation I had for our class and we discussed at the beginning on the term and kids understood. Did they come prepared all the time? No. Did they problem solve and ask a neighbor for a pencil - sure. Did the students who were engaged remain on task - yes. Did the students who had no interest in my class change their behavior because I gave them participation points - no. Really, giving participation points was ineffective and not something I had wished to continue.
Fast forward a few years after being in the classroom. Now, I'm looking behind at my experiences and feeling pretty good about that decision. Research points to the fact that grades should not include participation! Woot Woot.
Now, I'm curious what other aspects of my grading do not reflect research best practices and if I changed them could it be sustainable based on the larger system (meaning, would I be able to do what I wanted to do or would it need to be a change of school culture entirely?).
On a side note, when I reviewed application for admissions in a university, I did not find GPA's accurate or informative. Every school and within that, every teacher, has a different idea of rigor and relevance. How could I, as a reviewer, assess if an A really meant that particular student had mastered the content of that course? Realistically, I couldn't.
The applications I most enjoyed reading where holistic reviews of a students ability, not at all attached to a grade. Yes, this posed challenges in the review process because it wasn't a cookie-cutter situation. But, what I found was that I felt I could truly get a feel for what kind of student he/she was and how well his/her skills would translate at a university level. The critiques/grade report from each teacher was long and very detailed. It gave praises in areas of student's strengths and pointed out areas of struggle. This way, while something might be completely bright they could struggle working in groups and develop meaningful relationships. If I were an ideal world, I would remove GPAs and A, B, C, D, and F's and provide written progress reports. According to the "Reforming Grading Practices in Secondary Schools" only 8 percent of school report using a nontraditional system of grading and 1 percent of schools do not assign grades. Clearly, it’s not a popular thing to do.
According to the article, grades can be grouped into 3 categories: product, process and progress and most teacher’s grades fall into all of those three categories. Often teachers use various methods to assess learning – diagnostic, formative, and summative. The articles suggests to put only summative assessments in the grade book. With formative assessment, the key is that there should be no grade, just comments as feedback is essential to help student’s learning evolve. Feedback should be easily understood, specific, provides choice to the students, can be compared to sample or models, is about the performance not the student, and is part of an ongoing conversation about learning (p.4).
Standards-based grading: indicates levels of performance on essential benchmarks. It’s moving from a grading system of “tests, projects, and assignments” to a grading system of “conceptual understanding, application, analysis and evaluation, and formal writing”. It’s about finding a way to indicate that a student can exceed requirements in one area but fail to meet requirements in another area. How realistically can this happen in a system which isn’t set up to support this?
How do I as a FACS teacher move from a “projects, assignments and tests” gradebook to one connected to national standards? (I know it’s more than just typing up the categories). How do I manipulate or use the online gradebook to somehow “grade” on this standards based approach accurately? How does this impact the assignments I have designed (homework: a later blog)?
Stay tuned… as I explore possible answers to these questions in an upcoming blog!
Great thoughts Shawna. I think that this is a better time than ever to grade on standards. If we do it consistently along the 7-12 spectrum, it will be easier to communicate. The road block that I run into is time. As well as the entering it into TIES, and getting a clear consistent definition of mastery.
ReplyDeleteThis is something that we could work on in vertical team, as well as over the summer. Hopefully with standards based grading we can move away from a point system to mastery of standards that implement critical thinking and demonstrate mastery of 21st century skills.
I'm thinking we could try to pilot this in the new Teen Survival class. That has a variety of national standards and is a new course so we don't run into too much, "We do it this way stuff."
This is an interesting, best practice and TIME consuming project. I think we could do it though. :)
I agree with everything that both of you have stated. My big goal and challenge this summer is to figure out how I want to set up my STANDARDS-BASED grade book for the 2011-2012 school year. I know it is going to be a challenge due to the immense number of standards that both the 9th and 10th grade science teachers have. Not only are we going to be responsible for our science standards, but technology and engineering standards are being added for this next school year as well as literacy standards. I think that all of the standards are important and necessary, but it will definitely be difficult to show mastery with our TIES grading system.
ReplyDeleteAlong with grading purely on mastery of standards, teachers need to have a plan of interventions in place in case a student does not master a standard that is deemed vital before moving on to the next grade level. This takes a lot of planning, preparing and looking at formative assessments to figure out what interventions students may need.