One of the most difficult parts of implementing SBG is communicating with stakeholders. This was especially true for me because I chose to use SBG on my own. One of my co-workers worked with me, but every other teacher in our building used traditional grading. My coworker and I worked together sometimes, but we also had the freedom to do what we felt was best for our kids.
To educated my students' parent and my administrators, I
started by doing research about other schools.
I found this FAQ document from Excelsior Springs and borrowed very
heavily.
I shared my objectives lists, my own FAQ sheet, my rubrics,
my plan for weighting various portions of my students grades, and my plan for
teaching, assessing & remediating
with my administrators. They all thought
is was awesome and agreed to back me up if I had parent complaints. Luckily, I had none. In retrospect, I guess it is hard to argue
with basing a student's grade on what they can do.
About a week before classes started I emailed all of my
parents a welcome letter. I explained
that I would be emailing every few days for the first week or so with important
information about my class because I did not want to overwhelm them with one gigantic
email. I sent them the FAQs and the rubrics. I also sent them info on hybrid learning,
tutoring, online resources, how to sign up for access to the gradebook and everything
else you could imagine.
I followed up with a paper copy of a gradesheet and how the
grade was being calculated after the first quiz. I sent this info home every week for the
entire year. I also showed a sample
gradesheet and discussed the rubric during parent's night. I also explained SBG one-on-one at parent conferences. If they still had questions I tried to answer
them via phone when possible.
I have attached my FAQ and rubric. The rubric came from exemplars
Happy reading :)
This comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDelete