{"id":6102,"date":"2013-11-01T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2013-11-01T04:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/aurora-institute.org\/blog\/cw_post\/making-the-grade-count\/"},"modified":"2020-02-27T14:46:18","modified_gmt":"2020-02-27T19:46:18","slug":"making-the-grade-count","status":"publish","type":"cw_post","link":"https:\/\/aurora-institute.org\/cw_post\/making-the-grade-count\/","title":{"rendered":"Making the Grade Count"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Screen<\/a>
Caroline Gordon Messenger<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

As a teacher of high school English, the Common Core State Standards<\/a> are a blessing and a curse.<\/p>\n

And assessing a student\u2019s competence in the standards? That can be difficult and frustrating as well. Especially when Robert Marzano<\/a> has concluded in his research that teaching each Common Core State Standard to mastery would take 22 years of educational instruction to accomplish.<\/p>\n

As our high school begins to explore standards-based instruction and curriculum revision to align with CCSS, more questions emerge for educators about not only how to create quality assessment instruments, but also how to create quality measures for<\/i> assessment. In my past, every assessment had its own rubric, stating what criteria would be measured and how many points it would be worth, so that every grade would represent a number of out 100%.<\/p>\n

It took several years and the work of Doug Reeves<\/a> to make me question just what I had been doing for 10 years. So what changed?<\/p>\n

Everything.What was the most important part of my job as an educator? The answer to that is simple: student achievement and student learning. Were zeros the best way to those goals? Not really. Were multiple assessments with varying grading rubrics helping my students? When I took a long, hard look at past students and their final grades in my English course, the answer was a pretty striking \u201cno.\u201d<\/p>\n

I began to realize I had done my students a serious disservice. I had used averaging and weighting as ways to \u201csort\u201d my students into categories: smart, average, low. Worse, I placated my own conscience by telling myself I always offered them opportunities to revise, resubmit, and redo. It was the students\u2019 fault for never taking advantage of it.<\/p>\n

The question that began to swim in my brain hurt a little. I had always thought I was a good teacher. I had always believed I taught my students worthwhile skills. But I didn\u2019t always offer them opportunities to re-learn. <\/i>I hadn\u2019t explored what it meant to provide multiple and flexible pathways to learning goals and outcomes. My students basically learned some stuff, completed an assessment, and moved on to new stuff. In the philosophy of Rick Wormeli<\/a>, I wasn\u2019t really offering my students opportunities to learn at their pace, in their own way, to a level of proficiency and mastery that would actually help them to be successful outside of school.<\/p>\n

What was I going to do about that?<\/p>\n

The question collided with others from administrators in our building and our district. And I quickly came to realize that this sort of change needed to be supported on a large scale. It would take all of us to make change happen, and I was truly fortunate to be in a district where administration supported not just the idea of change, but also teachers willing to take risks.<\/p>\n

This confluence became the greatest source of inspiration \u2013 if others felt the need to change, then we could wade into the unfamiliar pool together, and the first step for me went back to where my self-reflection first started: assessment.<\/p>\n

If we were going to journey forth into standards-based instruction, and those standards would provide the measure by which we granted diplomas and deemed students\u2019 skills as proficient or competent, then didn\u2019t our rubrics for assessments need to be aligned to the standards? And then, shouldn\u2019t my rubrics be aligned with my colleagues\u2019 rubrics?<\/p>\n

A quick answer that I have seen played out in other districts is a standardized assessment. We all give the same assessment, perhaps even at the same time, and then we have an accurate way to look at data.<\/p>\n

This wasn\u2019t working for me. It lacked personalization. It lacked personality. It gave students no choices, addressed no one\u2019s interests, and certainly didn\u2019t align with my students\u2019 individual learning needs.<\/p>\n

Instead, could there be a rubric that measured a standard from the Common Core? Or, as graduation standards and performance indicators are written down, could we create rubrics that measure these indicators so that, when gathered together, all of a student\u2019s work in all of the indicators within a graduation standard would provide evidence over time of competency?<\/p>\n

As I began to work with performance indicators, I found these rubrics naturally lent themselves to offering students multiple opportunities to demonstrate competency. Not only could I, as the instructor, assign certain indicators to an assessment, but students could ask<\/i> that I score an essay or reading project or activity with a particular performance indicator rubric because they knew <\/i>it was an area in need of development.<\/p>\n

But how did I really know that what I was doing was shifting the focus from my instruction to their learning? I just asked them this question: \u201cHow is Mrs. Messenger\u2019s class different from other classes you take?\u201d Here are some responses:<\/p>\n