not fixed ability
• Thinking activities that require collaboration and deliberation
When teachers and students are mindful of the reflection process, they engage in ongoing dialogue about student learning and begin to develop behaviors that promote and encourage improvement.
Teachers Determine Grades With a Calibrated Interpretation of Student Evidence
When examining the evidence of a student’s work, the teacher decides whether he or she has achieved an expectation. No matter the algorithm or formula, determining proficiency is never as precise as simply reviewing the evidence against expectations. By shifting the grade determination away from mathematical formulas, some teachers continue to think that grading becomes more subjective and less valid. However, evidence-based grading should reduce subjectivity. In an evidence-based model, teachers collaboratively:
• Vet learning targets and gradations of learning
• Create formative assessments
• Review student work to calibrate interpretations
When we make calibrated and common decisions about student evidence to interpret their proficiency, we provide a fair and accurate learning environment superior to one with arbitrary cutoffs or thresholds.
Unlike standards-based grading, which tends to focus on the quantity of standards achieved, evidence-based grading focuses on the student’s evidence of proficiency. In essence, the teacher focuses on the growth within a student’s body of work to determine the student’s performance. The teacher uses formative assessments to evaluate each student’s growth and final grade.
In Elements of Grading: A Guide to Effective Practice, Douglas Reeves (2016a) states, “What we ascribe to students must be a matter of judgment as well as the consequence of evidence and reason” (p. 1). Traditional arguments force logical consequence and reason out of the grading conversation and replace them with arguments about accumulating points or other external rewards. Standards-based grading attempts to bring the discussion back to evidence, but it tends to fall short because it relies on the quantity of standards achieved—often appearing more like an achievement checklist than a discussion about learning development.
Evidence-based grading promotes dialogue between teachers and students about how students demonstrate learning and how they actually prove what they know, what they understand, and what they can do. This level of discussion encourages a fundamentally different instructional framework for teaching and learning. In this instructional framework, we must engage students in how they talk about learning, how they demonstrate learning, and how they produce evidence that demonstrates learning. This differs from traditional grading discussions that revolve around points earned, letter grades, or percent averages. Those types of discussions are not about the learning; they are about grades.
In evidence-based grading, the student and teacher discuss the skills achieved and evidence skills were developed. When teacher teams calibrate their expectations, create common assessments to capture evidence of those expectations, and distinguish whether the evidence shows patterns that meet those expectations, we have a process that is more precise than a mathematical formula because we’re talking about learning and communicating about growth and gaps.
Schools might struggle in their effort to make changes to grading practices if they continue to focus on standards, topical units, task-based curriculum, rote and short-term memory learning, and mathematical averages. Their conversations can be far more successful with evidence-based grading, which centers on a proficiency-based curriculum, reflective interaction with students, and collaborative and communal discussions about evidence. It is important that the discussions about learning and the evidence of learning remain the focus—be very careful not to fall back into old habits and old arguments about point gathering or worse, grade grubbing.
Five Phases of Implementing Evidence-Based Grading
Schools should not do the work of changing grading practices from the top down. The best chance for making lasting and significant changes in grading practices is through thoughtful and challenging professional development and the creative insights of teachers who are experts in their discipline. Change does not come easily through a sit-and-get, stand-alone professional development day or through a one-size-fits-all model. Instead, professional development must recognize that individual teachers and collaborative teams vary in expertise, knowledge, skill, and perspective. Any school change needs input from these diverse perspectives. This takes time, but when schools implement positive change with thoughtful deliberation and smart intentions, this change can last.
Every teacher brings different strengths and capabilities to work each day. We must value these viewpoints and consider them during the decision-making process. By providing more focused, worthwhile professional experiences for teachers, we can all make sense of best research practices to guide change in our schools.
We rely on long-standing research grounded in the creative process to create individualized, effective professional development experiences. Psychologist and author Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (1990) presents this process in five interconnected and overlapping stages, which inspired our five-phase process: (1) preparation, (2) incubation, (3) insight, (4) evaluation, and (5) elaboration. Summarizing the creative process based on previous work around the development of change, Csikszentmihalyi (1990) provides a better framework for professional learning among educators.
Many professional learning experiences we have observed tend to be lecture based and noncollaborative. Expert educators collaborate in five very different ways during the decision-making process toward change. As we’ve found, this allows us to create different forms of professional learning experiences that help us evolve change—by considering what we know, what we think, what we discover, how we evaluate, and why we build change. We believe this is a much more intentional way of approaching change, and we find that it helps us collaborate more effectively among teachers who might have varying thoughts or opinions about what is best for students.
For the purpose of simplicity, this book shows how effective education teams work through these five interconnected phases of the creative process. The phases first appear as separate events, but eventually all phases begin to interact with one another.
Csikszentmihalyi (1990) outlines the five phases of the creative process:
1. Preparation is becoming immersed in problematic issues that are interesting and arouse curiosity. Preparation is the term that psychologists apply to the first [phase] of the creative process when individuals are starting out and struggling to perfect their craft. Inspiration is what drives the curiosity of both great artists and scientists to persevere through their years of hard work.
2. Incubation refers to the period during which ideas churn around below the threshold of consciousness. After an individual has started working on a solution to a problem or has had an idea leading to a novel approach to an effort, the individual enters the incubation stage. According to research psychologists, this stage can last hours, days, months, or years. When individuals try to solve problems consciously, it becomes a linear process, but when problems are left to incubate or simmer, unexpected combinations occur. And it’s these unexpected combinations that form domain-changing breakthroughs.
3. Insight is the “Aha!” moment when the puzzle starts to come together. The insight stage is also called the eureka experience. Some psychologists call it illumination. It’s the exact moment in time when a problem that an individual has been trying to solve—for days, months, or years—comes together in his or her mind to form a clear resolution. This resolution only emerges after a complex and lengthy process.
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