Assessment, Evaluation, and Standards-Based Grading and Reporting (SBGR)

This week I read Spokane Public Schools' "Secondary Standards-Based Grading and Reporting Handbook" and the thirteenth chapter of Teaching Literature to Adolescents, titled "Assessing and Evaluating Students' Learning."

Spokane Public Schools Handbook

The first few pages of the handbook that Spokane Public Schools provides for parents felt pretty straightforward, and was pretty non-controversial. I appreciated the idea that grading is meant to communicate a student's progress, and that standards-based grading and reporting (SBGR) is designed to make these grades more accurate, consistent, and meaningful. That being said, as I moved further through the paper, it started to become clear to me why there was any need for "parent's guide" in the first place.

After giving the reader (in this instance, parents are the target audience) an explanation of what SBGR is and why it is being used, the handbook then shows an example of how parents can look up and understand the report card. This is where the handbook lost me. I felt there was not an adequate definition of the difference between "power standards" and "reporting standards" (I'm still not sure), and the report card looked very confusing in that it was unclear if I was looking at grades for one class or several. While this doesn't negate the fact that Power Schools (the program used) may be useful, I felt that if I were a parent reading this document, I would be very confused and frustrated.

Power Schools aside, the real reason this handbook seems necessary is the last couple pages. Here, the handbook reviews some interesting ideas on grading and homework. While I don't disagree with some of the logic, I am genuinely finding myself having a hard time accepting the concepts that a) nothing should need to be marked zero, b) that zeros, if marked, should not factor into the overall grade, and c) that homework should not be graded. As I said previously, I don't necessarily disagree with some of these ideas - they are just very foreign concepts to me, as they conflict with so much of the way grading was done when I was a student in public schools. This part of the handbook was for me the most challenging to confront, and it was clear why the school district felt the need to relay this information and explain their logic to parents who, like me, probably grew up in a time when these sorts of ideas were probably thought of as "some hippie nonsense" (really, my dad would probably call it just that).

Assessing and Evaluating Students' Learning

The ideas presented in this handout were a little less foreign to me, and caused me to be much more introspective in my response (I think I'm going to need more time to fully accept the ideas in the SPS handbook). It was interesting reading about this idea of valuing "knowledge and factual information about literature" versus valuing the "ability to critically analyze texts." What I really found interesting, or at least curious, was reading about the two different approaches and recalling the ways in which previous teachers of mine used either or both. Some clearly favored factual knowledge, while others clearly favored analysis and the writing of essays over test-taking. It caused me to be introspective as well, considering what I find more valuable, and how that might relate to my teaching style. I felt that this text seemed to favor an emphasis on the ability to critically analyze texts, though that may have been a misunderstanding of the authors' intent. Personally, I feel that there should be a balance of both approaches, as it seems to me that a solid grounding in factual knowledge could provide for better critical analysis of texts.

All that being said, I did like the different ways of supporting the analysis/writing approach. I definitely agree with the idea of using writing "templates" to guide student writing, as well as the "interpretive strategies" that can be used for writing prompts. I will absolutely be saving these ideas for future use in the classroom.