A month into the school year might not be the perfect time to re-evaluate my beliefs and practices regarding assessment and grading. I should probably already have all of this well-established by now. I mean, parent-teacher conferences are this week, and I should be able to clearly articulate what students’ grades are and what they mean.

And yet, I can’t get this topic out of my head. I’m reading Fair Isn’t Always Equal (Wormeli 2018), and I’m trying to figure out how to truly assess for mastery within my current 10th and 11th grade ELA curriculum using the framework of the Common Core Standards.

At the same time, a couple of teachers in my teacher research group are working on what happens when they don’t give grades so much as narrative feedback. What they’re finding out has me thinking about how I give feedback and what goes into my gradebook.

At first glance, it might seem that these two topics are at odds, with one focused on how we grade, and one  focused on not grading, but I’m starting to think they can actually work hand in hand.I think a lot of that has to do with when we give grades and what we give them on. I think that I still have a lot of thinking left to do on that topic, though. That’s a post for another day, perhaps.

What I’m working on right now is how to break down my ELA 10 and 11 standards into pieces that I can put in the gradebook to show what students really know and can do, and that’s enough of a struggle (but a very worthwhile and productive one, I think). Here’s what I mean.

I’ve been reading about breaking the standards down into the progressive skills or steps students would need to master in order to get at the whole standard. Some of the English standards encapsulate several high-level, complex skills into one statement, so this is really important in ELA. Let’s look at the standard my 10th grade classes are working on now as an example:

• CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RL.9-10.2
  Determine a theme or central idea of a text and analyze in detail its development over the course of the text, including how it emerges and is shaped and refined by specific details; provide an objective summary of the text.

For now, I’m ignoring the second part entirely, “provide an objective summary of the text.” That kind of seems like an entirely different thing from a theme analysis to me. It should probably involve theme analysis, but summarizing is different from analyzing in my opinion.

So just the first part then: “Determine a theme or central idea of a text and analyze in detail its development over the course of the text, including how it emerges and is shaped and refined by specific details“

To me, that seems to involve the following steps or progressive skills (and there may be even more that I have missed):

• Step 1: Define theme and identify complete, accurate theme statements.
• Step 2: Revise inaccurate or incomplete theme statements to improve them.
• Step 3: Write an accurate, complete theme statement for a text independently.
• Step 4: Identify evidence that supports a theme.
• Step 5: Write analysis/commentary that explains how evidence supports the theme.
• Step 6: Once students know how to do 1-5, put it all together. Read a text. Identify an accurate theme of the text, write a complete theme statement, and analyze how the author develops that theme using specific evidence from the text. Include commentary that connects the evidence to the theme.

And then we have to get into how they show mastery. Are they writing an essay? Presenting something to the class? Taking a test? And what would a test look like for this standard?

Would being able to do this with one text be enough to show mastery? If not (and I would say that it’s not), how many texts would be enough? What about different genres of text? Maybe a student can do this with just about any short story we give them, but they struggle if it’s a poem or a novel.

So then, what do I put in my gradebook? That’s what I’m stuck on right now. I’ve just been putting in an approximation of the full standard, but I want to communicate a student’s progress on both the progressive skills/steps AND on the full standard. Should I put those progressive skills in as sub-standards? I’m wondering how others reflect that in their gradebook (or other record-keeping strategies).

I’ve also adjusted my grading scale so that my 4 point scale works out this way:

• 4=100%
• 3=85%
• 2=60%
• 1=50%

For the reading standards that we’re working on, I enter a grade that reflects where students are after we work on it in one text. That makes it sort of a summative grade, but it’s not final. A student can revise or redo the assessment on that standard on the same text, or they can show mastery of it on the next text we complete and I’ll go back and re-assess it. But with the way my gradebook is set up right now, that might mean their grade looks like a D for a week or two while they practice more and work on the skills further. Even though I’ve explained my grading process to parents, they worry and call or email me to see what their child is missing (usually, they aren’t missing anything; they just need to redo or revise an assessment), and they ask if they can do extra credit (which I don’t offer). If a student plays a sport, it can affect their eligibility, and besides all of that, it definitely adds stress and worry to their lives.

I am required to put something in the gradebook, though. And I want to communicate how a student is doing on the standards to the student and their parents. But I don’t like causing all of this stress and worry when I know students will get it with a little more time and practice.

What do you do? How do you accurately communicate student progress to both students and parents? What does your standards-based gradebook look like? Send me all of the links and advice you have!