Students at Ashland Middle School in Oregon don’t get A’s or B’s on their assignments, they aren’t graded on a 100-point scale, or given a traditional standards-based grade.
But these students—and their teachers—can articulate what part of an assignment they struggled on, where they excelled, and what they need to do differently next time, according to Steve Retzlaff, Ashland’s principal, and Katherine Holden, the school’s assistant principal.
The two principals—like nearly half of teachers, principals, and district leaders across the country surveyed by the EdWeek Research Center in March and April of 2023—say traditional grades are a somewhat or very ineffective way of offering feedback to students.
We really wanted to translate the standards into student-friendly language. That was a big challenge.
So, over the course of about a decade, the school’s teachers and leaders devised their own grading system that considers student work according to a set of rubrics Ashland’s educators created from scratch. The system is now complete with bespoke standards-based scoring and reporting software.
“We liked the idea of getting clearer with kids about what the expectations were for them in their classes and making sure that those expectations were really clearly articulated,” Retzlaff said.
The school also wanted to shift from an emphasis on ensuring students digest certain content, to a focus on mastering higher-order thinking skills.
The first step in a long, still-evolving process: Asking teams of teachers to comb through state standards, and prioritize those that transcended a particular unit of study and would help students get the knowledge and skills they need to tackle content at the next grade level.
In history, for instance, that meant moving away from memorizing dates and focusing instead on skills such as analyzing primary source documents.
Defining what it means for a student to reach mastery or proficiency
Asking teachers to wade through standards isn’t revolutionary, Holden acknowledged. But it was a necessary building block to what came next: The creation of a series of detailed student-friendly rubrics for every grade and subject that could be used to give students feedback on their work. The rubrics defined what it meant for a student to reach mastery or proficiency on a particular skill or standard.
“Some standards are kind of clunky,” Holden said. “And so, our teachers spent a lot of time to break down those standards into discrete parts, which became rows of the rubric. Then the rubric language became very objective and measurable and clear to students and parents.”
For instance, the school’s rubric for writing a narrative piece considers a student proficient on organization and plot if their story has elements such as a beginning, climax, and resolution, and if “every event relates to the point of the story.”
The student would have reached a step beyond proficiency—mastery—if their story includes both internal and external conflict and if its resolution “relates to an intentional theme.”
On the other hand, a student who hasn’t reached proficiency on this skill might be missing key plot elements. Events in their story may be “confusing, illogical, out-of-sequence, or irrelevant.”
Teachers had to keep the rubrics jargon-free and phrase expectations in a way a middle schooler could easily understand.
“We really wanted to translate the standards into student-friendly language,” Holden said. “That was a big challenge.”
Establishing specific expectations for effective student essays
The work was time-consuming and forced teachers to think closely through the standards in ways many hadn’t before.
For instance, a group of language arts teachers decided that student essays needed an attention-grabbing introduction. But they realized they couldn’t stop there.
They needed to define for students exactly what an attention-grabbing introduction should look like. One teacher suggested it could include an anecdote. Another said they liked opening with a compelling fact, or a probing question. Ultimately, all three possibilities made their way into the rubric as examples of how to meet the requirement.
The rubrics became so specific, in fact, that teachers wondered if they were “giving away the answers,” Retzlaff said.
But Holden and Retzlaff told them that clear rubrics would help students understand exactly what they needed to learn.
The shift was a big one for Ashland’s staff, Retzlaff and Holden recalled.
“One of our best teachers said, ‘now that I’m so clear about what it is I want my kids to learn, I really need to go back and make sure I’m teaching them these things,’” Retzlaff said.
Teachers develop better sense of where students need academic support
The system also enabled teachers to get a better sense of which skills their students struggled with, as opposed to just seeing aggregate scores for each student.
If almost everybody “got 8 out of 10” on an assignment, Holden said, “you don’t know if it’s because of [problems with crafting] a conclusion or introduction. Whereas with this, you’re like, wow, everybody was proficient on this, this and this, but, man, quite a few kids weren’t proficient on this. I’m gonna go back and reteach that or work with a small subgroup of kids on it.”
Yet even after Ashland developed a set of rubrics that could be used for every assignment, the school kept giving traditional grades along with the proficiency-based feedback.
That was a problem, because it became too much for students and teachers to keep track of. Eventually, “everybody in the school said, ‘Yeah, we’re done with letter grades. We don’t need them,’” Retzlaff said. “And that was awesome, too. It wasn’t [the principals] saying we’re going to make this change. It was our staff coming together in authentic decisionmaking.”
One of the biggest challenges of this approach: Keeping track of where students stand and communicating that information to parents.
“We all grew up with letter grades,” Retzlaff said. “That’s the system that we’re familiar with.” That means the Ashland team must work every year to explain the system anew to incoming families.
Most parents feel more confident in it once they see that their children are clear about academic expectations, he said.
Still, he added, “the biggest pushback is from the families who really put a lot of pride and pressure on straight A’s.”
The transition to proficiency-based grading takes patience and time
Another big challenge: Keeping track of the feedback and allowing students and parents to see progress.
A school board member with computer programming skills helped tackle that problem. He worked with school leaders to create a tool that could hold the district’s standards-based rubrics as well as help teachers create rubrics for specific assignments. The system also allows parents to see what assignments students are missing. And it offers badges for certain academic accomplishments, such as achieving 100 percent proficiency on the skills assessed in a particular class.
“That was revolutionary,” Retzlaff said. Ashland Middle has partnered with several districts around the country to share its tool.
Below, see an example of what the tool looks like from a student’s perspective. (The student names are fictitious).
Retzlaff’s advice for schools looking to try something similar? Don’t expect a fast transition.
“I feel like educators are always looking for these quick fixes,” he said. “And that’s why I feel like education never really gets fixed, right? It’s because we try too many new things all the time. And we don’t really, you know, invest time and energy to do something well.”
