New Year, New Possibilities
Ahh, the first month of a brand new year! Everything feels new and promising, a blank slate, or, in the words of the illustrious hip-hop group Outkast, “So fresh and so clean, clean.” It’s an opportunity to tackle those things that we didn’t quite get around to in 2024. Or maybe start something brand new that we didn’t even consider last year. For those of you educators out there who look at this new year and the second half of the current school year with such aspirations, I applaud you. As a K-12 educator, I was literally never this person. In my heart, I absolutely always wanted to improve my pedagogy, but in my daily practice, it didn’t happen.
Embracing Standards-Based Grading: A Reluctant Start
I already considered myself a decent equitable grading practitioner and was proud of all that I was doing: collecting late work without a grade penalty; allowing for structured retakes; and using 50% as my grading floor. I was feeling pretty good about myself. I was doing enough, especially after I had become an expert at running on little rest and lots of coffee and Main Office candy, navigating new systems that seemed to constantly be introduced by my school district, and handling parents and caregivers who wanted my time. And then one year, the summer before school started, my grade team made the shift to using standards-based gradebooks, which meant grading students by whether they met course standards and not just by how well they did on a collection of assignments. I openly dreaded this change, but forged ahead with a loving teaching team to help me; I am still grateful for their patience and for the impact their wisdom had.
The Pivotal Process and the Rewarding Results
First, we aligned our assessments and practice assignments with our standards. Second, we added those standards, unit by unit, to our gradebooks. Finally, we met regularly throughout the school year to calibrate how we would assess student work based on those standards and how we would show student progress in our standards-based gradebooks. In this way, we were all measuring the same thing at the same time in the same way and reporting grades in the same manner.
The result was magical. Students were clear about their strengths and weaknesses and could either maintain or improve their skill sets. Parents and caregivers could look in the gradebook and see where their children excelled and where they needed support. The school’s other support teams could use the gradebook to target help for my students. Our collective gradebooks were “lifting the opaque veil” of grading and increasing transparency for everyone.
Three Key Benefits of Standards-Based Grading
My only regret about doing this was that I wish I had done it sooner. Here are three benefits I wish I had known about standards-based grading:
Standards-based grading makes rubrics easier to create and use. It took me a long time to use rubrics mostly because I had no idea what exactly I was supposed to be putting in them or what I was supposed to be measuring. Once I began examining the standards for my course, I had a roadmap of how to give students practice and assessment on specific standards. This helped me build my rubrics not only more logically but also more efficiently; ergo, I got a lot of time added back to my life. Plus, students understood why their assignments were graded the way they were graded, which led to less tension in my classroom.
Standards-based grading can help students prepare for standardized tests. Let me be clear: Standardized tests are not the end-all and be-all in education. They tend to be rife with all kinds of bias and don’t fully demonstrate student creativity or learning capacity. At the same time, they exist and aren’t going anywhere; our students are the ones who will bear the rewards–or consequences–of their test scores. As most tests are aligned with state or local standards, incorporating those standards not only into our teaching but also into our grading can lead to a greater correlation between grades and test scores; this is particularly true for our Black students, Latino students, and students who qualify for free or reduced lunch. Using standards as part of grading helps to increase transparency and level the playing field.
Standards-based grading supports our curricular choices. When people disagree with something about our teaching choices, our first reactions might be defensiveness, fear, or even cynicism. With standards-based grading as a practice that then informs our practice work and our assessments, who can dispute that? Grading based on fixed learning targets helps to manage expectations for multiple constituents as well as helps to hold us accountable for the ways we are assessing student work.
Wonderings for Implementing Standards-Based Grading
Maybe you are considering wading into the waters of standards-based grading. If you are, here are a few questions for consideration before diving in:
How would you describe your gradebook structure? What would need to be changed to make it reflect grading standards?
Do you grade by learning targets, standards, skills, etc.?
Do you have learning targets attached to your graded assessments?
Do you grade the same skills multiple times, which allows you to continuously assess skill progress?
If you are a school leader, a place where you can come and learn how other districts are moving to align standards is at The Second Annual Equitable Grading Study Tour! This two-day experience in the Bay Area, California provides an opportunity for school and district leaders to talk to and with each other about the complex change process and sustainability of equitable grading. You’ll also get tailored support from Crescendo Education Group to address the specific challenges and resources of your context. The event is capped at 60 participants in order to ensure high-quality learning experiences and authentic engagement, but there are just a few spots left! If you are intrigued, please take a moment to fill out our contact form here.
Educators are amazing and are doing everything they can to do right by students. We would love to support all educators–including you–in such admirable endeavors!
