Summer Upgrade: How to Transform Your Grading Approach in 8 Steps

Welcome to the Ungrade Upgrade!

If you have been wishing you could shift to an ungraded classroom, this blog post will show you how! You can do this individually, with a cohort, or schoolwide, whether or not you must work within a traditional grading system. If you can carve out 6 hours this summer, you can transform your grading approach for the upcoming school year. I’m serious: with just six hours, you can lay out your practices, create a learning progression or two, and realign your assessments. Read on! I’m going to lay out the essentials.

Have you been toying with shifting to an Ungraded classroom?

I have spoken to dozens of teachers who want to shift to an ungraded classroom but find the prospect daunting. They don’t know where to start or don’t think they can because of their school’s restrictions. Below, I will outline eight steps to take this summer so that you can make the transition for the 2023-2024 school year. No matter what rules your school district has in place, most of us can adapt the Learning Progression Model (LPM) within a traditional classroom system.

Why am I thinking about September NOW???

One of the best things about teaching is that there is a clearly defined beginning, middle and end. There are few other jobs that have that. I am crawling towards final exams right now (in New Jersey), but last week I opened my “Thoughts for 2023-2024” page, and began to jot down the ideas I want to remember when I am planning over the summer.

There is joy in knowing that I get to start over in August. I love that my classroom is a microcosm that I can play in, a sandbox where I can test out my hypotheses. Every year I solve one problem only to notice another in an endless game of whack-a-mole! I am still refining my learning progressions (albeit less and less each year), creating new activities, finding the right balance between formal and informal assessments, and searching for the “right” keys to unlock student potential. More importantly, I am trying to meet the students where they are, and the cohorts that are coming up are dealing with the ramifications of the pandemic. It is more important than ever to teach students that they have agency, which is one of the great benefits of using the LPM.

Why front loading your work is an unfortunate must

While summer months should (and will) be a time to relax and enjoy a change of pace, I know that I will spend hours and hours planning and organizing my classes.  It just makes the school year go better. If you are serious about transitioning to a more ungraded approach, then creating this foundation ahead of time is critical. This will not take as much time as you think because you don’t have to rewrite your curriculum! You are just framing out the structures within which you will plan the detailed learning journeys later. 

If you are reading this, you have probably already decided to make the shift. But in case you aren’t quite sure, here are my 5 favorite things about the Learning Progression Method, in no particular order.

  1. I get to provide honest and detailed feedback of student work quickly, cutting turnaround time to a fraction of what I used to spend, especially in the first half of the year.
  2. I have transformed my relationships with students so that I can be a coach, not a dictator.
  3. Assessments are streamlined into 3 categories: labs, checkpoints (tests and quizzes), and projects. This, along with some other microroutines, creates a predictable structure within which students do a wide range of activities each week.
  4. All students have a pathway to success, and differentiation is easy to implement.
  5. I have a clear picture of students’ strengths and weaknesses at any point in time. I use this to create my lessons, to converse with parents and guidance counsellors, and to differentiate for individual students.

By frontloading the work, you will set the stage for the course, give yourself a scaffold for your lessons, and be proactive about answering the questions that inevitably arise.  

A Guided Tour

Are you ready? Let’s take a guided tour of the 8 steps that will transform your classroom. To have a mental map of the process, I suggest reading through all of the steps before starting.

Step 1: Select and Define your Practices

The first step is to figure out what students should be able to do by the time they complete your course. These will be your Practices. Practices are what students can do. We use the content (what students know) as the medium for assessing these practices.

Using a mixture of state standards, school curriculum requirements, and your own personal values, make a list of everything that you wish your students would be able to do by the end of school year. Personally, most of my practices are derived from the Next Generation Science Standards (Science and Engineering Practices). 

Once you’ve done that, you’ll want to pull out the “behaviors” and non-academics; simply set those aside. You can use those to guide your classroom routines, but we avoid using those to determine grades. I also suggest making a separate “bucket” for content knowledge. Factual information, such as content-specific vocabulary, will be the vehicle that you use to travel the path to mastering the Practices, but will not necessarily be a goal in and of itself.

Then you can sort the remaining list into as few categories as possible. In my experience, the upper limit is about a dozen. Ours began at a crazy and unsustainable 28, but we settled on a comfortable and manageable 10.  

Give each category a name, and rewrite the wishlist into a coherent description. For example, my first practice is called Experimental Design. The description reads: “The parts of the experimental design section are: the lab question, the methods and materials, the data and observations. The goal is to communicate what and how you did the data collection, with enough detail so that someone else can follow your work easily.” As an example, you can examine my list of ten.

Step 2: Identify the achievement levels

The achievement levels plot the path to mastery. (Mastery is limited by the grade level expectations of your course.)  There are a lot of different ways to design a rubric, and plenty of debate exists about how many levels to outline. But I’ll just relate how and why we eventually landed on 6 levels.

I want to emphasize that we use the learning progressions to show students a path to mastery. While six levels may initially seem excessive, here’s our thinking. The uppermost level is Expert, where students are doing complex work that ties multiple or sophisticated concepts together. The lowest level is “Not Enough Evidence”, where we define specifically what minimum requirement(s) is/are missing. We needed a “Beginning” level to have an on-ramp for students who struggle even starting a response. We defined that as “Trying”. After Beginning level, students move from presenting relevant (but perhaps incompletely stated or incorrectly applied) concepts to explicit (completely and correctly stated but incorrectly applied) concepts to accurate (correctly applied) concepts on the way to Expert level. The keywords help us keep the learning progressions consistent.

Step 3: Draft the description of each achievement level for each practice

Now that you’ve outlined the achievement levels, you will create the Learning Progressions. Trying to tease out the levels so that they not only make sense developmentally, but are general enough to apply to all assignments is a delicate balancing act. So here are my tips:

  1. Use student-friendly language.
  2. Avoid quantifying whenever possible (i.e. “uses 3 examples”.)
  3. Avoid ill-defined language: “good”, “excellent”, etc.
  4. Provide flexibility by using words like “when appropriate” and “and/or”.

Remember, you will provide the details of expectations on the assignment itself; you only need to describe the product. I found it useful to start with the “Expert” level so I knew what the ideal would look like (generally, that was just the descriptions developed during Step 1.) Then I would write the entry level “Beginning”, focusing on the absolute minimum acceptable evidence that would enable me to provide feedback. Then I could figure out the intermediate levels.

I constantly refer to and use my keywords: what does “trying” or “relevant” look like for this practice? Accurate and correct answers are only required for the Advanced level, and at the Proficient level, we focus on refining the communication of their thought processes. Fleshing out what goes at each of the achievement levels can be a challenging part of the process, so be patient. Put it down often and return a little while later, if need be. I found it helpful to imagine a ladder, where students must step on the first rung (Beginning) before moving on to the next rung (Developing), and so on.

Step 4: Refine the language of your learning progressions

Once you have a draft done, the refining of language takes time. Putting each Learning Progression through the crucible of scoring student work is the best way to see where things aren’t working. After 8 years, I am still refining the language of one or two of mine. I literally just changed the Engineering Design Process, because the language was pulling kids off focus and killing the joy of project building. So, for the last unit I made some significant alterations, so that I could see if/how it worked. (Effect to be determined!)

I wholeheartedly encourage you to send me your draft. I love seeing how other people are constructing their learning progressions, and have enough experiences to provide you with actionable feedback to save you both time and effort. I often do virtual critique sessions either individually or as a group; let me know if you are interested! (Disclaimer: I am not marketing here. This is an honest offer of assistance without a cost or obligation!)

Step 5: Align your assessments

Now that your learning progressions are made, you can figure out which assessments you will use. You don’t have to create new assignments, just align your old ones with specific practices. For example, I use 4 of my 10 practices on lab reports only, a different 4 for quizzes and tests, and the remaining 2 for projects. Rarely, I will ask a lab question on a test and therefore use one or more of those practices in a test setting. It’s not that there is no overlap between them. It is just easier for you and for the students to have consistent practice in a particular setting. It streamlines the feedback. It gives students ample practice that ideally spirals throughout each unit of your course.

Step 6: Create Target Levels for the year

Students need to see the pathway to mastery. To do this, I set clear Target Levels for each unit. First greeting them at the starting point, I unveil the path one step at a time. I am the trusted guide pointing to a hazy endpoint that will become more clear as we get closer.

At what level do they enter your room at the beginning of the year? This may be different depending on the course or the population. For example, my regular class is assumed to come in at Beginning level and we start working on Developing level. But my AP class is assumed to come in at the Developing level and we start working on the Proficient level.

At what pace do they move through the levels? Again, it depends on the expectations of course as well as the students you have in front of you. In my experience, I can move at a pace that brings regular physics to Proficient with a sprinkling of Advanced, Honors to all Advanced levels, and AP to mostly Expert levels. So I plot a path through the units of study that move them from their starting level to that ending level, gradually and with constant feedback.

Step 7: Create Grade Translation

If you need to give a grade in your school, like I do, you need a grade translation. First, I would find out the absolute minimum number of times you need to report grades to parents. Perhaps you can send out frequent descriptive emails instead, reducing the need for grades. But regardless, let’s assume that, like me, you are still trapped in this grading system. So develop a grade translation that your administration approves of.

Ours has evolved over the years; we finally came up with a flexible, customizable grade translation that I love. It allows me to simply identify the target levels for each unit. Students get a grade based on whether (and how closely) they reached those communicated target levels. I can do this as frequently as my school requires. 

We also are experimenting with grade negotiations and grading contracts, in combination with the grade translation chart. (More on that in the future.)

Step 8: Create communication tools

The last step is to communicate all of this to your students, their parents, the administration team and your colleagues in the guidance and special education departments. The more proactive you can be, the better, in my opinion. Your own style and tools will dictate your mode of communication. Personally, I like to create video guides to walk people through the process. I share these videos on my class website or via email. The most important questions to address are: How do you know how you are doing in this class if there is no grade? Why am I changing what we’ve always done and are so familiar with? What do I want students to be able to know and do by the time they leave my class, and why? What is the purpose of homework and how is it assigned?

At the beginning of our transition to the LPM, we held a Parent Information Night, separate from Back to School Night, in order to field questions and concerns. I no longer need to do this, but I definitely make time to call home as soon as a parent reaches out with questions.

Conferencing individually with students is essential to address their questions and concerns. You will answer the same questions over and over again, but be patient. It’s taken me years to adjust to this mindset… they need time to wrap their heads around the process too.

You will also have to rethink how you use your gradebook. Since most parents (and students) unfortunately  use this as their primary feedback tool, what do you want to report in the SIS? Stuck with the traditional grading platform, can you adapt it to your new approach? I have created entries to report the scores on each practice at the end of each unit, as well as columns to report on general student performance and growth. However, since most parents really don’t understand this new schema, I mostly rely on email and phone calls home to touch base with them about how their child is doing.

I have developed guides for student use, such as flow charts and goal setting worksheets. All of these are posted on our Artifacts page. If you have any requests for other such items, please let me know what would be useful.

Resources

I know it may seem like a daunting task, especially if you are doing it on your own. If you can devote some time to these 8 steps this summer, you will definitely be ready to transition by the time school starts.  It is well worth the effort, and you will never regret it! With support, it won’t take nearly as long nor be as difficult as you think it will. To provide guidance and help you avoid the detours and delays, I’ve created an asynchronous professional development course called The Essentials of the Learning Progression Method. This self-paced guide will walk you through Steps 1 through 4.  A second course, “Putting the LPM into Action” will help you with the rest. I am available for questions and coaching via email along the way.

A Well-Deserved Break

I know we need a break. So sleep in if you can, go for long walks instead of giving extra help, watch TV instead of grading papers! But if you are like me, and believe that spending some time now will make your school year less stressful, then try this out. A small time investment up front now will enable you to make the shift to the Learning Progression Method. The hard parts are not the practical considerations of creating an ungraded classroom, but the shifting of the mindset. Because we have been immersed in traditional grading for so long, most of us need time to wrap our heads around the new approach so that we are consistent, positive, and coherent

After 8 years of implementing the Learning Progression Method, I am still very excited about the promise and possibility of learning without grades. While adapting to work within the constraints of the graded system, it is still very effective. I feel that I am providing a path for all students to be successful. Most of them see that path. Many take it, and are both surprised and proud of what they have accomplished over the course of a year. I think that you will be too.

Please reach out to me with any questions. I am looking forward to having more colleagues playing in this sandbox with me!