Why do we grade students?I've always wondered... why do we have grades? To see students' knowledge? To hold students' "accountable"? To get into college? To be valedictorian? I saw kids who teachers would describe as "they're smart but they don't care" with Cs and Ds and other kids who played the game so well they knew nothing but had A's but didn't always know the content and skills. I was think kid in high school A's and some B's in AP classes. However in college, going to liberal arts school I realize that my skills and experiences outweighed my grades. I still got decent grades but I did care less. So to write this blog post I did a little digging. According to Wikipedia, grading began in in 1785 at Yale and the quantitative scale was first implemented at The University of Cambridge. GPA is from a 1.0 to 4.0 scale and turns out doesn't show a correlation between grades and job performances (shocking). And grade inflation is so bad at universities grades are becoming useless. It seems like grading is a practice that was made such a long time ago, we just do it because it's what we've always done. Why "Traditional" Grading Is Just BADWhat a controversially statement! But it's true. Here are some reasons I believe traditional grading systems aren't a good idea:
Standards Based Grading 101Standards Based Grading is a lifestyle. It is not a fad. It is a pedagogy shift. Before I begin, if your school is district is doing an entire shift in all classes... please stop them. SBG must be teacher led and teacher invested. If a district does this, it is a recipe for disaster. Many districts have backed out of whole school SBG initiatives because of parent and student backlash. It was done wrong. Here is an example of a traditional gradebook. It may look similar to yours! You'll see that tests, homework and classwork are weighted differently. Classwork and homework are completion only. Let's explore some of the situations here. Leah: She does all her work! Look at that! Since it's completion only, so she does well. But on her tests Leah is not doing well. So what is going on in class? Is she copying? Just writing down random things? Jose: Does his homework and does well at tests! What an amazing student! For this student, SBG will help him solidify and understand his learning. Brent: Brent doesn't do much of his homework, but does awesome on assessments! However, his grade is low because he's not playing the game of school Alicia: She generally does some of her work and performs with a D average on tests. For a teacher, do we really know how she's doing? She doesn't even turn in work either "Does this count as points?"Let's see this same gradebook in SBG and analyze how the students are doing. In this scoring 1 is emerging discovery with assistance, 2 is attempt with some understanding and assistance, 3 is overall understanding with errors or misunderstandings and 4 is consistent understanding and mastery. Take a minute to really examine this. There is no homework score, just content mastery (this could also be skills!). I only used for one standard, C1. First is the initial assessment, done by the student. The most important part (and often forgotten) of SBG is student self assessment. They can grade better than you can. They know themselves and their strengths better. Next step, each attempt. These can be student self assessment, a discussion with a student and score, an in class mini quiz, exit ticket, etc. You may be like "OMG MORE GRADING". Never work harder than your students. Get them to do it! Do it while you walk around! Okay so the question is after all these attempts and assessment (which can be a project, test, etc.) what do they get? Does Leah get a 2 or 1.4 (average all scores)? She gets a 2. Why are we penalizing her for trying? That does not promote growth mindset. Jose would get a 4, Brent a 4 and Alicia a 2 or 2.5 Here's what it looks like in real life! You can see for students they mainly self assess throughout the unit and then I assess at the end for the summative. That is their "final" standard grade. However, students are always welcome to re-assess. This is the highlight of standards based grading. Students take their time to re-learn, sit with me and re-assess. There are no "re-takes", it is all on the student's time and my time. Yes, it is time consuming but worth it! What sucks about SBG is that we don't live in the SBG world. Colleges actually do like SBG however there is no way (unless your district does it... I hear a lot of elementary schools do this) to put this into a "grade". Ideally, we would just list the standards and report that. Still, not the world we live in. I have to turn in a letter grade for my kids. So we need to equate standards to "percent" or "traditional" grades... ugh. I use the Marzano scale which is above. There are other types of scales and you are free to research them! Here's my real world gradebook. We use a system called "Mi-Star" which is similar to PowerSchool but for our county. I set all scores of 4/4 and then under "Scored As" I put in the standard score. This "tricks" my gradebook into using SBG, because a 2/4 does not mean a 50%, it is 70%. If you want more information on this, please reach out via email, contact form or social media. The Bad and The GoodObviously to every awesome practice there are pitfalls.
How to Implement?
What I Love about SBG and What I Need to Work OnI am an extremely reflective person. After anything happens in my school day, relationship, workout, etc. I always think about how I can get better and do better. Here's what I've loved about this year.
I have a lot I want to improve on for next year. I always want to do better, I always want to do what's best for kids. Here's my plans for next year.
Where to look nowI am a huge proponent of education books. Don't even buy them... get them from your library. If your library does a consortium with other libraries in area they probably have it somewhere!
So what do you think of SBG? What questions do you still have? Drop a comment, email or reach out at @outoftheboxstem on Instagram or Twitter.!
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