Grading for Mastery at the Middle Level

By Dave Powers
Baldwin Street Middle School Principal

What's in a grade?  Does an A or a B indicate mastery?  Is an A earned in one teacher's classroom the same as an A earned across the hall in the same content area?  Good questions.  The truth behind the answers is scary!  It rocks the foundation of what we all believe about our own school experiences while growing up, not to mention the actual quality of the education we are providing for our students now.

The two middle schools in Hudsonville (Baldwin Street MS and Riley Street MS) have adopted a new common grading policy to begin this fall.  We hope to narrow our focus on student achievement by removing affective/citizenship type ingredients from the "Grading Recipe" teachers have traditionally used to "cook" the grades.  Those very important "Life Skills" will now be reported via a rubric that ALL teachers will use and report out to students and parents on an ongoing basis by virtue of our web portal.

At the same time on the academic skill side, we want a grade earned by a student to reflect what they "know and can do" in alignment with the standards for each content area (GLCE's).  At least 70 % of any given grade will be based upon summative type "Performance" related events (tests, projects, presentations, papers, etc.) and no more than 30% of a grade will reflect the formative "Practice" type events normally associated with school (small quizzes, homework, in class work, etc.) 

Each department has standardized their breakdown of performance vs. p practice ratio for configuring grades. Most are the 70+/30- ratio, while a couple departments have gone to an 80/20 mix. 

Last year as a pilot project we even had a couple 6th grade science teachers use a 100/0 ratio.  This model focused entirely on what the kids knew and could do on "performance" related events.  The overall GPA's of those classes were higher than the other sciences classes in the building that employed the traditional grading approach.  The results were counterintuitive yet stunning at the same time.

Also in this process we have eliminated the "Zero" idea from our grading scale so that missing work or late work does not have such a disproportional impact on the averaging of scores.  The minimum score a student can receive is an "E" (50%).  This process made us shift our paradigm of treating responsibility type behaviors of timely work completion from academic performance grades to "Life Skills" performance behavioral failures on a student's part. The consequences for unacceptable behaviors are much different than work quality or knowledge acquisition deficiencies.

We hope to instill in our students the belief that education is a service provided by teachers FOR them, rather than a series of school experiences done TO them. The more they own their personal success in school and see it as their road to future successes in life, the better! 

The process by which the combined staffs of our middle schools adopted this policy is another story in and of itself, but one of tremendous satisfaction as a building administrator.  It should be noted that Ken O'Connor's book, "How to Grade for Learning", and the significant work done by the Grand Island Public Schools in Nebraska, served as guideposts for us along our journey.

I have attached a couple PDF’s that lay out our policies and practices a bit more.