As usual, I had to be gently reminded that I am doing a terrible job keeping you informed on what is happening in the classroom. It was one of my peeves as a parent, and now as your child’s teacher, I am committing the same offense. The fact that I am a huge talker and a prolific writer makes the current situation uncanny. All I can say is that I promise to reform.
Standards-Based Grading was a topic of many of the conferences last week. With only ten minutes to converse, I really couldn’t speak about it with the attention it deserves. Perhaps in this communication, I can do it justice.
When I started teaching thirty-two years ago, my first school was completely SBG. It was a progressive public school in a small middle-class town outside of Madison. SBG made perfect sense to me. We covered a unit (social studies, math, etc.) and assessed each standard of the unit. If we evaluated the standard more than once, the most current assessment data was considered the current status. Therefore, if a child ultimately showed mastery of a standard, we considered that standard mastered.
A year later, and a move to Illinois, found me in a totally different situation. Now I was expected to take 30 grades, add them together, divide by 30 and give each of my 120 students a grade. As a mathematician and as an educator this did not make sense to me. This number meant nothing. It told the parents nothing. If a student received a 0% on an assignment and then a 100% on the next, her average was 50%. What did that mean? If I covered nine different topics and she was amazing on some, and still struggled on others, how did a 86% inform anyone about anything we were doing in the classroom? It just didn’t make sense. At this particular school, it was expected that I had 30 grades per kid per quarter so that I could prove my quarterly grades. Almost ten thousand grades were marked in my grade book. Only the kids who got 100s on everything were accurately informed of their progress. It was a mean game that we were playing, and I didn’t like it. Education is about learning. Learning means to go from not knowing to understanding. While learning is really fun, I don’t believe that it was ever meant to be a game where we vie for points.
Just recently I participated in one of my professional reviews. Several times per year, I am observed, and feedback is given. While I may excel in some areas and continue to strive for improvement in others, our central purpose is for me to continue to grow and learn. We aren’t playing a game. My performance is designated by a position on several different bands of expectations. Thank goodness the scores for each of the areas weren’t added together and then divided to give me a percentage rating. (Imagine what the parent communication score would have done to the overall average!) That score would not have made sense, and it would not help me become a better teacher.
SBG has made me a much better teacher. When I am relieved of the burden of every grade counting, when I am given the freedom to assess as often as necessary to allow my student to achieve success, then I know that I can really do the job expected of me. It doesn’t matter how long it takes, right? (I remember someone telling me that I couldn’t keep assessing. Why not?) You want me to make sure that your child is learning the ideas necessary to learn future ideas. You also want me to continue to instill in your child that we are never finished learning. I believe that we develop the hunger to learn by being successful. I can’t motivate and engage in a game that involves vying for points.
I believe in SBG in the same way that I believe in world peace. I am still actively working on learning how to play my role in providing both. Is there learning yet to be done? Of course. If I said I knew everything, I would be lying. Will I ever know everything? Probably not, but I will try to learn as much as I can. I am no longer 24 years old, and now when things don’t make sense, I object, loudly. I honestly believe that education is not as easy to understand as one might wish it to be. For sure, the path is not linear. I can feel myself wanting to write about concept nodes and brain development. Perhaps that is a topic left for another message.
Jennifer Melberg 