Setting Up Standards-Based Grading in a Traditional School

I have used standards-based grading for over a decade, and in all that time I’ve worked in schools that otherwise used traditional grading practices. My experience has ranged from being in a small school where I was the only person teaching my content and could make changes freely to being on a large team of teachers who had to give common formative assessments and stay within a few days of each other in terms of content and pacing.

No matter the circumstance, it is absolutely possible to implement standards-based grading within a traditional context. It just requires clear planning and clear communication.

Even if you’re curious about standards-based grading, reading that it will take additional work may make you ask, “Why would I even do it?”

The best answer I can give you comes from my own experience: I switched to a standards-based approach because I wanted more accountability for learning and more clarity in the data I was collecting. I achieved both of those, but what I didn’t expect was the huge impact this method would have on students and their approach to learning. Conversations shifted from being about what assignments a student needed to complete to get a better grade to being about how to improve in a skill they were struggling with. Students who would typically struggle in the past and then give up remained engaged because they knew they had another opportunity coming up to demonstrate their learning.

In order to make the shift, it’s essential to plan out how it will work in your classroom and your grade book and then develop a communication plan for your school leadership, your students, and their families at home.

Establish a Clear Plan

As you start planning how you will implement standards-based grading, you have to think not only about what you want but also about the grading and assessment requirements of your school.

The most important question you need to be able to answer for yourself and others initially is this: “How will someone be successful in this class?” Because you will still be in a traditional context, success will often be defined as receiving a high grade in the course.

I was able to answer this question by saying, “Students who receive a mix of 4s and 5s for their final scores for standards will receive an A.” I had anywhere from six to 10 essential standards that I assessed each trimester, and as long as students scored a 4 out of 5 on half of those and 5s on the rest, their grade would be an A. A student who had all 4s would get a B, a mix of 3s and 4s was a C, and all 3s was a D.

Next you’ll have to figure out how to utilize the online grade book. You’ll most likely be required to use district-mandated grading software, and there are always ways to make it do what you need.

My approach was simply to create a category titled “Cumulative Standard Scores” and have one assignment for each essential standard, each marked from 1 to 5. That category counted for 100 percent of the final grade. I had a section for formative assessments where I tracked students’ progress on each standard, but at the end of the term their grades were entirely based on their cumulative scores for the essential standards.

Here’s the nice thing about this system: Previously, when I averaged all homework, quiz scores, and test scores, many students were uncertain about why they got the grade they got—the grade seemed like the average of a bunch of random numbers. When I assess each standard, the reason for the grade is clear, as is what each student needs to do to improve.

Identify Potential Barriers

While you may love your plan, if you don’t take into consideration potential barriers, it will either fall flat or not end up being supported by administration. Barriers to this work are often systemwide or department-wide agreements regarding instruction, assessment, and grading.

For example, a common requirement in secondary schools is that teachers must input X number of grades per week. In this situation, there are a couple of possibilities. You could still input scores but simply weight them at zero. After conversations with my administrator, I was able to input a student learning reflection each week as an unweighted grade to meet that requirement.

Another potential barrier is the requirement to use common formative assessments. While those may feel like they go against what you are trying to do if they are not clearly designed to be standards-aligned, using something like an assessment blueprint to map the questions to the standards they align to will allow you to meet the requirements of using the same assessment the team is using and then take the results and make them meaningful in your system. This blueprint can also be adapted to be student-facing so that they analyze their own assessments to see which standards they did well on and which ones they struggled with.

In many states, contract language or laws protect a teacher’s ability to record grades according to their own designs, but make sure you have your grade book plan and potential solutions to all roadblocks you can think of prior to even beginning the discussion with your school leadership.

Communicate with Stakeholders

Once you have a plan you feel good about, the next step is to ask your administrator to support your goal of shifting toward standards-based grading. While many bargaining agreements have language about academic freedom and the teacher’s ability to control their own grading, this shift is much easier when your administrator is on board with your goal.

Following the discussion with school leadership—assuming your plan is approved—it’s essential to communicate your approach to students and families.

Here’s what I found to be most important in discussions with administrators and with parents and students.

1. Have both research-based and emotional reasons for the switch. Start each conversation by explaining the purpose for the change. I really wanted to help students develop a stronger sense of self-efficacy, which is connected to the second-highest item in John Hattie’s list of visible impacts on learning. Self-efficacy has been shown to increase students’ academic achievement.

You could also talk about how you want your grading to be more accurate—standards-based grading approaches tend to demonstrate stronger alignment with state test scores than do traditional approaches—and you can argue that this increased accuracy will allow you to make better instructional decisions.

The research piece is crucially important, especially in the communication with school leadership, but most people are swayed more by their heart than their brain. Think about specific students who could have benefited from this new approach. I would tell people about a student who was one of the most prolific readers in my class and one of the most creative and skilled writers, but failed my class miserably because she simply wasn’t doing the right tasks. I didn’t know how to fit her demonstrations of learning into a task-focused grading system. This story helped convince one of my administrators that this change was worth making.

2. Clarify how grades will be calculated. I have found that if I can clearly communicate how a student can be successful in the class, it eases a lot of concerns about the shift. Because standards-based grading is often either unknown or misunderstood, the key is to keep your explanation clear and concise. I try to focus simply on what will count at the end of the term and how scores are calculated. If I can explain those two things clearly, it helps get things off on the right foot and minimize the number of questions I receive later on or challenges about a student’s grade.

I have a letter that I will send home to families and also a slide show that I walk students through at the beginning of the year (and typically I do this again a few weeks later). The key for students is often seeing some scenarios that show how the whole process works.

I have found it incredibly helpful to use home-to-school connection nights (often called parent-teacher conferences) to emphasize the value of this approach to grading and assessment. I love being able to sit down with a student and their caregivers and say, “If you look at their grades, these are a couple of areas they are successful in, and here are a couple of areas where they are struggling.” That clarifies this approach, which may feel abstract or theoretical, and helps the family see the tangible value in it.

I would love to say that once these two pieces—clarifying your plan and communicating it to all stakeholders—are in place, you’ve solved everything that will pop up in the switch to standards-based grading, but that’s obviously not true. As with any practice, the fine-tuning and refinement are where classroom practices exponentially increase in value. However, these two steps do something crucially important: They open a door. They give you access to an approach in your classroom that completely changed how I was able to support learning in the classroom.