Assessment reform is crucial to education reform. Junot Diaz spoke at NCTE last night about the work we have to do to move away from the “journey of approval” (make the grade or face punishment) to the “journey of discovery,” wherein meaningful reading, learning, and heuristic mistake-making occur. Until an American administration takes up this challenge, what can we do? (Perhaps look at Polk County, FL?)
Pulitzer Prize Winner Junot DIaz by somethingstartedcrazy
Embracing standards-based assessment and reporting (SBAR) is a difficult, but achievable, goal for classroom teachers who want to begin the journey now. As long as you’re wiling to compromise at the end of each marking period and create a formula that cross-walks your feedback and students growth into a letter grade, it’s likely that the merits of SBAR will help you win over your administrator for a micro-pilot in your own classroom.
Essentially, SBAR is rigorous backwards design and the teaching, grading, and reporting practices that go with it. You unpack your assigned standards, decide which are most essential and umbrella-like, and then teach to those power standards and provide students with meaningful rubric-based feedback. The feedback has to provide concrete next steps and make use of a mangeable 3, 4, or 5-point rubric. Moving from not-proficient to proficient, with specific steps to follow, is a lot more motivating and attainable for a student than moving from, say, an F to a C with only a percentage to guide him or her.
Matt Townsley (@mctownsley) blogs on his SBAR journey in great detail and reflective depth. Robert Marzano, Rick Stiggins, and Rick Wormeli, et al., have all written extensively on setting up an SBAR program, including how to maintain and report out records of student achievement. To these experts’ work, I would only add a few pieces of advice for teachers hungry to make a difference in assessment as quickly as is reasonably possible.
- Take at least year to learn and prepare. It’s too difficult to learn SBAR on the go. Don’t implement an incomplete SBAR plan. That’s’s not fair to students and other stakeholders who depend on you to be consistent and effective in your feedback. Be really good at backwards design and learn to offer timely narrative feedback before you begin with SBAR. Train for SBAR. My journey towards practice took 2+ years of synthesis. I worked for a longer time to accomplish more difficult goals with SBAR than for NBCT certification.
- Find a critical friend who will at least listen and learn with you and observe your work or meet regularly with you to discuss and compare student work between classes. This will help make sure your implementation of SBAR doesn’t inflate or depress the “value” of grades in your classroom.
- Approach your administrator with a concrete plan and explanation of how you will educate students, parents, other teachers, and the administration. Be prepared also to cross-walk your feedback and students’ achievement to your school’s grading scale so the principal’s political liability is limited. Have your gradebook and report card ready and explain why they’re better than traditional models.
- Prepare yourself for mastery learning and the teaching that goes with it. You won’t end up with percents to average. You will need to follow up on your feedback and help students join a culture of quality work and determination to master content and skills essential to them.
- Practice your spiel. You will have to explain, defend, and champion SBAR to all kinds of audiences – students, parents, colleagues – with all kinds of attitudes – curiosity, skepticism, hostility. Always be willing to share, but never push. Teachers heavily invested in traditional models of scoring and reporting will be on the defensive around SBAR; they will rightly want proof of SBAR’s effectiveness. Share your data, but don’t use it as a wedge.
- Always make class time to explain SBAR and enable students to master work. You are the teacher; the students are the learners. You are interdependent, and your classroom culture needs to reflect that. Don’t give students awesome feedback in class and then marginalize them to after- or before-school sessions. Show them that your feedback and their work really matters. Make time for mastery in class. W. James Popham’s Transformative Assessment can help here.
- Stick with it. Don’t give up on SBAR. Stay the course for the year. For all your planing, there will be some learning and tweaking on the go. Remember that you are engaged in the right struggle for kids.
- Grow out slowly. Only expand the work of SBAR to engage enthusiastic and willing participants who will learn and plan for another year before practicing SBAR in the classroom. You have to be sure that all teachers practicing SBAR have a core set of common beliefs and an common set of practices that ensure consistency and fairness in the program.
If that sounds daunting, it is; however, it’s possible to out together a great SBAR program. As self-doubting and forward-looking as I can be, I hold on to my students’ comments about SBAR. The students who said I never explained it well enough were right. The students who said that the only time they felt like they really learned was when we used SBAR were also right. SBAR is what you make of it. Take the necessary time and care to craft a manageable and effective system.
Comments 3
One of the reasons I set out to write about SBAR was to provide Matt with some concrete examples of how we assessed with 4-point scales in language arts classes. I got carried away.
Many states have writing rubrics for student samples from standardized writing tests. I work in Virginia, so while practicing SBAR my colleagues and used the state rubrics, but rewrote them in more kid-friendly and genre-specific terms per assignments.
We developed our own rubrics in-house for projects using advanced (4), mastery (3), near mastery (2), and approaching mastery (1) as descriptors.
On traditional, summative assessments, we reached two key agreements. First, we agreed on a scale. An advanced score, or 4, would be given to students earning at least 90%. A mastery score, or 3, would be given to who scored between 70% and 89%. Students who scored between 60% and 69% would be given 2s, near mastery, while those scoring below 60% would be given 1s, or scores approaching mastery.
Our second agreement had to do with summative assessment design. We agreed that all summative assessments would have to range from the knowledge/comprehension level of Bloom’s Taxonomy through at either synthesis or evaluation. Even word study quizzes had to follow this model so that when we looked at summative assessments in a strand like reading comprehension or vocabulary, we were comparing apples to apples in terms of the types of student performance each assessment represented. As part of this agreement, we also structured assessments so that a student could not score above a 90% without earning at least some points on the synthesis or evaluation portion of an assessment.
We made class time for re-teaching and re-testing and extensions. While we worked with those in need of re-teaching, we gave students earning 3s or 4s choices between different higher-order activities and projects on the same unit.
Posted 21 Nov 2009 at 10:49 am ¶Great stuff here, Chad. I appreciate you taking the time to describe your thoughts and experiences via this blog. Your last point about getting a core group of educators on board with similar beliefs resonates with my current situation. Going solo with standards-based grading is a first step, but it takes a fair amount of time to “un-school” students, at least at the high school level, that by the time students leave the class they’re finally beginning to see the benefits. Then, it’s back to an emphasis on points rather than learning in other classes. The same idea applies when a student has a single class with SBAR and several without. It’s crazy to think about the mixed messages he/she must be receiving about grades and learning. Sad. Thanks again for being such a strong SBAR advocate.
Posted 23 Nov 2009 at 8:06 pm ¶Thank you, Matt, for so eloquently sharing your writing and thinking about it on MeTA Musings. You’ve reminded me – and many others, I’m positive – of the importance of fair assessment and its role in creating a positive class community.
Posted 23 Nov 2009 at 8:44 pm ¶Post a Comment