Four years ago, I wrote a series of posts about my then quite tentative experiment with standards-based grading in a History class (If you’re curious, you can find them here, here, here, here, and here.) I thought I had said everything I wanted to say about the topic. Recently, I was trying to explain my grading approach to a colleague and thought, “Oh, I wrote this all out once. I’ll just share the link.” I was surprised, reading them again, to see how uncertain I was about the whole endeavor then and how many things that I now know were left unsaid. Then, I was wondering whether a standards-based approach was possible in a Humanities class. Now, I can’t imagine doing it any other way. (Seriously. When my school dropped the curriculum reform that originally got me into this, I kept doing it because, well, I just couldn’t go back.) Then, I saw standards primarily as one way to structure a gradebook. Now, I see them as a shift in my thinking that shapes my whole class. So….here I go again with another series (I hope) about a standards-based approach to teaching as I see it now.
What do I mean by standards-based?
Obligatory disclaimer first: I really hate the name standards-based, because, after all, we all have standards. That’s not what’s different about a standards-based approach. But that’s the name everybody knows this approach by. So there.
There are plenty of variations in implementation, but, by my definition, grades are standards-based if:
- They are organized by the goal they measure, rather than by task (Suzy can write a debatable thesis but struggles to support it with evidence vs. Suzy has done well on quizzes but struggles on tests)
- They reflect the point a student has reached at a given moment, rather than a cumulative average (Horatio has recently shown mastery of the skill of source evaluation vs. Horatio struggled at the start of the semester, which lowered his overall grade)
- They separate feedback on effort, attitude, good citizenship, etc. from feedback on skills or knowledge demonstrated (Andromeda shows mastery in her written work. In terms of owning her learning process, she should next focus on turning in drafts on time vs. Andromeda’s last essay, while quite polished, scored a C because it was handed in five days late OR Andromeda struggles to identify the thesis statement in a piece of writing, but her high level of engagement and diligence–she did 60 extra credit homeworks–earned her an A for this quarter)
Why?
I have lots of ideas about what works best in a history class, but generally, I can roll with the punches. I’ve taught in 45-minute classes and 150-minute blocks. I’ve taught project-based approaches and courses with weekly knowledge quizzes. When it comes to standards-based grading, though, I would be hard pressed to go all the way back to a cumulative numerical average. The reason, I think, is that it touches on something really fundamental to the way a class works: how I communicate the goals to students. The bottom line for me is that this approach clears away a lot of the muddiness baked into a traditional, percentage-based grading system and makes the information that both the students and I get clearer, simpler, and more objective.
What I like about a standards-based approach:
- I have better conversations with kids. It hasn’t entirely eliminated the dreaded post-assessment grade haggling, but it has shifted the starting place from “I’m just wondering why I didn’t get an A,” to “I’m just wondering why this thesis is Emerging,” and that is a much better place from which to move forward.
- A subset of this–it lets me acknowledge effort (or prod a kid who’s coasting) without falling into the even more dreaded, “I tried so hard; I should get an A” conversation. I still give feedback on what I call “Ownership of Learning,” (see this post for my rationale on this), but it is now completely separate from the feedback on what a student understands or can do. Having these two channels lets me separate the judgment element of grading–is she doing what she needs to do to move ahead?–from the accomplishment element–has she met the goal yet? I can completely approve of a student who is still far from the goalpost, and this lets me say both things.
- It lets me talk much more sincerely to my students about a growth mindset. When I can point out that the next task that shows a given skill or piece of knowledge will overwrite the last one and that the only thing that affects their grade is where they come out in the end, I feel like I’m putting my money where my mouth is.
- I have a better handle on what’s going on in my classes. Many of the things I can see in my standards-based gradebook were things I already knew in a general, anecdotal way–“Suzy’s writing is really concrete,” “Johnny isn’t doing the reading”–but I was relying on gut feelings and my memory to provide those narratives. It was easier than I realized to be skewed by one time that I noticed Johnny not doing the reading, and there were certainly times when a student came to ask about a low quarter grade and I had no idea why it was that low until I went back through my gradebook and crunched numbers. Now, I can see at a glance what specific things Suzy has shown evidence of being able to do. I can see the same thing on a whole class basis. I can see when my fuzzy, generalized perceptions are inaccurate or why they’re true when they are. I can see progress, and I can see it in a far more granular way than in the days when I had to dig back into a photocopied quiz to figure out why it was so bad
- It feels fairer. Basing grades heavily on engagement, effort, or enthusiasm is tempting for teachers, because it lets us give a good grade to those students we find ourselves wishing would succeed, those kids who work hard, do everything right, and yearn for an A that is, for now, just out of reach. In some ways, that also seems fairer, because effort and attitude are–or seem to be–things a student can control, while ability is less so, at least in a given moment. But what about the flip side? What about the student we just find hard to like, or the student who finds it hard to conform to classroom norms, maybe because of a cultural difference or a learning difference? In giving that 30% engagement grade, we introduce a big, squishy realm of subjectivity. It adds justification to the student perception of grades as something I “give” them, rather than something they “earn”. It also makes the process far more vulnerable to my own unidentified biases. Depending on my own preferences or frame of reference, the quiet student, the fidgety student, the blond girl in a short skirt, the hard worker who constantly questions their grades, or the black boy with a chip on his shoulder might not benefit from the engagement credit that their peers do for reasons that they cannot–and maybe should not–change. If their behavior really is getting in the way of their learning, that will be obvious in their progress on the learning goals. If not, maybe that feedback doesn’t belong in the grade.
- Related to that, making grades more specific, objective, and concrete lets them feel less like a personal judgment and opens the door for me to be more of a coach (“here’s how you can make your thesis debatable next time”) and less of a judge.
- And related to that, a standards-based approach makes grading much, much easier for me. It didn’t when I started: reporting multiple grades for a single assessment (e.g. writing, argument, historical understanding) felt cumbersome compared to reading through and giving a single, gut reaction grade. But that single grade involved a lot of soul-searching and second guessing. It required writing fairly long comments to justify why the grade was it was. And I was still aware that the outcome was subjective: I graded small sections across everyone’s work, tried not to grade when I was tired, hungry, grumpy, etc., and went back at the end to norm and regrade in an only somewhat successful attempt to keep unfairness from slipping in. It took me time to fine-tune good rubrics, but now that I have described what I’m looking for well, there is fairly little need for judgment calls. I can give more detail faster, because I’ve taken out the broad judgments and replaced them with smaller, more concrete ones. Whether a thesis is sufficiently supported by evidence is still a judgment call, but it’s a smaller, easier, more concrete one.
Combined with a backwards design approach, standards-based grading just makes my classes work the way I want them to. Instead of something I fought against, something that periodically got in the way of my relationships with students and that I tried to ignore as much as possible, grades now feel like the glue that holds goals, incentives, and outcomes together in a logical, organic way.
wordsarestrong 