Tag: report cards

Things I Know 178 of 365: Report cards should be better

Zachary has been a joy to work with this year. I will miss him next fall.

– Mary Cavitt, my kindergarten teacher

From kindergarten forward, the majority of schools get progressively worse at telling students and parents what’s being learned and how well students are learning it.

A few days ago, my mom stumbled upon a folder marked “ZAC – School” while searching for immunization records.

Not the least of the documents in the folder were both my first and my last report cards as a K-12 student.

I found my final high school report card first.

When I saw it, my eyes flashed to class rank, then GPA, then a quick scan to remind me of my final courses and teachers.

A few pieces of paper later, 24 years after it was issued, I found my kindergarten report card.

It required a little more time for consumption. Nowhere did it tell me where I ranked among the other 5 and 6 year olds. I had no idea as to my kindergarten GPA either.

The only real use for the report card was a detailed accounting of my progression as a student throughout the year.

Groan.

I could remember every piece of information from that first year of K-12. I would be hard-pressed to recount half of 1% of anything covered in my senior macroeconomics class. I’d honestly forgotten I’d taken macroeconomics until I saw the report card.

In the comments section for each quarter, Mrs. Cavitt wrote a short message to my mom alerting her to my progress and letting her know I was being seen by my teacher.

In the “Comment Explanation” section of my senior report card – nothing.

As a kindergartener, I had little use for my report card. It was a document for the adults in my life to examine and use as a starting place for conversation.

In my later years, the report card held much value. It was a quarterly mile marker of my progress toward college and beyond. Still a communication between the adults in my life, it raised more questions than answers. I have no idea how I got that B in my first quarter of English IV, nor do I know what improved in the second quarter that led to an A.

I’m certain my parents asked questions on these very topics. I’m sure I stumbled through my answers and took stabs at the multitude of possible reasons for my grades.

I try to imagine, though, what would have transpired were I not as successful as a student.

If I’d been lost in the tall grass of high school with Cs, Ds and the occasional F, this report card would have served no purpose other than to reinforce my failures and dumbfound my parents.

If I’d not had such dedicated parents, the conversations would have stopped there and the frustrations would have continued to mount.

The modern middle and high school report card is an arcane relic made supremely ironic in light of the millions of dollars spent nationally in the name of gathering data.

I’m certainly aware of the systemic impediments in place, but improving communications with students and parents on individual learning need not include standardized tests and computer-generated reports.

At the end of my kindergarten year, in math, I could name the four basic shapes, count to 43, add, subtract, print my numerals and much more.

At the end of my senior year of high school, in math, I got a B.

Which measure focused on the learning?

Things I Know 121 of 365: Parent conferences should be amazing

The institution of grading students on an A through F scale has done a horrible disservice to education. It has falsely given the impression to generations of students that the teacher or the professor has some ultimate authority over the value of their work, as if their own assessment of what they were doing was somehow secondary.

– Michael Winetsky

Teacher conferences at my high school included the teacher and my parents. As was reported back to me, my parents would travel from classroom to classroom listening and questioning as each teacher explained a semester’s worth of work and learning in about 5 minutes.

My part of the conference came once they arrived home.

“What do think Mrs. Henning-Buhr said about you?” my mother would say.

I’d fumble through an answer, and we’d move on to the next teacher.

Though I never saw them play poker, my parents would have run any table they chose.

As I explained my perceptions of a class and guessed at my teachers’ takes on our learning relationships, my parents sat in perfect stoic silence. Not once did they give so much as a raised eyebrow to indicate what I was saying was at least close to what they’d heard.

The things of which I was sure, like my grades, were of no help.

“I got an A in that class,” I would say.

“But what did the teacher have to say about your learning?” my stepfather would reply.

We would go ‘round and ‘round like this until I started talking about my actual experiences in the classroom without mention of my scores.

Grades have been on my mind this week as we wrapped up conferences at SLA. Twice each year, advisors sit down with advisory students and their parents to look over narrative report cards, discuss the previous quarters and set goals for the time ahead.

Because we have all an advisee’s narratives in one place, the conference can be about a larger picture than my parents’ 5-minute discuss-and-dash approach.

It’s not perfect.

For all of the community we’ve built and the lengths to which our students’ teachers have gone to qualify the learning for the term, we still have discussions where parents ask their kids, “Why did you get a B in Class X instead of an A?”

I hate these conversations.

I realize they come from years and years of the adults in the room being conditioned by grades, but I still hate them.

If a student was completely lost in the tall grass of algebra at the beginning of the semester, earning C’s and D’s on work, but found his way through it with support and guidance from the teacher and peers, a grade based on the mean average from the quarter is not going to denote that progress.

Depending on any number of factors, that student final grade could be a B or a C.

The dangers of grades are reflected in the conferences.

In an attempt to put more ownership of the process on the students, my co-advisor and I ask our advisees to lead their own conferences.

The look through their narratives and their report cards, take notes on what they want to highlight and then, on the day of the conference, lead us through a discussion of their learning.

Some are rockier than others, but all of them have more student input than any conferences my parents had with my teachers.

What I haven’t quite figured out is how to help students move away from a defensive posture when speaking about their grades and learning.

To a student, whether straight A’s or report card potpourri, every advisee takes on an almost apologetic tone as we wind our way through the conferences.

Often, I’ll interject.

“Learning is difficult. Meaningful learning is even more difficult. You did a lot of work in the last quarter to learn, you should be proud of yourself. I know I am.”

I’ll get a faint smile and sometimes a “Thank you,” then we’re back to defense.

Maybe I should be taking my parents’ approach, but with a minor tweak.

Maybe I should keep the narratives and the report cards from the students and start every conference with the same question, “What good things did your teachers have to say about you?”

Things I Know 119 of 365: Report cards can be so much more

It is difficult to imagine a more potent lever for changing the priorities of schools than the evaluative measures we employ.  What we count counts.  What we measure matters.  What we test, we teach.

– Elliot W. Eisner, “The Meaning of Alternative Paradigms for Practice”

Writing narrative report cards is difficult. It is time-consuming and difficult.

At the end of the first and third quarters, SLA teachers write narrative report cards for each student.

Narratives don’t replace traditional report cards, they augment them.

Four years ago, my first round of narratives snuck up on me. I joined the faculty midway through the first quarter. I’d barely learned the students’ names and was being asked to write a few paragraphs about their strengths and weaknesses as well as set a few goals for the remainder of the school year.

While each student got a couple personalized sentences, that first round of narratives included a lot of copying and pasting.

It wasn’t until I sat in parent conferences with my advisees and read what my colleagues had written in their narratives that I started to understand what narratives could be for the students.

My second attempt was much better.

In year two, I learned that writing the narratives to the students rather than about the students helped me to feel I was connecting with them as I wrote. It also helped me to remember I was writing about a person, fighting off the slight tendency to write about my students in a dry and clinical manner.

In years three and four, I felt the greatest shift in my classroom practice as influenced by narratives. While looking at my grade book helped inform what I wrote to my students about their learning over the course of a quarter, the data it provided quantified students’ learning when I was trying to qualify it.

I began to use the note function with assignments in the grade book to track thinking that was particularly poignant. The use of Google Docs in the classroom made almost every piece of written work instantly searchable. I could copy and paste again, but this time it was excerpts from student work or comments I’d left that illustrated areas of strength or weakness in the quarter.

This past quarter, I asked students to keep longitudinal records of their thinking regarding the books they read in class. Each record had a section dedicated to a key literary concept. When writing narratives, I could track students’ abilities to articulate how a book’s author used figurative language to tell a story. If the records were blank or incomplete, I could comment on that as well.

Because narratives can be time-consuming and difficult, I’d created systems and structures throughout the quarter that could feed my reporting to offer a detailed assessment of student learning.

Because I’d built these systems and structures, my students and I could track the learning, reading and writing happening in the classroom. Not quite a portfolio, I’d built a web of data.

Writing a good narrative requires detail. I built assignments that supplied that detail. Multiple-choice, fill-in-the-blank, true-and-false, and matching assessments won’t work in my classroom. They don’t provide me with the deep understanding of my students’ progress I know I’ll need when sitting down to write narratives.

I changed my approach to teaching because I needed a better way to write about my students’ learning. Because I changed my approach, I came to better know about my students’ learning.

Writing narrative report cards is time-consuming and difficult.

I’m a better teacher for it.