Year 1: Do It for the Feedback:
There are many benefits to grading students against specific standards. One of the best is for the students - giving students accurate, detailed feedback has been shown to have a great impact on learning. Think about it, how do you improve at anything without someone telling you where you can improve?
Step 1: Lay out the Standards
If you're going to grade students against standards, you better have some standards against which to grade them! This may go without saying, but people often overlook the standards. In most schools and departments, standards have been written (at some point when it was mandated to do so) to fit the activities that teachers have been doing for years. This makes them relatively small in scope and narrow. Some schools use the NGSS standards, which are the opposite - very big picture and comprehensive. Whatever the standards are that you are using, you must be able to lay them out in a way that is measurable. This may require writing "sub-standards," or learning targets and objectives that fit under each standard, so you can assess students easily and clearly on a small piece of the overall standard.
Step 2: Create a Rating System
Some people like to have a really simple rating system - 3 different tiers: Not There Yet, Almost Get It, and Got It! Or the 3 levels could look like this: Unsatisfactory, Developing, Mastery. This 3 tier system may be good for the first year since we're focusing on feedback. However, eventually, when making the grade translation, this will require you to take 3 tiers and stretch the grades out to 5 levels (A, B, C, D, F). From a statistical standpoint, that doesn't make a lot of sense. I don't know how you would justify giving a student a B as opposed to an A when the original assignments were rated on three levels where the third level stretches across the entire A to B range.
Rick Wormeli recommends against using a 4 or 5 level scale that can easily be translated in students minds to the traditional A, B, C, D, F. He's trying to get away from those traditional categories, but remember, at least in the first year, you're focusing on the feedback aspect of it, so that won't really be an issue yet. I've decided to use a 6 tiered scale (0-5). Each level has some criteria to help you determine between two different levels, and the highest level is not always achievable in every circumstance since it involves applying knowledge to a situation. My scale was taken from Megan Ewald, a fantastic, innovative teacher at York High School. She, in turn, got many of the ideas from Terie Engelbrecht, who has her own blog worth checking out.
Step 3: Connect the Standards to Assignments
Whenever you assign something that students can get feedback on - homework worksheets, labs, quizzes, even tests, the standards (or learning targets) should be there for the student to see and for you to score. I add the standards to the assignment itself. Here's an example of a quiz. The students are rated against different objectives and given four different grades. Remember, the focus this year is feedback, so grade it how you want that is accurate, consistent, and manageable. Rating the students in different objectives gives them clear, detailed feedback. Alternatively, you could have the students themselves keep track of their ratings, or you could give them their ratings on a separate sheet of paper and attach it to the assignment.
Step 4: Change Your Language
This will have to be something you consistently work on. Grading based on standards is grading for learning. Many teachers have a view that the learning occurs when they are teaching. However, learning also occurs (or it can) when you give grades and feedback. You're measuring students against standards and constantly informing them of how they are doing and where they need to improve. You're no longer focused on students acquiring "points." Students can't gather "points" towards meeting a standard. They have to meet the standard to meet the standard. That is, they have to demonstrate skills, knowledge, or understanding. They can't do an extra project. There's no extra work a student can do to increase their grade. They can't clean the desks to demonstrate knowledge of a concept. What they can do is increase their learning to increase their grade. You're grading their learning and you're grading for learning.
I recommend avoiding the word "points" as much as possible. "Points" indicate that there are tasks the student does to acquire "points" and when they have enough, they get a certain grade. But the grade should not just be how many points they built up, it should be how much they actually learned. For this reason, I'm going to use "points" as little as possible. You may argue it's a difference in semantics, but think of it this way: thinking of a grade, as a student does, as a collection of points, how would you respond to the following question:
"How can I improve my grade?"
Suppose you didn't use the term "points," but always referred to the students' ratings. Students would have to ask the question differently. If they did, how would you respond to this question:
"How can I improve my rating?"
That one word changes the meaning of the question and the response it elicits. Changing a rating involves changing your skill or knowledge. Changing a points-based grade involves getting more points by doing something extra that may only be tangentially related to the skills or knowledge.
Step 5: Rate Everything
Once you've added your standards to your assignments in a way that makes sense for you, and you've begun changing your language to push students to invest in their learning as opposed to simply their grade, you're ready to start rating assignments. I simply circle the number to give the student a rating for each standard. You could also have students rate themselves. Rating student learning instead of grading the assignment is actually faster and easier after you've done a few dozen examples and you know what you're looking for and what each number on the scale represents. The goal here is to get the standards on everything, practice using them, and provide detailed, objective feedback to students so they know what to focus on. You'll tackle the gradebook during Year 2 after you have a good handle on using ratings, standards, and the basics of SBG.
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| Example of one student's ratings |
Year 2: Do It for the Reporting
In Year 1, the grades and ratings were for the immediate benefit of the student. You were providing detailed objective feedback that the student could act on. After Year 1, you'll have a better idea of what type of rating system you want to use, how to measure and record grades, and how to communicate the system to your students and their parents. All the standards are already in your worksheets, labs, quizzes, and maybe even tests. Where Year 1 was giving feedback to students more in the moment, Year 2 broadens it to track that feedback over the course of the year and into the next.
Long Term Feedback
The goal in Year 2 is to communicate ratings and grades not just to the student on the individual assignment, but to parents, administrators, and other teachers on the whole year. This requires a different kind of tracking system than a traditional gradebook. Many grading software companies have come out with ways of tracking standards instead of assignments, allowing parents and students to see how they are doing against a particular standard over time. Here's a video from ActiveGrade, an online grading platform that I've heard of but never used. It helps visualize what this would look like.
To Be Continued...
I'm just at the beginning of Year 1 at this point. What I've described here is my vision for how I think things will work out. My school may be switching to a different online grading platform in the future, so I'm going to hold off on describing how exactly I plan to track student progress against standards. Quite frankly, I don't know exactly how I will do it. I expect to have more clarity and direction by the end of the first year.
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