6 Articles to Get You Thinking About Grade Reform

-

I've spent the past few years reading everything I could about grading practices. I have been so lucky to be supported by my admin team as I have tried new things in my classroom and now that I have a few years under my belt I have even had the chance to start helping others find the best practices for them. 

When I help teachers who are considering new practices, I always start with a list of favorite books but the reality is most of us don't have the time or energy to dive into a book unless we know it is really going to help us. With grading practices that means knowing enough about grade reform practices to know if it is the right time for you to make a change and little of what those changes might look like.  Because of this, I decided to put together a list of some of my favorite articles that might help you determine if it's time to dig deeper and learn more.

Articles on why teachers have changed their practices and how to determine if you are ready to change yours


1. Another article to get you thinking about why some teachers are changing traditional grading practices is this one from Tony Wigner.



2. Carol Ann Tomilinson wrote one of my favorite books on grading but most of us don't have time to read every book out there so this article is a great resource from her for those aren't sure just yet if they are ready to jump in. 



Articles on Grading Practices 

3. Rick Wormeli is one of the most influential voices out there on grade reform and I love his thoughts on redos and retakes. You can read his main article here.

4. He also has a great article on teaching through assessment, if we spend so much time grading student work shouldn't it be a part of the learning process not just an end result?

Articles on Standards-Based Grading 

5. This article from Patricia Scriffny goes over 7 reasons to implement standards-based grading.



6. And finally, here is my own post on my biggest challenges in changing my own grading practices.

You can read all my posts about my grade reform journey here. I'll warn you, it gets messy but this messy work has made teaching more meaningful for me and while I still have a lot to learn I doubt there is anything that could make me ever go back to how I used to do things.

Do you have any favorite articles on grading practices? Share them in the comments!

Comments

Post a Comment

Thank you so much for commenting! You can also reach out to me on twitter: @mrsbyarshistory

Popular posts from this blog

Hacking the System: Using a 4 Point Scale with a Traditional Online Gradebook

-
Image
When I first started down the road of "how do I make sure my grading system supports learning and is not just a tool for communication" I found my biggest challenge was not creating lessons or building proficiency scales, it wasn't student buy-in or parent buy-in, it wasn't admin support or all the things you would think would stand in the way of such a foundational shift in practices. No, it was something entirely out of my control, the biggest challenge was trying to figure out how to get the digital grade book I had to use per my contract to play nice with a 0-4 scale.  Why a 0-4 Scale? The 100 point scale is a dream killer and it is full of opportunities for our own bias to trickle into the grading process. Maybe Johnny and Sally did the same level of mastery but Johnny had an attitude when completing it, how likely is it that Sally will get an 85% and Johnny will get an 80% while those few points might seem like nothing, that can add up. The bias...
Read more

Why I Am Leaving Canvas LMS for Google Classroom

-
Image
I consider myself a team player. A few years ago when our district announced that the Learning Management System they were supporting was going to be Canvas LMS I stopped using Schoology and started learning as much as I could about Canvas LMS. Right away I could see the potential, there was a ton of back end data that Canvas was collecting, it was designed with mastery and personalized learning in mind, and you could complete customizations of your pages with just a tiny bit of knowledge of basic HTML. So I committed to using Canvas as my class website and used it to host all the blended assignments I was creating. I spent hours reading the incredible Canvas LMS community learning all the things it could do that could potentially make my teaching more engaging, more personalized, and more about meeting the needs of my students.  You see, Canvas does have some remarkable features - you can create quizzes that pull from a question bank so no two students have the same qu...
Read more

Formative Assessment Isn't What You Think

-
Image
When planning for a Standards-Based classroom you follow a clear series of steps : 1. Pick your priority standards and rewrite them in student-friendly learning objectives. 2. Unpack those standards to really understand what they are asking students to know and do. 3. Build rubrics or proficiency scales to help make the learning objective accessible for students and to create a clear understanding of how mastery will be measured. 4. Build your assessments using those rubrics. 5. Create your learning path from introducing the learning objective to assessing the standard that includes a lot of feedback and formative assessment. 6. Make a plan for intervention and support. One of the most daunting elements of a Standards-Based classroom is the idea that feedback needs to happen consistently for students to be able to improve on the learning objective. We know a grade on its own is not enough to help students learn from their mistakes or to understand where they need to impro...
Read more