#SBGBOOKCLUB 2019: Rethinking Grading Part 2

Rethinking Grading: Meaningful Assessment for Standards-Based Grading

Alternative Ways to Give Feedback

I can use starter questions at the beginning of class. In my gamified class students can earn XP for answering the starter questions. Review games (Kahoot, Quizizz, Gimkit) are another excellent way for students to practice multiple-choice knowledge. Go Formative also offers many different types of questions that a teacher can ask and students answer the questions online. Sprinkling in challenges and competition can be very engaging for many students, and they are more exciting than quizzes. Classcraft also offers a formative assessment in the form of a "boss battle," where correct answers equal an attack on the boss.

Don't Grade Everything

We should not penalize practice. If a student tries an assignment and does most of it incorrectly, we should offer feedback and a chance to try again instead of assigning a low grade and moving on. If every task is assigned a point value, then tasks without points are considered worthless. The goal also just becomes a hunt for as many points as possible, not to learn the concepts and skills.

My Future Plans

• Introduce students to the learning target and have them self-assess. This serves as a pretest before teaching.
• Only summative scores should count in the final grade
• “Find it and fix it” - teacher tells students how many questions are incorrect, but not which ones they are; students have a chance to fix their answers
• Mastery checks
• Green - Basic skill problems
• Yellow - Require multiple steps/ideas to solve
• Red - new types of questions; go beyond and apply knowledge to a new situation
• Analogy
• Feedback = rehearsal
• Formative = dress rehearsal
• Summative = performance

First Steps to Grade Reform

My first goal is to focus my grade book on the standards instead of on individual tasks. I have already stopped grading for behaviors, as gamification in my classes has taken on this role. Instead of deducting points for late work or cheating, students lose health points in our game. Hopefully, cheating will not be a problem once I completely stop grading classwork.

Changing the Schedule

We currently have collaboration time for teachers once a week, but I spend my collaboration time alone. There are 2.5 Social Studies teachers in our district. One is teaching a reading intervention during collaboration time, and the other leaves school for the day before collaboration time. As such a small school, we have not been able to find a financially feasible way to make time for collaboration for all teachers.

Takeaways

I think the most important step in switching to standards-based grading is making sure that all stakeholders understand the process, as well as why the teacher is implementing the system. It’s difficult to get parents to listen or read newsletters, so getting the word out might be difficult. There is also the potential for misunderstanding. As long as students understand the system, they can help their families understand as well. I also like the idea of making information about my grading policy available on my teacher website, which is linked through the district website. I can also link my policy on Google Classroom for student access. Administrators can also back up the standards-based grading philosophy. My administration supports the idea of standards-based grading, so I am fortunate in that regard.