Standards-Based Grading | Standards-Based Grading CAN work at the High School!

Jen Sigrist asks UNI Professor Matt Townsley a series of common questions that arise around the topic of Standards Based Grading in high school settings.

What is Standards-Based Grading ?

Jen Sigrist, Executive Director of Education Services at Central Rivers AEA discusses the topic of Standards Based Grading with UNI Professor Matt Townsley.

Jen Sigrist (00:08):
Hello, and welcome to the Central Rivers AEA Learning On-Demand Podcast. I'm Jen Sigrist and I'm the executive director of Educational Services. I've been a former curriculum director who has lived the struggles of implementing the work today's speaker is a national expert on. Today I'm here with Dr. Matt Townsley, a professor at the University of Northern Iowa, an author of over 20 articles and books focused on standards-based grading, and as a teacher who is the first in his school to discover this practice then is a curriculum director, and now as a professor, Matt's passion is helping educators create classroom environments that take the mystery out of learning by being standards-based. It's not every day that we find someone who gets up every day and is excited about grading, but I know it's you, Matt, so welcome.

Matt Townsley (00:58):
Hey, Jen. Great to be here. It's great to reconnect with you on this podcast.

Jen Sigrist (01:01):
Well, let's face it, Matt, high schools implementing standards-based grading face this pressure to get kids ready for college and career, which may slow down, or even stop their progress, and we want to equip the high school leaders to understand implementation considerations that are unique to the high school setting. This podcast is meant to be kind of this quick hitter, level up their learning through some common questions that you and I both know schools will face from teachers and parents. You've written a book along with your friend and colleague, Nathan Weir from your days in Solon about making grades matter, standards-based grading, and a PLC at work, so I know that I've got the right guy to talk to today about this whole work, so thank you so much for joining us.

Matt Townsley (01:52):
Well, thanks again, Jen. When I was at the state of Iowa Math Teacher Conference in 2008 and I first was exposed to these different grading things, I never thought I'd be here on this podcast talking with you about it. But as you mentioned, I do get up in the morning and just get really excited about grading. As you mentioned, I was a high school math teacher in Solon, Iowa, and then a district office administrator also in Solon, Iowa. You mentioned my friend and colleague, Nathan. We just had a really great run there in Solon of some fantastic teachers, some fantastic leaders that really wanted to make some changes in their grading practices.

(02:28):
Jen, I know that you know the story, but for our listeners, if they want to hear the story, there's a great kind of back and forth that Nathan and I had a number of years ago that we really preview in the introduction of our book, Making Grades Matter. Really, the journey of Solon being just pretty much every other high school out there to the Solon High School that we know today like many other high schools are and are aspiring to to really make their grading books be more about learning and less about points and percentages. As a teacher and administrator in Solon, also in supporting over a hundred schools across the globe, I love my current role, though, at UNI being an instructor and a professor. You and I probably both call this thing standards-based grading that we're talking about today, but we know that schools around the state call it things like standards-based assessment reporting, standards reference grading, standards-based grading. I know there's little differences, don't get me wrong, but for the sake of our podcast, can we just refer to it as standards-based grading?

Jen Sigrist (03:25):
That works for me.

Matt Townsley (03:25):
Okay, great. Phew, I'm good. I'm good. I'm good. I'm really looking forward to digging in today.

Jen Sigrist (03:30):
Yeah, great. Well, when I think of a standards-based grading, I mean, what immediately comes to mind is the elementary report cards. I was an elementary principal for a while, and oh, gosh, they were already standards-based. They had this idea of are we developing, are we proficient? They'd have narrative comments, we'd have lists of standards. They'd be multiple pages long for parents by the time they looked at the course of the full year. But when I think about what that looks like for a high school, it provides some serious changes to some grading practices. How do you do this and still have letter grades?

Matt Townsley (04:08):
Yeah. Wow. That's a big one because many of us are, perhaps our first exposure to thinking about standards-based is, indeed, that elementary report card that you referred to. Now, for high school leaders listening to this podcast, they wonder, "Well, what's that going to look like for us?" Our gradebook can't look exactly like that report card, so nearly every high school I know that is using standards-based grading compromises in this way by at the end of the reporting period still determining letter grades from standards.

(04:41):
As a high school leader, I would probably want to know that the standards-based gradebook itself is going to look different, but as a leader, when I talk with parents and as I talk with teachers maybe that are thinking about making this change, the takeaway here is that while the gradebook may look different, the high school transcript is going to stay the same. The way I think about it is that the gradebook is now written in pencil. In a standards-based grading setting, the gradebook is written in pencil. That is, it's dynamic until the end of the quarter, or the trimester, or the semester. But ultimately, at the end of that time, once all of the standards are inked in there through all the reassessments and through all of the different ways that students have demonstrated learning, at that point, that letter grade that's determined from the standards is going to be inked on the transcript. There's going to be things like GPAs and scholarships that are going to come from that.

Jen Sigrist (05:40):
Oh, oh, oh, we're going to have to talk about that, Matt. That's going to have to be a later question because I know that's going to be a big issue for parents and teachers thinking about GPAs and those, so I'll hold that thought because I do want to get into that, but you're already making me think. As an elementary teacher, I had 26 students I was doing that report card for, and I have 150 students in my secondary class, or my high school government classroom. Thinking about that report card looking the same, you're telling me that that's not true. I don't have to worry about that report card and writing comments for 150 kids like I would think of it in an elementary. It's going to look different than that, yet we might have some methods that are similar or that we might use in a secondary.

Matt Townsley (06:28):
Totally.

Jen Sigrist (06:28):
Talk to me about those.

Matt Townsley (06:29):
Yeah, so the standards are still going to show up in the gradebook at the high school level, just like the standards were going to show up on a report card at the elementary level, but what we do with those standards at the end of the quarter/trimester/semester is where high schools diverge or are different from the elementaries. Again, if I'm listening to this podcast, and I know, how do we do that? What do we do with that? How do we take that information from our electronic gradebook at our high school and somehow translate that to a letter grade on the transcript?

(07:01):
There are three different methods that I've observed high schools use, and they really come from a lot of great books, not just Making Grades Matter, but there's another great book out there called How to Grade for Learning by Ken O'Connor that also talks through this. Those three methods are what I call the convert-to-percentages method, the Marzano method, and the logic rule method. I'm not going to go into those in detail here, Jen, but perhaps we can add some information in the show notes to really direct our listeners to that.

Jen Sigrist (07:01):
Oh, great.

Matt Townsley (07:30):
But what I think that our listeners need to know is that each one of those methods has its pros and cons. If I'm honest, and I had to pick one of them, I would probably lean into the logic rule because it really focuses a lot more on the learning and less on the numerical aspect of things. But every electronic gradebook out there has its limitation, so school leaders really should dig into those three methods, and just make a determination for their local setting.

Jen Sigrist (07:56):
Yeah. Well, now I'm hearing about these grades, and it makes think right away of one of the barriers, or perceived barriers, questions that administrators are going to get when they think about doing anything different with grading, look at, you're smiling, you know, athletic eligibility. When I think about grading and you're making any changes to that, athletic eligibility we know is tied to grades here in Iowa, so I imagine those high school leaders are like, "How do these go together? How does athletic eligibility work in SBG?"

Matt Townsley (08:30):
Yeah, yeah. Great question. Big deal. Huge deal. There's no escaping this, Jen, there isn't. It's a thing. We all know here in Iowa that the state has its own rules, like the no pass, no play athletic eligibility rules that we have to abide by. Where it gets really tricky is that in a standards-based grading gradebook, the gradebook itself grows as the quarter or semester progresses. If you think about the traditional way of grading that we were probably all used to, every day an assignment was turned in, there were some points attached to it. Of course, it grew, but it was just added on to every day and week. In a standards-based gradebook, it gets a little bit different because there's a lot of practice and feedback where there really isn't a whole lot of numbers in the gradebook for a while, and then all of a sudden, it's like a dump truck comes and just dumps a bunch of numbers in there for the specific standards that were assessed at that moment. That's where it probably gives high school leaders some pause, "What do we do with this?" It might seem like a bunch of our students at that moment are magically going to seem ineligible.

(09:40):
I'll share in the show notes a framework that we used at Solon. We call it an early alert system. What we did is we made a more stringent athletic eligibility policy on an interim basis. For example, if a student was not passing at the fifth week in the reporting period, we made them ineligible for one week. The idea was we would rather you be ineligible right now for one week and get off the ineligibility list than find yourself failing at the end of the reporting period, and then have to sit out for an entire next reporting period. I think what a high school leader would really benefit from is seeing how that played out. Of course, it's not necessarily transferrable to every high school setting, but I think once they see that, what they're going to see is that it's a proactive approach that goes above and beyond what the state says that has to be done, and it really balances out the idea of students assessing and reassessing as the reporting period goes on.

Jen Sigrist (10:40):
Yeah, so you're saying each high school could think about their local take on a proactive approach.

Matt Townsley (10:45):
Yes.

Jen Sigrist (10:45):
Rather than waiting till the nine weeks, then, oh, here's your eligibility for the next nine weeks, or ineligibility, you could implement some things using your own policies about a five-week check, as you were saying. I had experience with a two-week check. Granted, we were a smaller school and our teachers could say, "Are you on track with your standards," and an incomplete might give you one week of ineligibility.

Matt Townsley (10:45):
Fantastic.

Jen Sigrist (11:12):
Or a warning that, "If you're still incomplete at week two, then you're going to be ineligible for two weeks." These are all local decisions, is what you're saying.

Matt Townsley (11:19):
Yes. The best part about it is this, Jen, the focus in getting students off the ineligible list is about learning.

Jen Sigrist (11:19):
Learning, right.

Matt Townsley (11:28):
Not just turning in more assignments or doing extra credit, it's about learning.

Jen Sigrist (11:32):
Right, right. You give a chance for a student to all along the way see their progress rather than the surprise that sometimes grades can be at the end of a nine weeks. At least for some parents, it felt like their kids were surprised in that system.

Matt Townsley (11:48):
Yes. Athletics, big deal. I bet you've got some other big hitters you want to talk about today.

Jen Sigrist (11:51):
Well, I was just going to say, so we avoided this conversation, or put it off at the very beginning when you were talking about how it plays into colleges and universities in the quote, end quote "real world," but one of the loudest criticisms we hear about standards-based grading at the high school is that it allows kids to redo or retake and reassess, and that's not really how life is post-high-school. You don't get to do that in your real world. I imagine you probably heard these kinds of things at Solon and when you're supporting schools in your work now. How do you respond to what seems like a pretty legitimate argument? "In my job, I don't get to redo things all the time." What's your response to that?

Matt Townsley (12:32):
Yeah, great. First, I think if I'm a high school leader listening to this, I have to acknowledge that in some cases in the real world, there is a redo or retake, like doing this podcast. We will get a chance if we need to redo or retake this podcast, yet there are other instances in life where there aren't retakes, and so just be real in that regard. Also, to acknowledge that there are some college professors that will give redos and retakes at the college level, but there's probably a lot that won't. Having been at the university now for a while, I can attest that college and university professors' grading practices vary widely.

(13:07):
I think what high school leaders need to know is first, that there's a different paradigm in the PK-12 system when compared to the college university system. PK-12 leaders, high school leaders we're very accustomed to things like No Child Left Behind, Every Student Succeeds Act. I'll just summarize those really succinctly. The whole aim of ESSA, the whole aim of NCLB is that as a high school, we're supposed to help as many kids as possible get it. That's it, right?

Jen Sigrist (13:36):
Yeah.

Matt Townsley (13:37):
Our scores show up in the newspaper and online, whether we like it or not baked into us just making sure that as many kids as possible get it. That's not the college or university paradigm. It's more of a sorting mechanism, sorting them into pre-med and not pre-med and the accountants and not the accountants and so forth. It's just a totally different paradigm. As a high school leader, we need to acknowledge that our paradigm is different than this post-high-school, university, college coursework.

(14:08):
The second thing to acknowledge specifically as a high school leader is that there are already things that we do on purpose that are different at the high school when compared to the university. Let me just give you a really crazy example, Jen. I have some family members that went to a large public university, and they've told me that they had class sizes of over 200 in a lecture hall. Now, with that idea in mind, should we just arbitrarily increase class size in high school biology to get students ready for lecture hall? No way. No educator, no high school principal I know ever thinks that's a great idea, so already there's some things we do that we have put in place because we know our paradigm is to help as many kids as possible get it, so when it comes to these grading practices, we can be okay doing it a little bit differently because we've already done some things differently in the past.

(15:00):
Secondly, there's some great research that supports all of this. Dr. Tom Guskey, Dr. Thomas Buckmiller, and I, we actually went out and found some university students at the end of their freshman first semester, and these were students that self-disclosed through our research process that they went to a standards-based high school. Through surveys and interviews. We asked them about their transition from high school to the university. You know what they told us, Jen? They told us that this whole redo and retake thing did not wreck their transition at all. In fact, they told us that, you know what? It was just one of many transitions that they had to make from being a high school student to a college student. I'll be happy to link to that research in the show notes for our high school leaders to access and share with others.

Jen Sigrist (15:46):
Great. It didn't make them soft, it didn't make them lazy.

Matt Townsley (15:48):
It did not. No, not at all.

Jen Sigrist (15:50):
What about the whole procrastination? If I get to redo it now, I've heard this one related to this topic where, "Oh, I know I'm going to get a chance to redo it, so I'm not going to study, I'm just going to see what the first test is like, and then I'll study"?

Matt Townsley (16:06):
Great. Great, great. At the high school level, the things that high school teachers implementing standards-based grading put in place can really deter that from happening, things like a prerequisite for reassessment being, "Did you complete your homework connected to that standard?" Another prerequisite is, "Can you show me the way that you studied for the next assessment?" There's all kinds of things that high school leaders, that high school educators can put in place to make it seem like it's more work for students to go through it not in a punitive sense. But we talk about in the real world, for example, if I want to pay my credit card bill late, the credit card company's like, "Have at it, but we're going to charge you a fee," and so it's just-

Jen Sigrist (16:47):
A win-win for them.

Matt Townsley (16:48):
... Yeah, it's win-win for the credit card company, but it really is just an opportunity cost is really what it is. As high schools, we can put in these opportunity costs. It's the same thing that's going to take place at the university level as well, an opportunity cost to make that happen.

Jen Sigrist (17:02):
As we're talking about colleges and universities, I think we have to really get into what we were talking about at the very beginning when you said scholarships and GPA. Let's just be specific about that question because I know we heard it in our standards-based creating journey from teachers and parents, and it wasn't pushback, it was a serious question and concern, "How is my child going to be eligible for scholarships? We can't afford college if he or she doesn't have a GPA. If you go to standards-based grading and just say they're proficient or not, this can make or break our ability to pay for college." How do kids handle admissions if they're in a standards-based grading system? What do you tell school leaders as far as responding to parents, students, teachers who are concerned about that whole process and not getting in, or not getting the scholarship if we moved to standards-based grading?

Matt Townsley (18:04):
Yeah, Jen, I'm really glad you brought this up, and I promise I was not trying to avoid it. This was a real thing for us. In Solon, Iowa, I say it was within shouting distance at the University of Iowa, about 15 miles, and so we actually took the time to talk to the University of Iowa admissions officials. What they told us was this, "As long as you as a high school are still determining a GPA, it doesn't really matter to us how you do it."

(18:32):
Now, let me explain. What they told us is they already knew before standards-based grading that high school GPAs were being calculated and determined in a variety of ways. Think about it. Weighted grades, this school uses plus and minuses, this one doesn't, so they are already well aware of GPAs being determined in a variety of ways, so they just said, "Give us that 3.5, give us that 3.9, give us that 4.0 GPA on the transcript and we will figure it out."

(18:59):
But the reason this is such a big deal is because parents of high school students want to know, and so they hop on Google and they just type in things like "standards-based grading scholarships," and not a lot of great information is out there, and so I want to provide our listeners with a really fantastic resource. There is an article that was published in the National School Superintendents Association Journal, and the title of the article is called Getting a Fair Shot, and we'll put that in the show notes as well, Jen. It's just a really great perspective that a high school principal could grab. It's an article that can download, read it, understand where the admissions people are coming from, and have that confirmation, the same confirmation that we got from our University of Iowa admissions people. They could share this article with school board members, with teachers with parents. It's just a well-written article.

(19:45):
I'd also offer up chapter five from our book, Making Grades Matter, where we talk about this quite a bit. The takeaway point here is this, as long as a high school determines GPAs, a parent who is out there helping their son or daughter apply for that scholarships and they find that online scholarship that they're committed to, they can still type in a 3.67 or a 3.99 because that information will be readily available to them even in a high school implementing standards-based grade.

Jen Sigrist (20:14):
Wow. Thanks for that description, Matt, because I mean, I have a sophomore, so we're not quite there yet. It's close, but I know they're already talking about it to him.

Matt Townsley (20:24):
It's real.

Jen Sigrist (20:25):
Yeah, a very real concern. Well, so speaking of GPA, it gets us into this points and grades question, which as a teacher, I was, well, through high school myself, but certainly in my teaching practice, preparation practice was thinking like, "Okay, grades are going to motivate kids." That's the carrot that you dangle, and you'd even throw out that whole extra credit thing, "Oh, that's an extra way to really get kids motivated about paying attention in class and liking me so that the course they would do better," all those things being motivators.

(21:01):
But as we really get into this, that question of, "How many points is this worth?" was simultaneously frustrating to me. You're like, "I don't really care. It should be about the learning," is what I wanted my response to be, knowing that in the back of my mind it's like, "Gosh, that was kind of my assumption coming in, too." How do you handle that question that teachers, and again, parents are going to have as an administrator? I know I'm going to get it, where, "Okay, how are we going to motivate the kids if we don't give them grades? If it's not the same, they're not going to want to do the work. They're just not going to do any of that homework." All right, Matt, so how do you respond to that?

Matt Townsley (21:39):
You're bringing back some really interesting memories, Jen.

Jen Sigrist (21:39):
You're having flashbacks?

Matt Townsley (21:43):
Yeah, flashbacks of standing in the hallway at Solon High School and pondering the weightings of my gradebook with other teachers, "Should I make homework be worth 10% this year or 50%?"

Jen Sigrist (21:55):
Are you going to do a participation grade? Oh, right, right.

Matt Townsley (21:57):
Yeah, participation points. Yeah, all of those things. Another story came to mind. I taught a business math class and it was a lot of really, really awesome applicable things like taxes and debit cards and credit cards and real estate and buying cars, great stuff.

Jen Sigrist (22:14):
Totally engaging, real life right there.

Matt Townsley (22:16):
Yes. But I was not the engaging teacher I wish I could say I was on this podcast, okay? In fact, one day I was so frustrated with my students completing their homework, I remember pounding my fist on the podium I had in front. Pounding my fist, and I said, "Class," 'cause I was so frustrated, "Class, tonight your assignment will be worth 100 points." Here's how I did it, Jen. I went to the back of the textbook where they have all the review questions and I found... It was a frustration moment, by the way, listeners, not a good thing.

Jen Sigrist (22:49):
Yeah, this is not best practice, is that what you're saying?

Matt Townsley (22:51):
Not best practice. I went to the back of the book and I found one of those review sections where I could find 100 math problems. I said, whatever the page number was, "Page 602. You'll do one through 100 and it'll be worth 100 points tonight." Here's the crazy lesson I learned the next day, Jen. The same students that were struggling for whatever reason that I hadn't figured out to not turn in my five-point daily assignments were the same students that didn't turn in the hundred-pointer either, and the same students that were turning in the five-pointers consistently were the same students that put forth a big amount of effort on the hundred-pointer.

Jen Sigrist (23:31):
And were thinking bad things about you when you were doing it.

Matt Townsley (23:34):
Yes, yes, probably to this day. What I learned at that point in time, and what I've learned in now that I transitioned to this whole standards-based grading thing is that standards-based grading, or really, any grading system is most often not the problem in these types of scenarios, and it's also not the solution.

(23:52):
What I mean by that is, although a fundamental shift in standards-based grading is moving away from grades as those carrots and sticks and really towards this idea of our gradebooks communicating learning, there still has to be engaging teaching strategies that go along with it. We've told students for years that they should just do it for the points. There were teachers well before standards-based creating that were getting kids to do all kinds of things regardless of the points. What we'll find is that those strategies, those engagement strategies are the same engagement strategies that we want to also see in a standards-based grading format.

(24:33):
But here's one other take that I think is really important for school leaders listening. The reality of students not doing what we want them to do will become even more real in a standards-based grading setting. Here's why, because before, we could track it, "Oh didn't turn this assignment, didn't turn this assignment, didn't turn this assignment." Now, the information we're going to have most readily available to us in the gradebook is, "This student is struggling with this standard," and the teacher's going to want to know, "Why is that?" The administrator in conversations with the teacher's going to say, "Why is that?"

(25:06):
Mike Mattos frames this so well. He says that, "Sometimes there's a skill gap. In other words, we need to have some additional instruction to think differently about how we're teaching that. Other times, it's a will gap, and it's not necessarily teach it again, or provide additional time, but what's going on in that student's life, or how can we reengage them just in school in general." That's why I want to circle back and say sometimes that standards-based grading is not the problem or the solution. Engagement, if there is some secret sauce, Jen, I don't know if it is, but it seems like it could be, engagement is the secret sauce solution that's really worth digging into, and my guess is there's some really great content here on our on-demand learning that really would speak into that at a high level.

Jen Sigrist (25:51):
Thanks, Matt. As you were speaking, I just had to think about my role as a parent and the letter grade didn't tell me if it was my child's behavior or their lack of skill in the subject or in that content area for me to help. Did I need to come in as a parent and say, "Hey, shape up and do what your teacher says," or did I need to come in and say, "I'll work with you on your multiplication facts, I'll work with you on helping you understand the Mesopotamians, I'll work with you on..."? That's what standards-based grading as a parent helped me see, and it gave that language to my child so he could say, "I'm reassessing because I totally didn't understand how to formulate details for this main topic." He's like, "Oh, my details weren't strong enough. Oh, my gosh, that was amazing," instead of, "Oh, I got a B."

(26:48):
One of the pushbacks to this, Matt, is that standards-based grading places too much emphasis on tests, that one big project. Speaking of this engagement piece that you were just talking about, some parents and even teachers may perceive that in a classroom that's previously filled with all these worksheets, quizzes, and tests, that the new standards-based classroom places too much emphasis on that one thing. That might make us even a little more nervous because at least my child had lots of opportunities to impact their grade, and now, they just seems like they have just one. My kid may not be a good test taker though, Matt, and I'm nervous about this one thing really being the grade, so help me because I'm nervous for my kid who maybe has anxiety about a test, or sees themselves as not a good performer in that presentation in class. Okay, if they're going to struggle with this, how does standards-based grading handle that?

Matt Townsley (27:48):
Great. Yeah, as a high school leader listening here, there's probably two big take-home points here, I'd say, Jen. First is as I think about a standards-based gradebook where the emphasis is no longer on the modality of assessment. What I mean by that is like chapter six test or research paper. Instead, the gradebook's emphasis is now on the student's current levels of learning. We call that the standards, like citing textual evidence, or cause and effect of the Civil War. What comes from that, and that's our first point, is the idea of we can now better differentiate for our students how we're going to assess. From the student's perspective, we might be able to provide them with more choice in how they can demonstrate their learning.

(28:35):
I remember as a teacher, I went through an entire year long professional development on this thing called differentiation, and I got to be honest, I struggled to think about one big element of how I as a classroom teacher could differentiate because they were telling us, "Oh, differentiate how you assess students." I'm like, "But I got to put chapter six in the gradebook. If I give chapter six to this kid, how do I not give chapter six tests to this kid over here?"

(29:02):
As I implemented standards-based grading, it's like the light bulb went on. My focus now was on the learning. When I put citing textual evidence in there or Pythagoras' theorem, I could have Johnny over here show me through an oral conversation. I could have Jenny over here do it through a video she created. I could have Juan over here do it through a test. That freed me up as a teacher, and it leveled the playing field for this perception of, "My kid's not a good test taker." Huge, huge, huge, huge.

(29:34):
The second take-home point for our high school leaders listening is this, in standards-based grading, there is typically an opportunity for students to go back and go through some reassessment process that we briefly touched on earlier, and so our messaging in Solon, Iowa was this, standards-based grading is actually better for you if you feel like you are not a good test taker, because now you don't have to feel all the pressure in the old system of, "Friday is the only day I can take this test, and if I don't do very well, it's inked in the gradebook." Now, "If I don't do very well, there's always a reassessment process I can go through and maybe through the reassessment process, I might take form B of the test." By the way, taking form B takes some pressure off form A. Or when the teacher provides me that reassessment process, he or she might say, "You know what? Let's do this reassessment process by you doing it in a different modality entirely."

(30:29):
Really, through differentiating, that frees out the teacher. Through the reassessment process, that takes the pressure off the learner. When I think about standards-based grading placing too much emphasis on a test, I think it actually places less emphasis on tests.

Jen Sigrist (30:45):
That's a really interesting way to look at that because I mean, again, I'm thinking about students with dyslexia. If every test was an essay, you could imagine that struggle. You could see it. Yet, if you give them the opportunity to assess content knowledge in different ways, "Let me show you what I know about science in a different way. Let me create a video for you," and because you're standards-based, as a teacher I can say, "Oh, that relates to this standard. Yes, they have it." It was the writing that got in the way of their science coming to the surface, where if I obviously were assessing a writing standard, I would certainly need them to do that, and so you can differentiate even how you're doing that as a teacher where chapter six is chapter six, and you're probably even using the assessment from the textbook itself.

Matt Townsley (31:35):
Correct.

Jen Sigrist (31:36):
That's really interesting. I appreciate that perspective. Matt, you and I could talk about standards-based grading forever because we're both, I mean, so passionate about what it can do for kids and the focus on learning versus the focus on all the inputs of teaching, really, what's happening for the student. If I'm a listener, what do you think are one or two big ideas from the Matt and Jen conversation today that you want them to walk away with?

Matt Townsley (32:04):
Yeah, first is just a big-picture understanding that standards-based grading really focuses less on earning and more on learning, just to use a phrase you almost coined there, Jen. In all of this, the emphasis is on how much has a student learned about the biology standards, or the social standards, and in doing that, students are going to be successful in getting into college because of all of the GPA and scholarship things we've talked about today.

(32:31):
But there's one more thing I think is really helpful. As I think about my standards-based grading implementation in my own math classroom, as I think about our implementation at Solon High School, as I think about the schools I've seen that have done this most successfully, Van Meter and others across the country, what they're doing is they're doing standards-based grading with students rather than to students.

(32:58):
What I mean by that is that for years, our students in typical high schools have been doing this points and percentages thing, not because they chose it, but because this points and percentages thing was traditionally done to them, so a takeaway is, as a school leader desiring to do standards-based grading with students rather than two students is just to know it's going to take some time, and yet there's almost like a litmus test to look for in all of this. When our students see the benefits, just like your son, Jen, what you were describing earlier, when our students actually see the benefits to them and can explain it to their mom and dad, to their grandmas and grandpas, to their aunts and uncles, at that point, school leaders can sit back and say, "Wow, we're well on our way to a successful shift in grading practices." Jen, this has been super awesome. Thank you so much for just inviting me today to be a part of this conversation.

Jen Sigrist (33:50):
Oh, man. It was so much fun. I know we're going to have other resources in our series on standards-based grading for school leaders.

Matt Townsley (33:56):
I can't wait.

Jen Sigrist (33:58):
Thank you so much for your time. This has been a Central Rivers AEA Learning On-Demand in our series for district and school leaders around the topics of standards-based grading. Thank you for joining us.