Sharing My Thinking and Learning and Work As promised, I’ll be sharing a few peeks into my work facilitating a standards based grading and reporting initiative in a New York State public school over the next several weeks and months. Each visit will bring me back to this space, where I’ll try to make our process and more importantly, our greatest discoveries and tensions, as transparent as I can. I’m hoping that this will…
Standards based grading entered my little corner of the world on the winds of a perfect storm: teachers were acquainting themselves with a new set of challenging standards, they were eager to create a culture of learning after witnessing how our historic fixation on performance was influencing their kids, they recognized inconsistencies in their assessment and grading practices, and their report cards did not align well with their curricula. In short, their grades were meaningless at best and…
HAPPY NEW YEAR WESTERN NEW YORK EDUCATORS! This week, I’ll be sharing a series of posts relevant to standards based grading. Over the last three years, I’ve learned and worked beside several district and building leaders as they’ve laid the foundation for this shift, and although the process has varied from one system to the next, these educators share one common understanding: they know that standards based grading cultivates far healthier practices and perspectives about learning…