Chapters 11, 12, 13, and 14 of Fair Isn’t Always Equal discuss how teachers need to take
differentiated grading further than just assessment on an individual assignment,
and instead extend it all the way to report cards and course grades. There are
many complicated issues at stake when it comes to grading, and keeping with the
themes addressed thus far, the chapters aimed to instruct teachers on how to
make sure that all grades are indicators of content mastery. When it comes to
matters of assigning zeros for missing work, grading gifted and special
education students, and weighting grades for example, it is most important that
grades give accurate representation of a student’s individual progress and find
ways to exclude extraneous factors that can negatively skew a grade. To this
affect, Wormeli suggests using the less-common 4.0 scale because it gives more
room for personalization of a student’s specific content achievement. He also
contends that grade books should be heavily revised, replacing what he sees as
arbitrary A’s, B’s, and C’s with indicators of whether a student has reached
particular benchmarks and standards. This can be done by listing grades
according to topics of understanding and goals that a teacher wants their
students to accomplish during a particular unit. Because it can be difficult to
make both students and parents aware of important information about what goes
into tabulating this kind of adjusting grading, Wormeli suggests including
extra comments and asterisks on a traditional report card and finding ways to
incorporate a grade for individual student progress throughout the course of
the year.
A lot of what we have read about this semester is
very different from the kind of education I was raised on, and that made it
difficult for me to see the practical applications of all of it and made me
skeptical of how effective it could really be. But now that I’ve been in the
field, I can see how everything becomes real when it is applied to a high
school classroom. Meeting standards and personal progress really do matter more
than A’s and B’s, and those letters and numbers do very little to give accurate
feedback on how are students learning. When I become a teacher, I want to be
one who is able to really help them learn things, and a big part of that is
giving accurate grades that can move the learning process forward instead of
stunt it, which is what happens when students put in hard work but are
rewarding with only mediocre grades. The current grading system really is convoluted
and inaccurate, and it is up to modern teachers to change it for the better. As
a teacher, I will try my best to put into place systems that reward adequate
content mastery and put emphasis on understanding tangible, practical concepts.
Improving the way grades are reported also helps get parents more involved in
education by giving them access to feedback that they can understand, and
parental participation does wonders for a child’s achievement.
