Gradebook as a Record of Completion

Once I had decided to go gradeless and have students pitch a grade every 5 weeks, I needed to determine how to utilize my gradebook. Students will be reflecting on their learning each week, and I plan to have that Google Doc shared with parents, but I also want to keep our gradebook updated. We utilize Infinite Campus, and I plan to use it to communicate student completion (since feedback will appear in student weekly reflections and in their Weekly Learning Guides).

MY PAST PRACTICE

In past years, I divided each assignment into a column for each standard it assessed. So, an analysis paragraph may assess elements of fiction, focus and organization, and use of evidence. There would be three columns for one assignment and would show as “Character Analysis: Fiction Elements,” “Character Analysis: Focus,” and “Character Analysis: Evidence.” I would then assign a letter grade for each standard, provide feedback, and input the letter grade in the gradebook under each category (so a student may have an A, a B, and a C across each category; or maybe their work reflected an A for each category).

In Infinite Campus, I would create Categories that aligned to each of my course Standards so students could see how they were performing for each standard. However, this still utilizing averaging across all assessments.

This was helpful to see patterns across assignments and standards (since we often worked on focus and evidence, for example). However, now that we are going gradeless and providing more feedback for each assessment, I wanted to make the gradebook more manageable.

GRADEBOOK ABBREVIATIONS

I plan to use two gradebook abbreviations: S and N.

• S: The work is submitted and has been completed. Additional feedback will be available to students on their individual assignments.
• N: There is no evidence of student learning, meaning that the learning task was not completed or not completed well enough to gauge how the student is progressing.

Originally, I was going to use “C” for “complete,” but I did not want to confuse the abbreviation with an A-F letter grade. The “N” was originally going to focus on “not complete” (as you can see in the second half of the description above), but I opted for “no evidence” (or perhaps “not sufficient evidence”). This focuses on students producing evidence of their learning (rather than just something not being completed). While I think the language here is important, I also wanted to readily understood by guardians.

SETTING UP THE GRADEBOOK

With these two abbreviations ready to go, I plan to only create one column per assignment this year (regardless how many standards it addresses). Those individual standards will be more thoroughly addressed in the rubric attached to the assignment in Google Docs. So, rather than creating a category in Infinite Campus for each Standard, the only category in the gradebook will be “Learning Evidence.” As I check each student’s work, they will receive an “S” or an “N” for that assignment in the gradebook (but they will receive more feedback on each rubric).

NEXT STEPS

While students begin September 8^th, my first formal assessment won’t be assigned until the following week. Before then, I will post the new version of my rubric and feedback format. Together with the reflections, key assessments, gradebook data, and grade pitches, the rubric will provide the final key piece of my gradeless plan.