"Is this graded?"

After three heavy weekends of grading and reporting, I can finally come up for air. Oh yeah, of course I still have some work to do-- it's never ending-- but this weekend it's about feedback and not about grading, and it's only about 3 hours' worth instead of 10 hours' worth.

Our middle school faculty is doing a book study of Thomas Guskey's Answers to Essential Questions about Standards, Assessments, Grading, and Reporting (Corwin, 2012). We have been having a lot of discussion about formative assessment: what it is, what it looks like, what to do with it once we have it. We are not new to the concepts of formative and summative assessments. We did a lot of work around those ideas about 5 years ago and have been working with it since. It's pretty surprising, then, how much variety we have as a faculty in our understanding and use of formative assessments.

Five years ago, our middle school made a decision to make our grade books consistent by having two categories of grades: formative (weighted as 15% of the whole grade) and summative (weighted at 85%). This change definitely made a big difference in helping our students and parents understand how grades were being calculated. Before this change, some teachers were counting homework as 85% and tests as 15%, others had standards-based categories (for example, world language teachers had categories for Speaking, Listening, Reading, and Writing-- each weighted as 25% of the total grade), and others had categories that included participation and collaboration. The 85%/15% weighting keeps us teachers focused on using grades to show achievement of standards, rather than behaviors (like participation), and keeps the grade reflective of how well the student can achieve on his/her own (summative assessments like tests and performance tasks and in-class projects) rather than practice opportunities (like homework).

This system has been good for teachers and parents, but we are starting to question the value for students. Students have become "trained" to ask, "Is it formative or summative?" when an assignment is given. Teachers infer that students use the answer to gauge how much effort they should put into completing the assignment: not much if it's formative, quite a bit if it's summative. It makes sense, considering the weighting categories, and our students are not fools. They do what they need to do when playing the game of school. (You can tell I am in the midst of a poetry unit! I may be a poet and not even know it!)

According to Guskey, formative assessments are supposed to give feedback to students about how well they are meeting the standard (and hopefully some information about how to get closer) as well as giving feedback to teachers about how to adjust instruction based on where students are in their learning. Bottom line, formatives shouldn't be graded because their purpose is practice and feedback. 

So our conversations about formative assessments have two sides to them: we understand and agree to the concept that they shouldn't be graded, yet we wonder if students will take them seriously if we don't slap a grade on them (even a small one like 15%). 

I think we can get away from grading formative assessments if we do more work re-training our students to view them as learning opportunities in which they get to practice a skill or strategy and get feedback about how well they are doing before the summative assessment. To that end, I have been watching my language when I make assignments and get the inevitable question, "Is this graded?" I am using the phrases "learning opportunity" and "get feedback" more and more often. 

It's been interesting to see how this response affects students. The students who "get it" really do use the feedback to improve their work. I saw this very clearly when I was grading fantasy stories last weekend (one of the 10-hour work weekends I've been having): students who used the rubric to self-assess and make goals asked for help from peers and me when they got into trouble spots, and made improvements based on that feedback. Their summative assessment results placed them squarely in the A-B range. Those students who went off on their own and disregarded my feedback, did not get help from peers, and didn't see the rubric as a tool to improve their writing, sat squarely in the C-D range. 

I have a selfish interest in the "no grades for formative" debates too-- less grading for me to do! I still need to hold students accountable for doing the practice pieces (homework, in-class activities), but a complete/incomplete designation in the grade book can take care of that. As for "formative feedback", that is work I am glad to take on as long as students use it to make improvements before their summative. 

Now I have to get back to giving feedback on poetry analysis annotations. They will want to use it when they write it up for their summative poetry anthology project.