In our final story from our Assessment for Learning Convening in Aurora, CO, we share a provocation from Maria Kaimana of Envision Academy in Oakland, CA. Maria’s provocation opens with the question: What are the most effective ways of creating and maintaining equitable grading and assessment practices? Through her reflections, Maria explores the way New Legacy Charter School shows their commitment to the idea that the learning environment should be a space for learner belonging, equity, and liberation. We are left with the question of how we contribute to the creation of liberatory systems that center the student.
Although Maria Kaimana’s story is the conclusion to our stories from our Aurora convening, she is also a bridge to our convening in Oakland, in May 2024, where we continued to explore the idea of assessment for learning practices through the observation of student defenses of learning and the question of how culminating performance assessment systems foster learner belonging, equity, & liberation.
What are the most effective ways of creating and maintaining equitable grading and assessment practices? This has been a question at the center of my work since I first started teaching in 2013. I’ve wrestled with the question based on school and district mandates as well as the feeling that grading raises in my gut. I’ve tried different approaches over the course of my 10 years teaching. Now, as an instructional coach, I’m grappling with how to support teachers across a school with improving their grading and assessment practices to center student learning.
Through AFL’s January convening in Aurora, Colorado, I had the chance to learn more about grading, equity, and feedback. Below are the most significant take-aways that I hope to integrate into my school community in order to improve our grading practices and make them more equitable.
A common language matters:
Through reviewing various documents at New Legacy High School as well as talking with faculty and students, it was clear that adults and students were consistently using a common language–the language of the core competencies–to help students situate their learning within the larger context of the world around them. Both students and teachers were focused on describing the skills that students were using and the learning that was being assessed versus explaining the assignments that were being turned in.
The competencies, including various skills associated with each one, were visible in every classroom. Both students and teachers could describe how student work was situated within the larger graduate profile. Additionally, through student presentations of learning, students could describe how they were growing in their competencies and how these skills would help them thrive in life outside the school building. The common language to describe success created cohesion and a shared vision of what it means to be a scholar in the community.
Create systems and routines for things that matter:
As a competency based learning school, teachers and administrators used a comprehensive Google sheet gradebook to track student learning in relation to each competency. While the system took time to develop and iterate on, it allows teachers and advisors to track student progress in each competency and keep learning visible. A routine that was possible because of the comprehensive gradebook was that Advisors were then able to have conversations with students using a variety of data from different classes to help students reflect on and make progress in each competency. It was clear that New Legacy is serious about competency based learning and therefore, they designed systems that would support students ability to reflect on their progress, receive feedback, and revise their learning.
“We are not here to ‘play’ school, we are here to prepare students for life”
Instead of having traditional transcripts sorted by classes, New Legacy has a competency based transcript that details students skills in each core competency. For example, instead of listing grades for English, there is a section for Reading, Writing, and Communicating where students earn scores in five sub skills related to the larger competency (i.e. text comprehension and analysis). Scores are listed out of four points and correlate to no evidence, in progress, meeting expectations, and exceeding expectations. When the executive director explained his mission at New Legacy, he said, “We are not here to ‘play’ school, we are here to prepare students for life.” The transcript embodies this by helping students articulate exactly where they skills are and it also helps employers and colleges more deeply understand the students.
While not every school can immediately shift to a competency based transcript and there is an immense amount of work that must go into calibration, considering the ways we can stop “playing” school and designing systems that truly prepare our students for life is an essential first step to re-thinking our grading systems.
My visit to New Legacy made me believe that it is possible to create schools that are designed to truly assess student learning and teach them the skills they need to thrive in the world. It expanded what I believe is possible with assessment and helped me see that it is possible to take small and large steps towards equitable grading practices.
Storyteller
Maria Kaimana
Instructional Coach
Maria Kaimana is a humanities instructional coach at Envision Academy in Oakland, California. She started her career teaching English in North Carolina, but moved to Oakland in 2015 to be back where her love of teaching began. Throughout college she was a tutor and college advisor at schools across Oakland. She is driven by her passion for social justice, her genuine curiosity, and a true love of learning. When she isn’t working, she can be found swimming in The Bay or hiking in the mountains.
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