What is your Grading Recipe?
Part 1
I remember the first time I realized that our grading system was a problem. It was a faculty meeting and we got into a discussion about grades, and I innocently asked one teacher what factors go into how she reports grades. She said, “well, about 50% are tests, and about 20% is homework, and the rest is effort, behavior, and being ready for class”. A colleague of hers responded with some element of surprise that she actually places a lot more weight on tests and barely counts homework and effort. Then, a third teacher piped in that sometimes he sometimes will somewhat inflate a grade to avoid having to defend the grade to a difficult parent.
I felt like a deer in the headlights, not knowing what to make of this conversation but alarms started going off in my head. I decided to conduct an in-house survey of all our teachers to find out exactly what ingredients went into the grades they “give” to students, and how each of those are weighted. What I found out was just how little uniformity there was in grading practices within one little school! Teachers each had their own individual rationale of why their grading practices were fair. One honest teacher even admitted elevating grades for students whom” she really liked and were really great kids”.
This began to explain several phenomena. Each year, around the first progress report, several parents would meet with me, wondering what is wrong with “that 4th grade teacher who obviously cannot teach math”. It seemed that last year, her little darling got straight A’s in math, and this year his math grades were hovering around a B-. Similarly, we would notice a number of students whose grades in certain subjects would strangely go way up from one year to the next, while other students and grades would plunge. What happened?
What happened was that there were two or more totally different recipes that went into the grade which allegedly is supposed to communicate how well the student is learning the material he is supposed to be learning. The 4th grade teacher decides that effort, and smiling, and attendance, and being a really “good kid”, is what really counts. (It cannot hurt either, if the student’s mom is your mother in-laws first cousin!). Actual measures of learning and academic growth are in small measure in this teacher’s formula.
Fast-forward to 5th grade, and this teacher cares little about your smiles or attendance. What really counts in 5th grade is doing your homework and your test grades which account for 95% of the grade- a totally different recipe! This pattern of up and down grades can go on year to year because each teacher’s recipe for grading has different ingredients, with different measurements for each. This phenomenon can also explain why some students always tend to perform better in Teacher X’s 3rd grade class, while students annually struggle in Teacher Y’s 3rd grade class. It turns out it may have nothing to do with teacher effectiveness but a totally different grading protocol. So, it turns out that very little of our academic reporting was actually reporting on academics! We also could not rely on report card grades to help track student growth.
Another embarrassing epiphany which this led to was what exactly should grades mean? What are they communicating? Say a student gets a B- in English. Does that mean the student is a B- in ALL English areas, including reading comprehension, fluency, grammar, writing, literature analysis, spelling, and vocabulary? What if the student is an A+ writer but struggles in his reading comprehension earning a C-? Does a B- in English communicate anything meaningful to the student, her parents, or next year’s teacher? The same can be asked regarding any grade in any subject area.
It became an immediate, front-burner, to-do item, to fix this unintended farce and create a new philosophy and mindset which would result in true and transparent academic reporting which is aligned from grade to grade, at least within the same school. I began by holding a series of meetings with teachers, individually, small group, and full faculty, to share the results of my research and how this kind or alleged reporting does nobody any good, and if we are an institution dedicated to a student’s true academic growth then we need a school-wide system for academic transparency.
There were three major steps adopted over several years which totally transformed the academic tone of the school and made grades a clearer, more objective representation of a student’s accurate strengths and challenges.
1. We separated out every one of the non-academic areas from the academic grade. Removed from the grading recipe were attendance, effort, homework, character and behavior, and readiness. These were removed from the academic equation because these areas, as important as they are, do not inform us about how what kind of math skills the student has, how well she writes, or how his basketball skills are progressing. We pulled these out, but to demonstrate how critical these life skills are and how they contribute to academic success, we recorded a student’s performance in each of these areas on a separate Work Habits report card, which was the first page of our report card, to emphasize its centrality to meeting students expectations. This move “purified” the academic reporting to just the academics.
2. The true hard work was in creating a schoolwide, grade -to grade, Learner Objective curriculum. This meant that for each subject area, English, Physical Education, Math, Science etc., we created a hierarchy of observable and measurable objectives, written in student terms- “ the student will be able to_________”. What goes in the blank is a verb that determines what a student should be expected to do for each of the grade level skills in that subject area. Of course, this part of the project requires lots of teacher time, discussion, and clarification, but when finally completed we had a schoolwide transparent curriculum of what will be taught, what students are expected to learn, and what criteria will be used to communicate success in meeting, or not meeting, the expected objective. Teachers gradebooks were set up to record the current proficiency level for each objective, rather than the typical “Test 1” or “chapter 12”. The result is that there was clear alignment in teacher planning, instruction, assessment, and communication with students and parents. With this approach, grades were never “given” by a teacher, but were rather a reflection of a student’s accurate growth for a specific learning area. Points are not taken off for misbehavior, turning in an assignment late, or absence. These were reflected prominently and importantly on the Work Habits page which now can shed light on why a particular student earned the academic grade which he did.
3. After accomplishing the first two steps, we were now able to redesign our report card. We first separated out the specific but broadly worded learner objectives for each subject area, for each grade level. Instead of giving one overall averaged grade in Math, for example, the teacher would now enter several assessment results, say for “dividing 3-digit numbers by 2 numbers, reducing to LCD, converting decimal to fraction, etc.”. We did the same for each subject, for each grade level. We then set up a teacher committee to develop a system of reporting how each student is performing relative to the specific objective. We eventually decided on a 4-point scale, as follows: 4= student is exceeding grade level expectations, 3= student is meeting grade level expectation, 2= student is struggling to demonstrate proficiency, 1= student is not meeting grade level proficiency. An added challenge was to devise different criteria for things like GPA, valedictorian, and Honor Roll, but we eventually hashed these out, as well. An added benefit from this switch over to more transparent grading practices, is that it greatly enhanced the focus of teacher/ parent conferences by framing the discussion to a student’s actual performance level in meeting the various objectives. Teachers could then also discuss how attendance, behavior, participation, and homework, may be contributing to the student’s overall performance. This idea is incredibly vital and powerful in promoting the “growth mindset” of students who no longer view grades as a random number assigned by the teacher to their assumed progress, but rather an indication of their own progress. The teacher/student conversations are now focused on where students are meeting proficiency, where they are not, and what strategies can be employed to produce positive growth.
What is critical, retrospectively, is to roll out the new standards and grading practices slowly, with a few grade levels per year, and with adequate communication and opportunities to create clarity, buy-in, and to address any concerns. It is important to understand that the parent body requires a process similar to that which benefited the teachers.
Practices Which Support Good Grading
Part 2
1. Instruction planning should begin with the teacher crafting the specific learner objective which articulates what the student will be expected to DO ( Performative task) or KNOW (Declarative Task), what task will be given at the conclusion of the lesson to assess the learning, and what proficiency level is going to expected, or how well is the student going to be expected to perform the task at this time. The elements of your lesson now should all be designed congruently to meet the learning goal.
2. It is critical that the teacher communicate and articulate, verbally and in writing, at the outset, what the lesson objective is. This aids the student in focusing his efforts on meeting the lesson goals. It can look and something like, “By the end of the lesson, you will be able to locate the punctuation mistakes in a given paragraph, and correct at least 8 of them in two minutes”.
3. For some assessments, such as a research project or major essay, it is advisable to create a rubric that outlines the academic expectations of the final product that will demonstrate grade level proficiency. It is also a good idea to show exemplars or models of proficient work and of sub-par work, to develop transparency and clarity.
4. Reframe and rename homework to “practice work”. This work should ideally be differentiated to meet the various needs in the classroom. The quantity and complexity of the practice should suit the student, just as a prescription must address the age and weight of a patient. Practice work should not be “graded” but the student SHOULD be given feedback. The practice should also be reviewed in class the next day in some way to promote practice and retrieval of the acquired objective. It does not benefit the student to receive the feedback a week or two later, or to receive it without the opportunity to using it to enhance the intended lesson.
5. I wonder whether tests are truly assessing the long-term growth and acquired knowledge of the student, or merely a student’s short- term memory after cramming the information the night before. The student may be able to regurgitate the information in the short term only to forget it shortly after. This is why many “pop” quizzes to promote retrieval of the material is more effective than fewer, planned chapter tests. Giving ongoing assessments that require constant retrieval of previously learned material creates long term learning.
6. Tests should be crafted in a way which divides the several objectives which are to be assessed. In this way, the student is to receive feedback on each of the assessed objectives, and not one averaged grade of all the items. The latter becomes a stew of various ingredients which do not provide adequate feedback to the student, nor allows the teacher to accurately track a student’s progress, or lack thereof, of a particular objective.
7. Similarly, “report card grades” should not be an average of all the assessments of the objective but instead represent the CURRENT proficiency level of the student for that objective. It is totally inconsequential if the student was less than proficient three weeks ago but can now demonstrate mastery.
8. Within reason, allow and encourage students to have “retakes” or additional opportunities to demonstrate proficiency. This should be allowed following: A) the student receiving quality teacher feedback. B) the student reflect on the feedback and have an opportunity to summarize the intended takeaways and new strategies. C) the student indicates readiness to apply the takeway to a retest or assessment opportunity. This idea makes testing much more formative in nature. It is about the learning process, and not about reporting.
