Chris Hull taught seventh-grade social studies for eleven years, and he was grading by standards before the practice caught on. He prefers to call it standards-informed instruction because the goal is for instruction to be informed by how students progress on specific skills.
Chris, now Otus co-founder and president, joined Lindsey Lyons on the Time for Teachership podcast for a conversation about equitable grading and what it takes to make that shift.
An assessment is a moment in time
A test shows where a student is on a given day. Think of the score as a checkpoint on the way to growth.
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"If you look at an assessment, you’re measuring where the student is today. And I think every teacher goes into teaching because they believe and know students can improve and grow. And so, if you know growth is possible, if you know this is going to take place, you want to be able to take measurements along the way to kind of be your guiding principle of, ‘Hey, am I on the right track? Are things progressing properly?" |
However, deciding what comes next takes more than a total score, which often hides which skills are growing and which are stuck. Breaking an assignment into the skills behind it shows where each student is, and makes it easier to personalize and differentiate instruction. In Chris’ seventh-grade social studies classroom, it meant asking whether a student can explain who a situation involves and why it matters. From there, a teacher can personalize and differentiate. When a whole class struggles with one skill, the teacher can see what’s tripping them up. When only some students do, they get small-group time while the rest move on to an extension.
Start with the skills you want to measure
A letter grade packs a lot of information into a single symbol. For a teacher meeting a new student, that A- or C+ is helpful, but it doesn’t show which skills the student has mastered or where they need support.
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"If I’m trying to get a new job, I can’t say I got an A in my last gig, hire me. No, I have to tell you what skills I’m proficient in. As a teacher getting a new student, I want to know where they were and what their skills are. I don’t want to know that they got a B in algebra. That’s a very broad measurement." |
That starts with a decision about which skills matter most. A school or classroom can’t measure everything, so it picks the skills it cares about and decides how to measure them. Then comes the system. Doing this with pen and paper is too difficult, so the system should handle the calculations and connect to the tools a teacher already uses. For example, in Otus, a teacher grades a rubric or a quiz the way they normally would, and the standards view automatically shows how each student is doing on each skill.
Everyone should work from the same information
Changing how a school measures learning raises questions from families, such as what it means for grades and college applications. But schools don’t have to change everything at once. A school can start teaching by skill right away and take its time changing how grades are reported. In the meantime, the key is a common way to talk about how a student is doing.
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"When we talk about equity, it really is around everybody having the same information to have these discussions with and then to really engage in those discussions... All of a sudden, we’re all talking about the same thing, so now it doesn’t feel like I’m talking in a language I’m unable to comprehend or understand. No, we’re on the same page; now I can really help my child or help my students in a much better way." |
For families, that can mean seeing traditional points next to skill-level progress, so a parent worried about college can see how the two connect. A crosswalk that converts between points and standards makes that possible, and the right pace is whatever is practical for the school. Platforms like Otus can handle the conversion, so a school can keep traditional scores while teaching shifts to skills.