Initially, I started this journey in an effort to change the conversations that were happening in my classroom.  I was growing increasingly frustrated with the emphasis on grades over learning and needed to find a way to combat that.  No matter how much I would emphasize the importance of the acquisition of knowledge and skill, students would still revert back to, “All I want to know is how do I get an A?”  This, or some variation of this, was a common theme to the majority of the conversations that I was having.  Identifying this as one of the major obstacles in student growth, I asked my administrative team if I could develop an approach that would minimize the emphasis of the grade.  With their support, I started a journey that, although challenging, was rewarding and fruitful.  What had started as an effort to change the conversation, has now become a mission to increase communication, collaboration and consistency of all those involved in the learning process.

Admittedly, when I first decided to make the shift, I did not comprehend the scope of the project I was about to begin.  It took me years to fully comprehend what standards-based grading is and how to fully support the principles at the heart of this endeavor.  At first, I developed learning targets in the form of “I can” statements for everything I wanted students to know and be able to do.  There was a generic scoring rubric that applied to all statements based on the level of independence a student had with each skill.  At this point, I hadn’t changed anything else about the course.  I was using the same types of assignments and assessments.  The model was flawed, but it did accomplish the task of reducing the emphasis on the grade.  It took some time, but I began to see more students engaging with the content.  Students who would previously leave things blank were answering questions.  I had students who refused to participate in investigations and turn in labs start engaging in class and submitting work.  They were trying.  I always believed that the more I could get students to try, the better they would do, but it wasn’t until a couple of years later that I would get the evidence to support that belief.  Thanks Mark Rober!  More on that later.  Even though this was nowhere near a polished product, I was seeing enough improvement in student approach, attitude and quality of work that I knew I was moving in the right direction.  I administered student surveys and took all of this information into the summer to review and revised my model for the following year.

My colleague Elise Burns, who I share a classroom with, saw the shift in my students and decided to join me on this journey in year 2.  We reviewed the successes and challenges I encountered and made revisions based on all the data I had collected throughout the first year.  We had consolidated some of the “I can” statements that seemed redundant and tried to clarify some language to better communicate to students our intent.  At this point, we were still using the generic rubric that applied to all statements.  We didn’t agree on everything, so we decided to use two similar but different versions of the model.  We compared student work throughout the year, regularly having the other assess their level of performance as a quality control.  We again administered student surveys at the mid-year and end of the year.  What had become clear to us at the end of this year was that we needed to move away from a generic rubric and provide students with a learning progression.  Clear benchmarks that can be used to provide meaningful feedback.

Starting year 3, we had developed a learning progression for each content area and all the skills we were expecting students to acquire.  We had looked at all of our “I can” statements and grouped similar ones together.  Once these statements were grouped, we assessed which statements needed to be addressed before a student could be successful with other statements.  This order became our learning progression.  With these learning targets in place, we revised our assessments in an effort to support these progressions.  Although we did see an increase in the quality of student work, we noticed that students seemed to plateau.  This led me to dive deeper into the research.  I had one key question that I wanted to address.  Why wasn’t the feedback we were providing getting students beyond that plateau?

Part of the switch to standards-based grading was based on the research of Ruth Butler, 1988.  We were applying these principles of providing descriptive feedback in the absence evaluative feedback.  The effects were noticeable in the earlier stages of development; however, the feedback did not seem to help students break through the plateau.  Although I was familiar with John Sweller’s Cognitive Load Theory, 1994, I had never applied it to our course design.  It wasn’t until this point in the development of our model that I realized, in order for our feedback to be actionable, it must not overload the student’s capacity to absorb and apply it.  We were scaffolding our curriculum, but we had overlooked on key piece.  We were trying to teach too much at once and not allowing students the opportunity to fully acquire a skill before we moved on to the next skill.  We now had our goal for our summer work.  Provide a scaffold that allows students the time to develop a skill before another is introduced.  The challenge became, how do we do this while covering the curriculum?  We evaluated our curriculum and changed our sequence to support this development.  We separated the assessment of foundational concepts (content) from process skills.  Then we created minimum course requirements to keep students on track and make sure they had enough practice with each skill.  Probably the most impactful change we made though was only displaying our targeted level of development for each skill.  We had noticed that students would look at the highest possible level on a rubric and attempt to achieve that level even if they did not have the skills to do so.  They persisted in spite of feedback telling them to do otherwise.  With these changes in place, we began to see students break through that plateau.  At this point, we were confident in our model and our focus shifted to developing language on our standards that clearly communicates the expectations and learning progressions, as well as creating the resources to support students in their development.  This is an ongoing process.  Although this is challenging at times, I am glad I am on this journey and would never go back to a traditional model.

I know the topic of standards-based grading can be controversial and divisive.  That is not my intent.  This is not an indictment on traditional education.  I have heard many times that traditional education works.  This is a true statement.  I have also heard that if it’s not broken, don’t fix it.  This is where I disagree.  Traditional education is broken because it does not work for all.  This is where Mark Rober comes in.  For those of you not familiar with Mark Rober, he is a NASA engineer and YouTuber.  He has no ties to education and no dog in this fight.  In his TedTalk on the Super Mario Effect, he highlights an experiment he did with his YouTube followers.  In this experiment, 50,000 people took on a challenge that they were told would prove that anyone could learn to code.  That, however, was not the intent.  There were two versions of the challenge.  One where users lost points when unsuccessful and one where they were just told they were unsuccessful and to try again.  In the version where users lost points, 52% solved the puzzle with an average of 5 attempts.  In the version where the user was just told to try again, 68% solved the puzzle with an average of 12 attempts.  I’m not sure how closely the percentages translate to the classroom, but the trend does exist.  My stance is, if there is something that I can do that will allow more students to have an opportunity to meet success, then I am ALL IN!  That is why I switched to standards-based grading.