One of the most difficult things to learn for a new English teacher is how to grade. I remember the first time that I sat down with a stack of essays. I was a senior at Southern Utah University, and I had been asked to teach one section of English 1010 as an intern. I was a poor college student, so the extra money sounded great, and I wanted the experience to put on my resume as I went out into the real world.
Back then, I read all of the essays, ordered them from best to worst and assigned grades accordingly. This process was what other professors did, and they helped me get through the first stack. Evaluating students against each other and not against a set of norms didn’t totally make sense to me, but in the end, I felt like the students’ grades fairly represented their writing prowess.
That type of grading worked fairly well at the university level, and I think many professors still grade like that. However, when I started teaching in public schools, I realized that I couldn’t just assign students grades based off of 2-3 essays written throughout the grading period. There were expectations of daily work, and those expectations extended to grading daily work.
So….my grading process became muddy.
Some of the problems that I experienced stemmed from what my meager concept of rigor was. I felt like I needed to give a lot of assignments in order to be sufficiently “rigorous.” I’ve since learned that that idea is ridiculous, but I was young and learning. So, I gave 2-4 assignments a day that all went into the gradebook, and the result was that students could pick and choose which assignments to do and which they could skip. There were enough points in the system that some assignments became unintentionally optional.
At first, I thought this was a kid problem. Why were the kids being so disrespectful and not completing everything that I gave them? I thought that my assignments were valuable. I had spent time creating them. Why didn’t students see that same value in them?
The truth is, however, that it wasn’t a kid problem. It was a teacher problem. I had set up a system of grading that didn’t measure or value learning. It valued compliance and work completion or, more simply, playing the “game of school.”
Even though I understood that there was a problem with my practice, it took me a long time to figure out how to fix it. When I began my masters program to become an administrator, I didn’t realize that I would find the answer to my great grading conundrum.
One of the classes that I took in my M.Ed. program was on assessment. We talked a lot in that course about making assessment meaningful and having it reflect true learning. At the same time, I was talking about grading frustrations with members of my PLC team, and we were coming up with interesting ideas on how to tweak our grading practices in order to maximize relevancy. One idea that a teacher had was to make essays, projects, and tests conditions of getting a grade. Because it was hard to make a single assignment worth enough points to not be optional, she just made them not optional. Students had an incomplete in the course until they completed the requisite assignments.
I liked this idea. I was frustrated when students would opt out of essays because they had enough points from other smaller and less important assignments. At that point, I also picked up three books: How to Grade for Learning by Ken O’Connor, Fair Isn’t Always Equal by Rick Wormeli, and Formative Assessment and Standards-Based Grading by Robert Marzano. Those books systematically laid out a process for making grading relevant and tied to learning targets.
** The links above are affiliate links to Amazon.
At this point in my journey, I decided to jump in. I’ve never been one to slowly implement things. I generally just jump into the deep end of the pool. Standards based grading was no different. That summer I set about doing the prep work to use SBG in the fall. Here is the process I followed and that I have helped other teachers duplicate:
- Unpack the core standards by looking at each skill (verbs) and concept (nouns). The purpose of this exercise is to really understand the core and what it is that we’re supposed to teach. Most core standards cover too many skills and concepts for a teacher to cover fully in a school year, so it is important to identify the ones that students absolutely must know before heading off into the next year.
- Identify and list essential standards. This list of standards becomes part of the guaranteed viable curriculum for the course, meaning that the teacher guarantees that those standards will be taught well and that students will be given equitable opportunities to master them. I suggest writing these as “I can” statements and simplify the language from the core standards, keeping the list to about 15 standards for simplicity. Here is a link to my essential standards that I used in 10th grade English.
- Define the success criteria for each standard. Here is where SBG really shines. One issue that I have run into when using traditional grading practices is that there are too many levels (100) to define. I need to be able to explain the difference between a 90% (A) essay and an 89% (B) essay clearly and without saying, “The first one is just a little bit better.” After listing essential standards, it is imperative to define what success looks like for each. In my case, that has meant defining 4 levels of achievement for each standard–Advanced, Proficient, Approaching, and Emerging–and clearly explaining what each one of those levels looks like. This means really thinking about each standard, how it is taught, and how success can be measured. I kept these definitions in a spreadsheet that became my master rubric for the course.
- Create assignments using the rubric. This is where the magic starts to happen. Once the rubric has been created, it becomes the backbone of teaching, learning, and assessing in the class. Each assignment in my class has the rubric for the particular standards being assessed attached to it. My students become very familiar with this structure, learn my rubric, and rise to the levels of mastery that I have defined. Here is a sample of one of my assignments.
- Aggregate standards data. More on this in later posts, but it is important to track student achievement based on the standards and to use this data to inform instruction.
- Allow many opportunities to re-learn. As teachers, we need to understand that everyone learns at a different pace and respect our students’ journeys as they learn the concepts in our classes. I will share more on this later too.
This is the outline that I have used to get started, and I have refined it in the years since beginning. In future posts, I will share my refinements, my process, and some tools to help teachers start down this road.
Finally, I just want to spend a minute on how amazing this change was for the culture, learning, flexibility, and overall atmosphere of my classroom. The other day, I was going through my old teacher box and found several letters from students expressing how much they loved my class and appreciated that I really wanted them to learn. Standards based grading is the avenue to that, and once it is in place, it opens the door to many other strategies like PCBL, which will be discussed much more in depth moving forward.
Here are two presentations I gave while I was getting started with SBG:
One at UCET in northern Utah
And one at InstructureCon in Keystone, Colorado: Extending Canvas for Standards-Based Grading
The 3D Teacher 
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