Here at TBS, we are proud to have made the decision four years ago to stop giving letter grades in our Middle School. Grades are intellectually dishonest artifacts designed for adult consumption instead of furthering student learning, serve to judge students solely on the product they produce rather than provide insight into the ongoing process of their learning and understanding, and are well researched to have negative consequences for both high and low achieving students, around motivation and self-esteem, respectively. At TBS, we don't judge students based on how much raw information they can memorize and recall (though we want to know that, too); we want to understand how a child takes in new ideas, analyzes them for their component parts, synthesizes them with what s/he already knew, and then applies them in the context of new and novel situations that speak to the child's motivation and interest.
In turning away from letter grades, we took guidance from the work of Project Zero to help us begin to consider what thorough and rigorous assessment of a student should look like, and how to communicate that to families. Our faculty has done - and continues to do - extensive professional development in using various forms of assessments that range from summative to formative in nature, including standardized tests, teacher-generated exams, portfolios and rubrics, and peer and narrative self-assessments. And in our progress reports, we have used a set of terms that communicate the in-process development of each child, rather than summative judgments of their products or efforts: Emerging, Developing, and Mastering.
In the progress reports that faculty have begun to write for the first semester of the current school year, we have made an adjustment to the terms (and their definitions) we present on the progress reports, in response to parent and faculty feedback that we needed to be more precise in how the reports communicated our evaluations of student learning. This is the first adjustment we have made to these terms since introducing them four years ago, and it comes after significant research into the terms and definitions used by other programs both locally and nationally, as well as reflection on the strengths and weaknesses of our own system. We have revised our scale to use a six-point frame with the terms Not Observed, Emerging, Developing, Competent, Effective, and Mastering. The definitions are as follows:
Not Observed: Student has not yet demonstrated the skill, awareness or understanding in the school learning environment.
Emerging: Student sporadically demonstrates the skill, awareness, or understanding in learning environments both inside and outside the classroom, and rarely makes use of peer or teacher feedback.
Developing: Student sometimes demonstrates the skill, awareness, or understanding, applies the skill or awareness with contextual accuracy only in structured, teacher-created settings, occasionally makes use of feedback, and usually relies on external guidance to self-correct.
Competent: Student consistently demonstrates the skill, awareness, or understanding when working in structured classroom learning contexts, and occasionally in other settings. Student makes appropriate use of peer or teacher feedback and occasionally self-corrects with some guidance and direction.
Effective: Student almost always demonstrates the skill, awareness, or understanding in structured and emergent learning environments inside the classroom, and at times outside the classroom, relying on minimal feedback from others.
Mastering: Student always demonstrates the skill, awareness, or understanding in all learning environments, inside and outside the classroom, with independence and confidence.
Each of these definitions is written to include frequency of demonstration, the context of demonstration, and the role of feedback, in that order. They do not correspond with letter grades of A, B, C, D, and F, nor with judgement-laden terms like Excellent, Good, Satisfactory, and Poor. They are attempts at value-neutral descriptors of how a child is demonstrating his/her grasp of the skill, awareness, or understanding that is named in the assessment, and provide a data point for continuing the ongoing dialogue between teachers, students, and parents about what each child knows, and how each child learns. For this reason, we hope that parents do not respond with negative emotion to assessments that are identified as emerging or developing, though we know that some may have those feelings; to honor the development of each child, we must recognize that we all move through these stages of mastery on our educational path.
I'll close by saying that there are at least two small ironies in the school's shift away from grades that do not escape my notice. First, the process of truly coming to understand a child's understanding via rigorous assessment, and then expressing that through a report via the application of assessment terms to a dozen or so skill areas and a short personalized narrative, is exceedingly difficult for even the most skilled and conscientious teacher. Grades were far easier for faculty to give, and learning how to provide and then communicate authentic assessment is much harder. Second, adolescents are at a point in the developmental arc in which they are constantly comparing themselves to their peers, and thus interested in knowing how they did in their work compared to their peers. So, the lack of grades can become a point of tension, as we push them to engage in the more difficult work of active self-reflection and meta-cognition around their own work. In both cases, we are guiding our faculty and students to behave in ways that are intellectually and philosophically honest and in line with our school philosophy, and that is an essential step in our program's success.
Look for a letter from Head of School Mitch Bostian about the upcoming progess reports, as well as a yet-to-be-scheduled evening Parent Education event on assessment at TBS sometime in the next few weeks.
