This school year, Monroe High School and Monroe Middle School teachers started to transition to Evidence-Based Grading, or EBG. This change is meant for students to take ownership of their education to become the thoughtful learners and self-reliant people we know they can be.

Evidence-Based Grading

Evidence-based grading is really about more than grading. It’s a curriculum, instruction, and assessment approach that focuses on what students actually learn. It does this by putting the important skills kids need in life at the top and measuring student progress on those instead of averaging everything together. By bringing enduring skills out in front, staff, students, and families all have clarity on what we are aiming for and how the student is progressing on each skill.

EBG is a competency-based model where students produce evidence of what they know and are able to do in order to show proficiency of those expected standards. This is common practice in the adult world where we have to show competency in specific skills to get a driver’s license, become an EMT, or professionally install HVAC. In this way, EBG raises the rigor because instead of sending students into careers averaging everything they have done, we have set the bar for each skill and designed the course to facilitate student learning so they can meet it.

Learning with Purpose

We want all of our students prepared for their futures, no matter what pathway they take. Their experiences in our classrooms, in our athletic competitions, on our stage, and in our community help our students discover who they are, what their strengths are, and what they want to pursue after high school.

In EBG, the lessons are planned to develop student proficiency in the enduring skills they need for the real world, like analyzing, communicating, and computation. When students can see how what they are doing directly relates to what’s ahead, they can see the relevance in what they are learning. In this way, EBG directly connects the school to the future. 

Involving Students in Their Learning

In EBG, there is a strong focus on students taking charge of their learning so they build a strong sense of self. Students set goals, track their progress, conference with teachers, and reflect on what they have learned throughout the course. There is an emphasis on two-way communication between the teacher and the student during the learning process. Teachers provide clear rubrics with criteria students need to show proficiency in to demonstrate success at each skill. Practice and assessments are designed to measure student understanding and competence, not just memorization.  

Supporting Students

A gradebook organized by skills also allows the staff to better organize systems of support. In the traditional system, pulling all students with Ds into a help session isn’t sensible because they inevitably have Ds for different reasons. With everything averaged, it isn’t easy to tell who needs help with what. However, by organizing the learning around skills, it’s easier to give each student what they need for support in each skill, just like our preK-5 colleagues have for years. We want to work student by student, target by target, to be sure we are helping all children reach their potential.

LAUNCH

Our LAUNCH classes are a great example of this real-world application where students are working with community mentors to complete projects while learning content. Students in LAUNCH demonstrate their proficiency in the skills they have learned by doing everything from designing websites, to organizing community events, to building a home. Students produce evidence of their learning that they are proud of. LAUNCH reflects back to students their skills, their growth, their achievements in real life situations. Our EBG classes aim to do this as well by carefully identifying skills students need to have and expecting them to produce evidence of their proficiency.

Moving Forward

Change is hard, especially when it’s complex, but MSD is proud to embrace innovation! It’s important to remember that times of change are often also times of great progress. EBG challenges long-held grading practices and pushes us to think differently about student learning and how we report it. So far, early data shows that our students have been really successful this year in their classes and on our state required standardized tests. While we can never associate student growth with one particular strategy because there are too many variables, we do know that EBG in combination with everything we are doing has produced some very good results. As we always do, we will continue to monitor student learning on classroom and state assessments. In the end, if we are serious about preparing our students for the future, then we must align our practices with our principles. We want students who are self-reliant, grades that reflect their skills, and schools that focus on learning. We will continue to work collaboratively toward creating the best possible schools we can for our students. 

— Susan Anderson taught high school English for 13 years, and for the past four years she has served as the MHS Learning and Technology Coach.