6 — Wednesday, Dec. 1, 2021 — North Pointe
IN-DEPTH
Out with the old
In with the new
Pandemic causes teachers to revisit grading methods By Farrah Fasse, Annabelle Julien, Bella Yoakam & Elly Meteer EDITOR-IN-CHIEF, SECTION EDITORS & INTERN The primary focus for administration and faculty this year is to “optimize learning,” according to Principal Dr. Kate Murray. Due to the pandemic’s effects on the education system, there have been many nationwide conversations about how to support students and their learning. Along with those discussions, additional topics such as reassessments and late work, and how they can benefit the students on both grades and learning became important issues discussed throughout the faculty. One of the silver linings of the pandemic was that it allowed teachers to rethink grading and learning. English teacher Paul Golm believes that the pandemic helped him and many other teachers develop new policies that best support students. “I think we were really kind of shown during the pandemic that holding really strict philosophies about grading leaves a lot of kids behind,” Golm said. Furthermore, senior Sophia Graham says she thinks many teachers’ flexibility is beneficial following an unstable school year due to the pandemic. “For right now, after the craziness that was last year’s Zoom, school, hybrid, everything, flexib[ility] is basically what students want and what’s going to be most effective right now while we transition back into a more normal school year,” Graham said. Another way for teachers to help provide meaningful feedback is with formative assessment, according to Murray. Overall, this allows teachers to check progress and understanding before a summative assessment, such as a test or quiz. “A formative assessment system, combined with meaningful feedback, has been shown to drastically increase student learning,” Murray said. “Meaningful feedback for a student should be able to, one, restate what the goal was, two, specify where the student is in relationship to the goal. Then, three, explain to the student how to close the gap between the two.”
Learning how to learn
During Monday morning faculty meetings, teachers have been gathering in subgroups called Application Teams, or A-Teams for short. These groups cover different forms of meaningful feedback for students,
such as social emotional learning, alternative forms of assessment and grading. Science teacher Colleen Byrn is a part of an A-Team on metacognition, which focuses on helping students self-reflect and analyze their own thought patterns, in order to better understand not just how to do their work, but also how to approach it. “Metacognition is, it sounds weird, but it's thinking about your thinking,” Byrn said. “It’s the idea that if you can recognize how you think about things, you can better how you think and/or change how you think, which really impacts learning and students doing better.” Byrn says she, along with the other members of her group, is working on formulating self-assessments and reflections to help students hone these skills. “[We are] trying to figure out what students are aware of in terms of their learning habits and what they aren't,” Byrn said. “That's not like ‘I do my homework, I don't do my homework’ but, ‘when I'm doing work, how do I think about it?’ We're strategically trying to figure out ways to ask questions, just to see where students are, so that we can better address navigating through that.” In A-Teams this year, staff has also been utilizing a 2021 guidance report from the Educational Endowment Foundation entitled “Teacher Feedback to Improve Pupil Learning.” The report, based on educational research, contains six recommendations for upholding the principles, methods and implementation of meaningful feedback. Murray hopes that what staff learns from this will help them as they ensure all their practices and policies best support students’ learning. “I think that we continue to learn as we read and discuss together the impact of these different strategies,” Murray said. “I would like to see us continue to learn, grow and change in ways that are holding students accountable for the learning, and not just the date on which they learned it.”
Balancing the scale
Currently, the Grosse Pointe Public School System utilizes a non-equidistant grading scale for secondary students within the learning management system, Schoology. Passing grades, As, Bs, Cs and Ds, span 10% increments while an E, a failing grade, makes up 60% of the grading scale. This is a typical procedure within many school districts across the country, and is something that is currently being questioned as a part of a national conversation about equitable grading in education. Schoology automatically assigns zeros when teachers mark assignments as “missing.” Some educators, including Golm, have taken to overriding automatic zeros and giving students a 50% for missing assignments. “The lowest score I would like to give students on [tasks], especially big tasks, is a 50% , because a zero doesn't adequately reflect [a student’s ability] when it calculates their full grade for the quarter,” Golm said. “It doesn't adequately reflect where they actually are. When you look at the mathematics behind choosing to be more lenient, or trying to assign grades that better reflect the skill, the actual tools we use need to actually support [their grade and growth].” However, when calculating a student’s final grade for a quarter or an exam, GPPSS uses an equidistant grading scale, with the lowest possible percentage being a 50. If a student scores lower than 50%,
inue to t n o c s u s that e to see y k a i l w d n l i “I wou hange c d le for n b a a t n w o u r o g learn , ents acc d ate on u t d s e g h n t i t d not jus are hol d n a , g d it.” in e n n r r a a e e l l the they which y e Murra Dr. Kat al Princp
