Thanks for this detailed description of your process of shifting away from
grades! Entertaining as well as enlightening. Wow!
I've been reading a biography of Thomas Jefferson this winter. Jefferson
realized that certain changes become possible during a revolutionary period,
and was aware of the importance of striking while the iron is hot. For
instance, he successfully advocated for a decimal-based currency system in
the 1780s, but had no success getting congress to adopt a rational (metric
like) weights and measurement system in the 1790s. The iron was cooling.
All the not-using-grades schools mentioned in this thread implemented that
approach while the iron was hot... when or just after their schools were
formed. It would be interesting to hear about a successful traditional
school that stopped using grades? Does such a creature exist? Disruptive
innovation theory predicts that it would be extremely rare.
I believe information technology is heating up schools to a degree where
major change is possible. The iron is starting to glow a bit. Who are the
Jeffersons of our time?
Fred
(To prevent this discussion from sliding off to the 'siding of oblivion'
listserve equivalent we may want to move it over to ISENET where it will be
more accessible down the road.)
I wonder if major changes like
On Thu, Mar 4, 2010 at 8:38 AM, Bill Ivey <bivey01370@gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi!
>
> The process of having the middle school shift to standards-based
> assessment began at our end-of-year meeting after the second year of
> the school (spring 2005). I had brought in photocopies (with written
> permission from the author!) of parts of Rick Wormeli's excellent book
> "Fair Is Not Always Equal," and by the end of the meeting we had
> decided to forego letter grades and start making the transition,
> assuming the approval of our next Head of School. During the next two
> years, we began laying the groundwork among ourselves, with the
> "simple" discussion around the design and layout of the actual
> progress report forms provoking a lot of discussion about not just the
> concrete wording used on the form but also ways to rethink our
> teaching, link it more specifically to standards, ensure it's
> developmentally appropriate, and more. It was hard for us to leave
> behind the idea of giving some sort of global assessment for a given
> project and really begin to see learning as a continuum in many
> different areas, some of which would be explicitly noted and assessed
> in a given project, others of which might have to wait. I think this
> work was critical to our success - it meant when we threw the switch
> sending letter grades onto the Siding of Oblivion, we all had a pretty
> deep understanding of what exactly we were doing, and why. We also had
> a progress report form about which we felt pretty good.
>
> Last winter, our new Head of School courageously decided we would
> throw that figurative switch this year, and it became time to involve
> parents in the process. Since the birth of the middle school, we have
> produced a regular newsletter that always includes some sort of essay
> (currently a blog) on middle school kids, learning, life, that sort of
> thing, and this provided a great forum to lay groundwork for the
> announcement. We announced the change right before Spring Family
> Weekend, and scheduled a meeting for parent reactions to the new
> progress report forms; it went well. We wrote up this meeting for the
> newsletter, got Board approval for the new practice, and went live at
> midterms this fall. Again, we used the newsletter to lay groundwork
> for the new practice. We do student-led conferences, so it was a great
> way to integrate those and the progress report forms into a holistic
> discussion of how and why we assess. Reactions were generally
> positive, with the strongest resistance, such as it was, coming from
> two students, both returning 8th graders who were very grade-focused
> last year. We talked to them and other students about why we're doing
> this, made a couple of much-needed improvements to the form, and
> sighed in relief. By now, the new system has almost come to seem
> routine.
>
> Probably a longer discussion than this needed to be, but brevity is
> not a strength of mine, and hopefully this was helpful at any rate. If
> you have any questions, just let me know!
>
> Take care,
> Bill Ivey
> Stoneleigh-Burnham School
>
>
>
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