This is my best creative hat

Every day there seems to be one more webinar on grading. This is great that more information supporting competency education is becoming available. However, my concern is that they are not contextualized within a school culture or school-wide reform.

Earlier this week in a conversation, Rich DeLorenzo pointed that if one teacher uses proficiency-based grading and the teacher down the hall doesn’t, students, and possibly parents as well, are going to feel a real tension. One of the reasons is that in proficiency-based models we are willing to have the hard conversations “I know Bobby is in 4^th grade but he still is reading at 2^nd grade level”.  That conversation isn’t likely to come up in traditional grading as long as Bobby does his homework, attends school regularly, and demonstrates “good” behavior in  class.  DeLorenzo emphasized “When we eliminate the bell curve we change the goal of education and the pedagogy.”  Is the principal ready to support both kinds of educational models — one focused on making sure that students learn and the other that student do what is expected by the teacher?

When we eliminate the bell curve we change the goal of education and the pedagogy.

Grading, as it is so deeply related to assessment, is going to be one of the big things to change in a school.  However, it needs to be part of a school-wide change.   Grading isn’t a stand-alone practice – personalized classroom management strategies, student voice and choice, adaptive instruction, and transparency are all parts of  redesigning core operations of schools.

So tune in — but put your best analytic and creative hat on while you are listening. If you want to do move foward on proficiency-based grading, ask yourself what are the other changes that are going to need to happen in your school?

Webinars on Grading Past and Present

Today — Proficiency Scales for the Common Core, Marzano Research Laboratory, May 23, 2013 | 4:00 p.m. EDT

Wednesday, May 29, 2013: League of Innovative School Webinar on Proficiency-Based Learning Simplified: Best Practices in Grading and Reporting  | 3:00–4:00 PM EST. Register here.

Thursday, May 30, 2013: Standards-Based Grading and Assessing Student Mastery of Content. REL-NEI’s Northeast College and Career Readiness Research Alliance hosts this Bridge Webinar with Dr. Thomas Guskey to explore emergent research on proficiency-based leraning and graduation requirements, a new approach to assessing student learning and reporting on student progress.|  12:30–2:00 p.m. ET Register here.

In the last three days, in three different meetings, I’ve been asked to summarize what I’m learning about competency education. In yesterday’s meeting with RTT districts I shared the following list of things people starting off in competency education need to think about earlier than later in their process…i.e. this is a place where implementation can go wrong.

1) Start With The Students:  We think a lot about college and career readiness, Common Core curriculum, and what we expect students to know and do.  If we want to get students there then we need to start with where they are.  This means when students enter your school, doing assessments to understand where they are on their learning progression and what gaps they have is essential. Teachers will need to do pre-assessments when students enter their classroom to understand how they are going to need to differentiate, group/regroup.

This is one of the game-changing dynamics of competency education. At today’s meeting with Race to the Top districts this kicked off a huge conversation. Once you do this we can no longer ignore the fact that some students are 2,3, 4 or 5 years behind or don’t have the prerequisite skills they need to do the grade-level curriculum.  Scott Benson, Gates Foundation referred to this as the “design and accountability challenge of our time “.  I call it the Elephant that we’ve been successfully ignoring for decades.  There are many ways of trying to accelerate learning…but we haven’t been systematic in researching this so that districts and schools can be sure they are deploying resources most cost-effectively. (more…)

Carter’s Story

This past week I had the privilege of attending an IEP meeting for Carter, a student that I have come to know quite well over the past three years. Carter has a learning disability and was diagnosed with ADHD back in fifth grade. School has always been a struggle for him, particularly the parts of school that require him to be focused and attentive in class and to meet assignment deadlines for his teachers in a timely manner. When he is focused, school comes relatively easy to him. With the help of his case manager and the support of his parents over the last two years, Carter has managed to earn all of his freshman credits and sophomore credits. The final course grades that appear on his transcript aren’t stellar, but regardless no one can argue with the fact that he reached proficiency for each of his course competencies and thus received credit for each of his courses. (more…)

from Making Mastery Work

During my travels in Maine last fall to three districts in the Maine Cohort for Customized Learning that are well on their way to fully implementing competency education, an interesting question popped up during conversations with students:  What happens once a student reaches proficiency? As I talked to students, they all had different responses to how they used the time that is built into the school day (reading The Learning Edge for more information about how districts are embedding support time):

Faster:  Amidst a gaggle of 7^th grade boys, one student clearly liked to power ahead in math.  He emphasized it was only in math (his father was a math teacher) and that he was at “teacher-pace” in his other courses. If he had extra time in the class or in the day he would work on his math. Once he reached proficiency (usually described as a 3 or above), he would move on to the next unit as the learning targets, curriculum modules, and resources were available online.

Better:  In a conversation at a high school, two young women, self-described best friends, discussed how they have a competition among themselves.  They aim to get “4’s” on all assessments, in all classes, all the times.  If they have extra time in the day they work on whatever topics they needed to in order to demonstrate the application of their learning beyond what was taught in the classroom to their teacher.

Passion:  One young man, showing the slumped body language of disengagement, simply said that he does the minimum as he isn’t interested in school. He aims for a 3 at teacher-pace. With his art notebook always at his side, he uses an extra time to do the one thing he really likes – drawing.

Fun: A quiet young woman told me that it was doing the work to get a 4 that was the fun part of school. She felt that she could be creative, explore something new, apply the learning in a way that was meaningful to her.  From what I can tell, the option of a 4 was a door to the joy of learning.  (Check out the video The Box to see what this can mean for students).

(more…)

Artemio Paz, Jr
Chair, OR State Board of Education

Diane Smith from Oregon’s Business Education Compact forwarded to me the Student Achievement, Grading and Reporting policy passed in December by the Oregon State Board of Education and scheduled to take effect July 1.  This is a great example of rulemaking by forward-thinking state education leaders.

The policy is chock-full of interesting ideas with powerful implications. Diane pointed out two major implications:

• Parents will be informed whether or not their child is proficient in grade-level standards.
• It institutionalizes the competency-based practice of maintaining academic performance reported separately from behavior factors.

A couple of others jump out as well:

• Students will have multiple opportunities for students to demonstrate mastery of academic content standards.
• Districts must respond to students who have not met or have exceeded the academic content standards with access to additional services and other public school or alternative educational options.

In addition to this policy advancing Oregon’s proficiency-based efforts, it looks like a very powerful policy tool for parent advocates to demand that their children get the help they need right now – not by retaining students but getting them the help they need right now.

The policy is included below.   (more…)

If you are considering having your district or school move towards competency education, then find an hour to dive into the recently released The Long Conversation or, “It’s hard, but worth it. Did I mention that it’s hard?”

This case study on Kennebec Intra-District Schools better known as RSU 2 commissioned by the Maine Department of Education really is a must read for anyone starting to think about implementation.  It’s chock full of lessons and insights that can help you leap over the hurdles you are bound to encounter.

Setting a Vision:  The process used by RSU 2 under the leadership of Don Sivisiki, now at the Maine Department of Education and its vision for student centered learning can be helpful to think about how to shape a process to engage school board, educators and community members. (more…)

I don’t think there is a word for it…probably time to make one up. I just love the feeling of “a-ha!” – when I get an itsy-bitsy glimpse of understanding about our world and our work. I had two “a-ha!s” when I caught a glimpse into the Muscatine Community School District’s (Iowa) efforts in competency education.

The Muscatine Journal covered a school board meeting where a competency education pilot was described.

It starts in the classroom:  Muscatine has 26 volunteer teachers that are going to pilot competency education in their classrooms.  They are from elementary, middle and high school as well as their alternative school. They are doing their own research and figuring out how to integrate standards-based grading into their classrooms. (more…)

From SRHS website

This past spring, two members of my administrative team at Sanborn Regional High School in Kingston, New Hampshire had the opportunity to present our school’s competency-based grading and reporting system to admissions representatives from each of the New Hampshire Colleges and Universities. A very interesting conversation unfolded when the team passed out two competency-based report cards from two students at our school. Both students had earned a final grade of an “80” in their Forensic Science class, but both had very different grades in each of their competencies for that particular course. One had an “exceeding” grade of 95 for the crime scene management competency (students will demonstrate the ability to use and understand how observation is used in order to collect and gather evidence in scene investigation). The other student had an “inconsistent progress” grade of a 75 for the same skill. This evidence suggests that one student perhaps had a more complete understanding of the scientific inquiry process that goes into a forensics investigation, while the other still had work to do to bring that skill to competency.

The ability to be able to “dig deeper” into what a final grade represents and how it can be used to report learning not only intrigued the admissions officers, but it generated an entire discussion around what else a competency-based grading and reporting system could do for students. Indeed, this model should be the way of the future for all high schools. Our school made the leap from a traditional to a competency-based model over a period of about three years, and I challenge you to explore how you might make the same leap at your school. (more…)

Those of us that were at least moderately successful in the old system may find it challenging to participate in the design and development of competency-based environments.  As challenging as new school development is, converting existing schools to a competency-based environment can be a monumental challenge.  At the top of the list of controversial items is grading—the old A-F system imprinted in our brains.

During my first year as a public school superintendent my state introduced new standards.  My team immediately began planning for a standards-based grading system.  It seemed only logical that if the state was going to test our kids against the new standards, we should provide similar feedback on a regular basis.  The introduction of new standards-based report cards resulted in a teacher revolt and a ton of parent complaints.  Fifteen years later, the district is still fighting this fight.  (more…)

Why do we continue to use grades to record student understanding?  What does a letter tell us about a student’s understanding?  Or does the letter represent understanding at all?  Many of us are guilty of recording things in a grade book just because the student did the work.  It had nothing to do with how much the student understood or was able to do.  There are also students who refused to do the work, but could demonstrate that they understood the material and scrape by with a D or a C.  Are we recording behaviors or learnings?  Should we be recording the two together as one letter grade. (more…)