Towards understanding assessment (baby steps)

Where I'm coming from
I got my teaching license in 2003. None of my coursework for teaching, including my student teaching, had anything to do with standards. 
Then I got a job outside of the traditional school setting, out of the loop as far as current best-practices and educational reform were concerned. I kept this job for 8 years.
In 2012, I got back into classroom teaching by landing a job at brand new international school in China. The leadership of the school was pretty progressive, and decided from the beginning to go with the most current research-based practices.
I still remember the staff meeting where we were introduced to Standards-Based (SB) Grading, Assessment, and Reporting (I'm going to use SBG, SBA, SBR, and try to explain why I differentiate later). Few of the staff (some with much more experience than I) knew about or had much experience with SB anything, and it was kind of a shock to most of us. Oh yeah, BTW, this meeting happened AFTER two or so weeks of instruction, AFTER some of us had already distributed syllabi, grading scales, etc. I had no idea what anyone was talking about - the only grading I knew was percentages and ABCs. I cried in the bathroom that day...
Pretty quickly, watching others struggle with this, I came to the understanding that my lack of experience was an advantage. I didn't have to deal with, or unlearn,  years of assessing any other way, I just had to get my head around doing it this way. I was also the only secondary math teacher in the school, so I had an incredible, and often intimidating, level of freedom in developing my curriculum and classroom practices. So I bought in, did the work, and started learning. 
Needless to say, I learned more through the experience of teaching than I ever had in any class about teaching. I learned more through personal research, struggling with frustrations, searching for my own answers, than I ever have from professional development. After five years with this school, I feel like I have a relatively good grasp on the idea of SB, although I'm still struggling with the practice and implementation.

Where I am now
As far as I can tell, so is everyone else. I ask educators and administrators about their implementations whenever I can, and I read a lot of blogs and articles on the subject. Over the last five years, only one educator I've spoken with said that his school had "completely figured out" SBG; further conversation revealed that what he really meant was that his school had aligned a 1-4 grading scale with a percentage grading scale in a way that the majority of teachers, students, parents, and other stakeholders accepted.
Everyone else tells the truth; it's a journey, a learning process that no one seems to have nailed down completely yet. There are great ideas out there, but there doesn't seem to be anyone (other than that guy) who's willing to say they've got all the answers and they know exactly how it should be implemented.
I like to separate SB, especially when it involves grades, into three areas that help me think about my own practice. These distinctions are mine, from my experience, and may be different from others'. (they may also be wrong! :)

• Assessment (SBA): This is the spirit of the whole thing. You start from a standard, make it into a learning target, and design instructional activities (formative assessments) and summative assessments by which students can show that they've met those targets. Teachers assess the degree with which students have shown proficiency.
• Grading (SBG): This is the method by which teachers assign a category, or grade, to represent a student's level of proficiency. 1-3, 1-4, 1-5 scales are common, rather than letter grades, and each level comes with a descriptor (my last school used Emerging, Approaching, Proficient, Exemplary) and they usually reference a rubric which tries to explain what each level means. SBG also makes little or no use of formative assessments (homework, quizzes, classwork) in calculating the final grade, focusing instead on a student's performance on summative assessments. This is where the big controversy with students, parents, and teachers who are used to traditional grading scales and levels. It also seems like every school is coming up with their own (different) way to address this discomfort.
• Reporting (SBR): This is the report card, the way student progress is communicated to students, parents, other schools, etc. My last school had us report on content domains from the Common Core as well as and overall "grade" and a narrative paragraph (yeah, report cards took a long time).

​Where I'm going
Earlier this summer, I participated in an assessment workshop for AERO which gave me a whole new way to think about the standards, and I really want to write a post about it later. The shift that's rolling around in my head involves using clusters (not specific standards) to come up with targets, and couching the targets in the four claims from the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium.

In a few days, I'm heading out to start a new job in Pakistan! I don't know everything about how things work there, but I don't think they're using SBR yet (kind of a relief to me). They use percentage scales and letter grades for reports, but I've been reading a lot on how other teachers are doing SBG within their own classrooms, even if it's not a school-wide practice, and even if they eventually have to show a letter grade. Overall I don't think I can do assessment any other way, so SBA will be a part of what I do no matter where I teach. 

If anyone made it this far, thanks for reading. I hope to keep posting on this journey, reading about what others are doing, and refining my practice.


People who've helped me think about this (not an exhaustive list, INPO):
Follow the links for some great posts on SBG
Michael Matera
Dan Meyer
Dane Ehlert
Jonathan Claydon
Nora Oswald

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