For the last few days as I have been thinking about the topic of grading in a Thinking Classroom with the support of Magma, I’ve been reflecting on grading in my math teaching past. I’ve had times when I’ve been quite sure that my formula for how many points each assignment was worth and the percent weight of each category accurately translated into the correct grade that reflected what my student had earned. But, that shifted as I learned more and as the whole field of education has evolved.

The following are some shifts that I have noticed:

Eliminating zeros for missed work. It turns out that giving students a zero for missed work can make it mathematically impossible for students to recover their grades. Instead many teachers are opting to give a 50% for missing work. Read more here. 

But, what about homework and participation points? These amounted to us using grades to reward students for behaviors that we are trying to encourage. They do nothing to inform the reader of the grades as to what the student knows and can do. 

Another idea I encountered is that of an “OMNIBUS” grade, which started me thinking about what exactly a grade should communicate. An omnibus grade is one score or number that encompasses everything about the student’s efforts, accomplishments, and understanding all in one letter or percent. 

Standards Based grading is another theme in grading that has impacted my thinking. This is when grades reflect students’ progress on specific standards, often on a 0 to 4 scale.

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And the last shift that I have observed is the message from Thomas Gutskey “We don’t assign grades to students, we assign grades to performance. And as performance is always temporary, grades, too, should always be temporary.” This way of thinking is in line with nurturing a growth mindset, and also aligns with the Ideologies in Building Thinking Classrooms. For example we name the problems mild, medium, and spicy based on the problems, not on the ability of the students. 

In Building Thinking Classrooms, Dr. Peter Liljedahl calls out the tension that a BTC teacher feels between how they are teaching their students and how they are assessing them. I love the phrase in BTC he uses, “no matter how much freedom we had to break the institutional norms within the classroom, three to four times a year we still had to dock with the mother ship and… report out a grade.” 

Peter calls out the difference between a point-gathering paradigm for grading in which every point that students “gather” is recorded in the gradebook, and then at the end we divide by the total number of possible points to yield a grade. This is the omnibus idea of a grade, and one of the impacts I often experienced was requests for extra-credit towards the end of the grading period to add to the numerator. But this method doesn’t tell us what a student knows and understands, and even though I was convinced as a new-ish teacher that I had the perfect, objective, formula…it wasn’t actually objective. 

What’s more, this method really didn’t tell me what students learned in my classroom. As a simple example, a student who alternated between getting 6’s and 10’s on 10 point assignments all quarter would receive the exact same grade as the student who got all 6’s for the first half of the quarter and then “got it” and got all 10’s for the rest of the quarter. In the delightful example of parachute packer school, which of those two would you rather have pack your parachute when they graduated? There is a wonderful illustration on page 257 of Building Thinking Classrooms you can check out, and you can read more about the origins of the idea of standards based grading over time here.

Dr. Peter suggests using a data-gathering paradigm, which works beautifully in conjunction with the navigational tools that we discussed in the previous blog about helping students know what they know and what they have yet to learn. 

Dr. Peter advocates for building a rubric for a unit and then recording student progress on the topics for the unit. This rubric would be very similar to the Navigation tool that students use, but the things the teacher records would be a bit different. Below is a sample rubric for Multiplication and Division of Decimals, in which the problem numbers from Magma are listed in each cell so that teachers and students know where these concepts have been assessed. For a quarter or semester this table would include more concepts, but also students would have multiple opportunities to demonstrate understanding. 

Example of Navigation Tool for Multiplication & Division of Decimals

Dr. Peter suggests that teachers track progress similarly to how students might in a navigation tool, (Please see the previous blog on helping students navigate).  Teachers can also track when the data comes from an observation or a conversation. This enables teachers to use day-to-day classroom evidence in addition to evidence from quizzes and tests. 

Magma adds an extra tool to support teachers in data-based grading. The Magma Skills Wheel gives a visual of how a student has done on an assignment. This data display is available for every assignment that students work in Magma, enabling both students and teachers to monitor progress.

A variation on the BTC navigation tool that teachers and students might use is to create a Stats wheel that students can complete as they progress through a unit of study. If teachers create a practice test for a chapter or unit of study in advance of teaching the unit, students can use that practice test as a way to track their progress in the unit. Teachers can show students what the stats wheel for the unit looks like before they start the chapter, and then monitor progress as they work through the chapter.

In a Thinking classroom, teachers and students can use Magma to chart and report their progress towards learning goals and targets. The process of both making those goals transparent and reporting in a way that gives a clear picture of what students know and can do is exciting and transformative.

Let us know how you are thinking about grading in your Thinking classroom with Magma. If you are interested in more information about using Magma to support student learning please click here to connect with our Integration Partners. 

Resources:

Edutopia: https://www.edutopia.org/article/why-i-stopped-giving-zeros/  

ASCD: https://www.ascd.org/el/articles/grades-that-show-what-students-know

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