by Kelly Mogk
I was fortunate enough to spend the first several years of my teaching career at a school focused on brain-based teaching and mastery learning. We guided students to become self-sufficient learners, wrote narrative report cards, and helped students collect samples for the portfolio that followed them as they progressed from kindergarten all the way through fifth grade. There was no online gradebook, and we never put percentage-based grades on any student work. Our focus was on the learning, not the grade. It was a beautiful thing, and the beliefs I built there have colored everything I do as a teacher to this day.
Since leaving my original teaching home, I’ve experienced the difficulties of calculating percentage-based grades to assess student writing. Often when handing back graded writing and watching my students slump in their seats, I couldn’t help but remember a line from a movie my children watched obsessively during their teenage years, A Knights Tale: “You have been weighed, you have been measured, and you have been found wanting.” This was not the tone I wanted to set in my classroom. Something had to change.
Writing is a conversation, and assessment should be a part of this conversation. When students submit a piece of work to me, my first thought is always the same: First, do no harm. I want to develop writers that can express themselves with ease, and more than that—I want them to see themselves as writers and find joy in the learning. This can’t happen without ongoing conversation purposefully crafted to help them develop both their writing and revising skills. Handing a student a paper riddled with red corrections, annotations in the margins, and a random grade scrawled across the top simply isn’t going to accomplish these goals.
This year, I’ve decided to move back to my teaching roots, even though my school’s grading system requires percentage-based grades kept in an online gradebook. I was familiar with Mark Barnes’ SE2R system of feedback and assessment, and was fortunate enough to stumble upon a post on MiddleWeb from Sarah Donovan highlighting how she plans to use both Barnes’ system and her own three perspective peer feedback model with students. After exchanging a few emails with her to glean more insight on her practice, all the pieces of research I had been devouring over the summer finally started to fall together into a plan for my own fourth grade classroom.
At the beginning of the year, I shared a mastery level scale based on Robert Marzano’s work with students. They attached this scale to their writing portfolio along with our first few ELA learning standards. I used a simplified method found at Young Teacher Love to teach the proficiency scale to students, comparing real life experiences to our learning standards. I believe as we continue to have these conversations in class each child will be able to accurately discuss what they know about their current level of understanding in all our learning goals.
When we talk about our learning, we use this scale:
1 = Novice (needs one on one assistance to understand and accomplish tasks)
2 = Apprentice (has knowledge of the skill, but still requires some help using the skill)
3 = Practitioner (understands and uses the skill with ease)
4 = Expert (understands the skill, can use it in new ways, or teach it to other students)
As students work on their writing, I conference one on one or in small groups, moving from table to table to assess their progress. I created a binder for each of my four classes, with a tab for each student, which I carry with me as I’m conferencing. I’m using a technique called “track records” I read about in Hacking Education: 10 Quick Fixes for Every School, by Mark Barnes and Jennifer Gonzalez, to keep notes on both behavior and academic progress. I take quick anecdotal notes on each student’s track record throughout the week, making sure to take time to conference with students once a week to share what I’ve noticed and make goals for improvement the following week.
When students complete writing pieces, I plan to use Mark Barnes’ SE2R model to offer feedback. For example, we’re currently focused on writing complete sentences. I believe my feedback will look something like this:
• Summarize: I explain what they accomplished. (You wrote a complete, detailed paragraph explaining a time you went on an adventure.)
• Explain: I give details on the learning demonstrated and/or missing, based on criteria given before assignment was completed. (Each sentence includes ending punctuation, and you also demonstrated how to use commas in a series correctly, but most of your sentences are missing beginning capitalization.)
• Redirect: I reteach the skill that requires more learning. (Let’s look at a paragraph from the story we read yesterday. What do you notice about the beginning of each sentence? How can you demonstrate that in your own writing? Let’s use what we know to edit your paragraph.)
• Resubmit: I offer the ability for a student to resubmit the piece with corrections after they examine the skill in which they are not proficient. (I’d like you to rewrite this paragraph, paying close attention to what you know about how sentences begin, and thinking about how we edited your paragraph together. Please bring it to me when you are finished.)
In this way, I can keep the conversation going, and my writers have the benefit of continued practice to build their writing skills. This week, I began modeling how to work with a partner to offer feedback. I’m looking forward to trying out Sarah’s three perspective model soon, as I believe it will provide the structure my young learners need to provide consistent, detailed critique to their writing partners.
Working with my principal, I’ve decided on a system that will allow me to translate the levels of our mastery scale into grades for our online gradebook. While I won’t be putting any percentage-based grades on student work in class, we will discuss this translation system so they understand how their level on any given standard will look as a percentage grade. I still believe that grades are more of a hindrance than a help to students, but I have to acknowledge that these grades are currently the universal language that parents feel comfortable using to discuss progress with their children.
This may only be a small step forward, but it’s a happy step in the right direction. We’ve been in school now for three weeks, and these strategies are just beginning to bloom. My writers know what they need to know, they trust me to help them grow, and I’m excited to see how this process will develop along with them throughout the year.
Kelly Mogk is a Fourth Grade ELA and Social Studies teacher at Arlington Classics Academy in Arlington, Texas. When she is not lost in papers and research while working toward her Master’s of Liberal Studies, she can be found tweeting from the classroom.