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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.

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. 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.
5. 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.
6. 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.
7. 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.
8. 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.

Over at Twitter recently, @mctownsley pointed toward an earlier post at Edumacation about the tension between standards-based assessment and traditional grading.

Assessments, like any kind of data-based research, can be used by many people in many different ways.

One teacher might pump her fist in the air after seeing that 95% of her students passed this year’s reading test.  Another might perseverate on the 5% who failed, knowing that those students are the toughest to reach and no one’s reached them yet.  Another educator might take issue with the test’s validity and discount the results entirely, instead focusing on whether or not her students’ final portfolios demonstrated mastery of reading and writing for a variety of purposes and audiences.

The same can be said of assessment systems.  They, too, can be taken and manipulated in many ways by many people.

Look at traditional grading.  Take two English teachers working in the same grade at the same school.  Despite sharing a common, 100-point scale, two teachers’ students could earn the same scores but learn dramatically different things depending on the curriculum, assessment, and instruction used in the two classes.  Even if those teachers shared a common curriculum, a 90% in one class doesn’t have to mean the same thing in the other class.  What if both teachers gave book tests, but on different books?  What if both teachers gave book tests on the same book, but one teacher’s questions never broke the knowledge/comprehension ceiling?  Or what if both teachers gave the same test and it included analysis items, but only one of the teachers ever modeled or gave practice in answering analysis questions during the reading of the book?

Look at standards-based assessment and reporting (SBAR).  Take another two English teachers working together in the same grade at another school school.  Ask the same questions; you won’t get very different answers.

I ran a SBAR pilot in my classroom for a year and was then fortunate enough to work with a group of peers willing to try it department-wide for another year.  We learned a lot about assessment, grade-book design, and report-card design from struggling with the tension between SBAR and traditional grading.

While I believe standards-based assessment and reporting is better for learning than traditional grading, and while I believe that the two should not be mixed, I don’t worry so much about which system to use anymore.  I worry more about people issues.  How can you make sure that every student has a teacher who provides opportunities for authentic learning?  How can you make sure that every student has a teacher working with colleagues to transform rote content into fuel for life-long learning?  How can you make sure that every student has a teacher who cares more that students’ learning demonstrates mastery than that students’ behavior satisfies the teacher?

The SBAR process does a better job of pushing teachers to tackle those questions than traditional grading does.  However, there are multiple obstacles in the status quo to implementing an SBAR classroom or school-wide grading system, including grade-books and report-cards which are commonly adopted by a whole school or system and not often up for change.  Perhaps the biggest obstacle is our conditioned impulse to equate a 4- or 5-point scale with the 100-point scale used for traditional grading.  They do not match up.  The should never be cross-walked.  They are irreconcilably disparate.  Don’t do it.  When you tell a student that mastery equals 80%, or that approaching mastery equals 60%, you effectively squelch any intrinsic motivation the student has to move forward in learning by equating formative feedback with summative grades.  The 100-point scale and its letter grade equivalents exist to sort children by summative, lag indicators.  The 4-point scale exists to promote student learning by articulating the characteristics of different levels of mastery.  The 100-point scale suffers from inflation, discrepancy, subjectivity, and the confusion of student behavior with learning.  The 4-point scale, while adaptable, concentrates on learning and makes public the teacher’s commitment to providing clear benchmarks for students to reach.  There’s not a lot of wiggle room in the 4-point scale to fudge with decimals, to reward extra credit schoolwork less demanding then the learning, or to take points off of mastery for too much talking.  Ultimately, it’s better to take the assessment and feedback lessons learned from SBAR and to apply them in practice using a 100-point scale than it is to ever try to crosswalk the two.

It’s a reform-crippling irony that the public thinks number- and letter- grades provide more hard data about student learning than rubrics built on 4- and 5- point scales do. If your school or public is unwilling to publish or accept “grades” based on SBAR and its scales, make traditional grading mean more.

All criticisms of the 100-point scale aside, I still think it can be used to promote learning if teachers work together to make sure that the grades stand for real learning benchmarks, and to make sure that students can always improve their grades by demonstrating higher levels of mastery over time.  If teachers working together agree to tier assessments, for example, so that no one gets a B without applying knowledge, and no one gets an A without analyzing or evaluating  “new” information with “old” skills, then it becomes likely that both of those teachers will provide some instruction and practice on the kinds of thinking that make work personally meaningful for students.  I want teachers to design assessments and instruction that promote student meaning-making, regardless of the grading scale the teachers use.

Ultimately, any scale needs to be used to value, promote, and reward authentic learning.  The scale is a construct – it’s a communications technology; it’s not the learning itself.  Does your quarterly message to parents and students promote learning?  Even if your division requires you to use a scale with which you disagree, you can call home or re-purpose school postage or bandwidth with a newsletter or narrative report that more accurately describes students’ learning in your classroom.  You can pilot student-led conferences.  You don’t have to stop communicating at your grading scale.

In fact, it’s not this scale or that scale that’s the problem.  The problem lies in how we use the scales and how much care we take in making sure that the scales encourage learning and academic risk-taking instead of discouraging them.  Our problems with grading are people problems.  They come from grading in isolation for too long and from believing for too long that the 100-point scale is enough to unite us and our work.  We need to network with one another, as well as with experts in the outside world, to provide personally-meaningful, autnehtic learning and feedback for our students.  We need to expand our PLCs into PLNs.

What does a 90% or a 4 mean to you?  What do you think it means to your students?  How does it move forward their learning?  What do you think it means to world?  How can you be sure?  How authentic are the “grades” in your classroom?

Beware getting caught up in arguments with your peers about how to label learning; unite with your colleagues instead to align assessment, instruction, and feedback to ensure that learning is authentic and happening in the first place.  Make your standard authenticity and make sure to share out how it goes.