Ahoy, SBGers!

It’s been a very busy few months for us. We’re working on getting our visualization of SBG integrated with Haiku so that it’s easier to use SBG across a larger group.  Our current group accounts will know what I’m talking about when I say that major improvement is possible in that dimension

Speaking of dimensions, I’ve got an exciting new view for your gradebooks today.  We already have the Mastery view (the default red/yellow/green number) that shows you the strengths and weaknesses in your class (as you’ve measured them).  The Frequency and Recency views can help you plan your assessment strategy by showing you which standards you haven’t measured often or recently.  Today you’ll find an extra mode: Improvement.  We highlight the areas on your gradebook that your students have shown growth or regression in.  This is regardless of score – it’s just improvement.

So here’s what your normal gradebook might look like:

We’ve always been proud of this view. It shows you strengths and weaknesses.  Now, by choosing the Improvement mode at the top of the window, you can see the changes in scores!

In this case I can see areas where certain students or certain standards are changing in my class (due to my instruction? Due to reassessment? Now you can evaluate what’s happening in your class).

This gets even more useful when you sort the gradebook on your class average:

Kablam! The standards your students are improving in are on the right, and the ones they’re regressing in are on the left. Now you can think about what you’re doing differently for these groups of standards and what types of remediation you might want to take.

You can also sort on a standard to find the student that’s improved the most, or sort on a student to find the standard in which he’s improved the most.  I hope you can use this to find positive nuggets for those students that think they’re bad at everything.  For those students that think they know everything already, I hope you can use this to identify places that they improved and reinforce the idea that it’s their work and tenacity that makes them good students, not some innate gift (did you know that students who think their success is innate have been shown to get more frustrated and lose interest faster when they actually do face a challenge?).

Let us know what you think!

We’re very excited to announce that we have signed an agreement to be acquired by Haiku Learning Systems, the incredible company behind the excellent learning management system Haiku LMS.

But, why?

Riley, Michal, I and our team have poured our hearts into building ActiveGrade for the last two and a half years and are incredibly proud of what we’ve created so far. Looking to the future, we saw an immediate need for additional resources to continue growing ActiveGrade.

Similarly, the team at Haiku have poured their hearts into Haiku LMS for nearly seven years and have created a product that teachers, students, and administrators genuinely enjoy using (a rare feat in the EdTech industry). A pressing need for a partner in standards-based grading started the conversation with ActiveGrade, and that conversation blossomed into a fantastic relationship.

With the incredible talent behind Haiku, we’ll be able to take standards-based grading to new places that we simply didn’t have the resources for until now.

What does this mean for your ActiveGrade gradebook?

ActiveGrade will remain online and supported with all of your data as safe and sound as you’ve come to expect from our team. Our team structure may look a bit different on the inside, but the product you know will continue on into the foreseeable future. We promise ample notice of any planned changes to the service in the long term.

The future of ActiveGrade with Haiku looks amazing. We’re continuing our mission of making the best standards-based grading experience for educators and students. This means new features, new technologies, and new insights into your classroom data.

And the ActiveGrade team?

We’ll be joining the Haiku team virtually, keeping our Iowa City office open and fully operational. We recently spent five days with the whole Haiku team in person and can say without any hesitation that they’re a wonderful group who share a passion for education and learning like no other. We had so much fun and gained so much insight that we’re already scheming ways to get them all to gather here in the midwest.

And finally…

We wanted to say thank you to all of our customers. Without passionate educators like yourselves, ActiveGrade couldn’t have gotten as far as we are today. Your feedback–both positive and negative–over the last 2 years has been incredible and we truly appreciate that you’ve been on this journey with us. We look forward to continuing to provide you with the best standards-based grading experience on the web.

More info available in our faq.

We’re excited to start the year with a subtle but useful improvement to the way you enter assessment data into ActiveGrade.  We’ve streamlined the process to eliminate several clicks, and we’ve added context menus to help you fill in a lot of scores at once.

We’ve also improved the way you interact with previous assessments.  It’s one less click to see the list of all assessments you’ve entered, and you can search for them by name.  You can also copy an assessment from one class to another, so that the name, date, and standards will match (when possible).

We think it’s a big improvement.  Please let us know what you think in the comments, or at support@activegrade.com .  Thanks, and good luck this semester!

Back in MY day, if I came home with a bad grade, my parents would ask me what gives. I wouldn’t necessarily be in trouble, but if it was outside of my normal pattern, they’d want to know if everything was alright. They would NOT assume a problem with the teacher. If they did, they kept it to themselves or helped me brainstorm ways I could talk to the teacher. Mostly, my mom just made herself available to help me look over the math lesson and explain it in a different way if I was confused.

When I became a teacher, I noticed parents had become more involved. To be fair, I worked at a boarding school and the monthly reports might be the only times the parents heard word one about their child’s academic woes. Not being on the scene themselves, they sometimes turned to us teachers to provide more support or alter our instruction.

Recently, a friend of mine went to work for a wealthy private day school. She was floored by how quickly her students enlisted the “big guns” of their parents to protest a particular action. If she gave a less than favorable grade, if she assigned a paper, the parents would be called in to complain. It wasn’t only that the students expected to be rewarded for bad work or that they didn’t expect to have to work hard, it was that, in addition, they didn’t fight their own battles.

A recent EdWeek article suggests that these parental interventions throughout a student’s youth are contributing to our high college dropout rates. Students, they say, lack resilience and resourcefulness in part because they have been protected from difficulty.

I do not mean for this to be a parent-bashing post. Our grading system puts a lot of pressure on students and one bad test score can have a major impact on a child’s future; it’s no wonder parents get protective. I think a change in our grading system can help parents have a more fruitful engagement in their child’s education.

Standards-Based Grading takes some getting used to, but it presents an opportunity for educating parents on how to be guides for their children, not stand-ins.

How can SBG limit helicoptering?

1. Makes course expectations exceptionally clear to students
2. Attaches a clear purpose to each assessment and assignment
3. Shows students exactly what skills to work on
4. Enables students to assess again making fighting over a grade unnecessary
5. Turns the final grade into a reflection of what the student has learned not an average of their performance throughout
6. Helps both students and parents see learning as a process

By better outlining expectations and empowering students, standards-based grading lets parents see what their children need help with. When parents feel more informed and see clear guidance for ways their children can improve, their is less need for them to step in.

I recently said in an interview that extra credit is a terrible idea. The interviewer remarked that without extra credit he would not have passed many classes. Later I was kicking myself for not better explaining what I meant. Because that’s just it – many students wouldn’t pass without extra credit.

So what exactly are we accomplishing with extra credit?

I see two reasons for it:

Extra Credit sometimes has nothing to do with the course material

1. We are creating ways for students who don’t know the material to pass
2. We are creating ways for students who do know the material but get bad grades because of homework and tests to pass

When our rationale is stated thus, there is clearly no justification for extra credit.

No Justification for Extra Credit

Let’s look at reason 1. Finding ways for students who don’t know the material to earn extra points is a sad admission that a passing grade doesn’t mean anything. Is the point of school to pass classes or to learn the material?*

Let’s look at reason 2. Finding ways for students who should be passing the class but aren’t to earn extra points is indicative of our strange grading policies. Why would a student who should be passing not be passing? Maybe we are measuring the wrong things or weighting the wrong things too heavily.

What to do instead of Extra Credit

1. Offer Reassessments – It can be hard to know what to do when a student underperforms on a test. You want to give her another chance and the standard way to do that is to give her an opportunity to earn more points. Instead, remember that the goal is to determine if she has learned the material. In that light, it makes perfect sense to reassess the skills she underperformed on. Whether you give her another test or have her explain the concepts to you in person, it doesn’t matter. Just find out whether she know it or not.
2. Don’t factor homework completion into the grade – This is a common scenario: a bright student fully comprehends the material but is terrible about turning in homework.  Now you want to give him extra credit to help him overcome his abominable homework grade.  Instead, just grade the students on whether or not they understand that course material.  That’s what you are there to teach.  Would you rather a student passed because he knew the material or because he turned his work in on time?
3. Keep track of homework separately – It’s true that homework completion might say more about a student’s future work ethic than his ability to understand complex math formulas. However, combining work ethic with comprehension in one grade is not going to help a future employer know anything about what that student is capable of. Plus, teaching those skills is a task shared by every teacher in the school.  Find ways to give feedback about those skills as a group, but don’t let a student’s poor time-management negatively affect every content-area grade.
4. Assess often – By assessing a student’s skill level regularly you can identify weak spots before they get bad (and so can the student). Assessing rarely means you might not realize a student was struggling with a concept until it’s too late for her to get help (and thus she needs quick extra credit to pass the class). A nice bonus is that test anxiety will be reduced.

Extra Credit allows us to pass students for the wrong reasons. They miss out on the sense of accomplishment that comes from really learning the material and we slowly lose hold on what grades are about.

*I believe there are other reasons for school, but I really hope that, as a culture, we would favor learning over passing classes.

Take a picture of student work and attach it to a standard

Bwa-hah!  THIS evidence.

It’s here!  An election day treat for you. Now you can upload files to ActiveGrade and attach them to scores.

Why is that cool?

In theory, ideally, you are basing the scores and grades and comments you give to student on some work or action they’ve taken.  Now you can show student exactly what you’re basing your feedback on.  Of course you can upload a document, like a test or paper (maybe it even has your notations on it). In addition you can take a picture of a student project, or the problem they worked out on the board.  Maybe you record yourself giving feedback on a paper and attach that to the score.

Just think of the possibilities!

• Students get more detailed feedback and know where their scores are coming from
• Parents get to see what their children are up to and get to understand your feedback methods better
• You can be reminded of why you gave a score and pull up quick documentation to discuss with students
• Students have a portfolio of work to choose from when applying for colleges and it’s all directly attached to specific skills that they know they can demonstrate.

Want to know how it works?

The new Individual Assessment Screen. Add a score, a comment, some evidence or all 3!

1. Click on a cell in your gradebook
2. Click “Add Assessment”
3. Then click “Upload Evidence” or “Choose Existing” (to attach a previously uploaded file)

POW!  Done.

You can add evidence from the group assessment screen as well.  Just click on the document icon next to the desired cell.

But Michal, seriously, this paper my student turned in assessed 5 different skills; I want to upload it 1 time, not 5 times

Well who’s stop’n ya!  Not me, I’m sure.  In the group assessment screen, after you’ve chosen the standards you assessed, drag the desired file to the student’s name.  It will be attached to all the standards for that student.

What’s it cost?

You all just got a free gigabyte of storage added right to your license so you can start uploading today without worry.  After that, if you find you want more storage, you can purchase extra quota for approximately $0.99/gigabyte/month.  Account owners can do this from their Account Settings Screen.  To see all our new pricing plans, visit our pricing page.

I used to get all uncomfortable and non-committal around the idea of retakes. If a student asked me for a retake, I would dither and huff, feeling at once that a second chance was a reasonable request and that it was unfair to all the other students. In a traditional grading scheme, that’s an understandable reaction. In that system, I set a date for a test and told students about it. They were given ample time to prepare and show me that they knew the material so we could move on. To give one student a retake was like giving them license to blow off all this prep time I’d given them. Aside from the extra time this student got, he also had the advantage of knowing better what he should study. If I didn’t want that to be a huge advantage, I had to spend a lot of time rewriting the test. Then, the crappy grade he got initially would be supplanted by this much more pleasing score. So who should get this freebie do-over? Just the student who horribly bombed the first test and will fail without a retake? What about the student who barely missed getting a perfect score or is just under an A? Should they also get to retake?

You see my consternation.

Here, as in so many of the unintended consequences of our grading systems, my focus, and the student’s, was on the fairness of the grade and the importance of one test. It wasn’t on whether or not he had learned the material or on the best way to measure his understanding.

As I began adopting standards-based grading in my classroom, this question of the re-take became simpler. I began to see assessments as multiple measurements (or reassessments) of the same standards. Of course it makes sense to allow my students many opportunities to demonstrate their understanding especially because that understanding will be evolving over time. Why would I want my student to be held hostage by a test score at the beginning of the year?

Assessment Portfolio

Every now and then I get the opportunity to observe teachers using ActiveGrade. I’ve noticed that after allowing students to reassess a skill, some replace the original score in ActiveGrade. I realized that some teachers might not know they don’t have to be beholden to the re-take notion in ActiveGrade. When you give a reassessment of a skill, you now have new evidence that shows the student’s evolving understanding of the material. You can add it into ActiveGrade as it’s own bit of information. Assuming you are using one of the more responsive calculation methods, like a decaying average, or the power law, or most recent, the student’s old score will not have a major negative impact on him (or his grade). Instead, he can see his progress over time and know that with practice he will improve.

3 Distinctions as I see it:

1. Reassessments of the same skill are different than re-takes and are encouraged.
2. A reassessment score is new evidence of current mastery; a re-take is a do-over often due to poor planning and studying.
3. A reassessment score is one bit of data in a portfolio of evidence of the student’s progress toward a particular target; a re-take erases evidence of progress.

So! If you take one thing from this post, let it be this: don’t replace scores; let new scores join the portfolio rather than override it.

For example:

“Why don’t I have an “A”?  I’ve turned in everything on time and I get all the assignments right!”

I find it a cultural tragedy that such words are thus formulated and uttered by young, curious minds.

Let’s break it down:

• “Why don’t I have an ‘A?’  The student is not asking about the course material, the student is asking about the first letter of the alphabet.  He’s more worried about a static score on a couple of assessments than about the course and what he’s learning.  This is a sad focus for education.
• “I turned everything in on time and get all the assignments right.”  Here we see that, to the student, the grade is a reflection of timeliness and correctness.  It is not a reflection of current level of knowledge and understanding or a measure of where the student is now as compared to where we’d like him to be by the end of the course.

The problem is, we’ve taught our children to value the affirmation of their carefully nurtured perfection over the joy and process of learning new skills.  What does it mean when a student has an “A” after the 1st week of class, or heck, after the first quarter even?  Are they done?  Have the accomplished it all already?  The fact that this is possible makes the over-achievers and grade hounds feel like failures, if not wholly betrayed, when they stand at anything less that an “A” throughout the entire course.

Standards-Based Grading is a great antidote to this affliction but can cause allergic reactions when not administered early in life.  By high school much of that fabulous mental plasticity has begun to wear off and students often have fairly firm ideas about what school and grades are about.  They’ve learned how to play the game or they’ve learned to stay out of it by disengaging from class and assuming the characteristics of disinterest.

How then do we shift student attention to what they are learning rather than what grades they are getting?  How do we make the course material and the process of learning the foci of the school experience especially when students are used to the old model?

1. Stick to your guns. You shifted to SBG because you thought it was a better way to assess, and give feedback to, students. You aren’t wrong.  So don’t give in and think that perfect answers on a single assignment means the student has perfect understanding of the whole concept.  It’s ok to say “yes, you got all of these answers correct, and right now that equates to an understanding of 1.”  Students and parents might get upset or confused at first, and that’s ok, they’ll learn.  You didn’t go through this whole process of researching and remaking your grading scheme just to go back to perpetuating the idea that an assessment has any great meaning or purpose other than as a tool to aid learning.  Your system reflects what they know now in comparison to what they are expected to know by the end.  It’s a great system and you don’t need to cave on its most important aspects.
2. Repeat yourself repeatedly.  Like I said, students and parents will be confused at first and some will have strong negative reactions to the SBG, the grading antidote.  Just keep reminding them: “Learning. is. a. Process.  The feedback I give you will help you know where you are now and how to move forward.”  To spice it up a bit, try saying “Your scores reflect what I think you know right now.  If you don’t know that much right now, that’s ok.  The class is just beginning; by the end of the course, you will know more and I’ll make sure you have plenty of opportunities to show what you know.”

For students to become convinced that each assignment score isn’t a part of a long tally that will constitute their final grade, they need to be assured, again and again, that learning is a process and that your goal is to help them make progress on that path.  Just like you teach them the material of your class, you also need to teach them how to learn, how to use feedback to improve, and how to engage in the material without getting unduly preoccupied with grades.

We’re excited to announce our next feature: evidence.  It’s not quite ready yet – if you’d like to get a sneak preview, we’d love your feedback.  Email me at riley@activegrade.com.

What do you mean, “evidence?”

Soon, you’ll be able to upload photographs, papers, and any other files to your gradebook.  When John submits a paper, you can grade it as normal, but you’ll also be able to include a copy of it with your grades in ActiveGrade. When Mary demonstrates some level of understanding on the white board, you can snap a photo of it and upload it to ActiveGrade along with a comment and a new score.

Why would I want that?

This was our most-requested feature this summer. We think it can…

• Help your students understand where your judgements are coming from
• Help you remember how and why you came up with the scores you gave way back when
• Help your parents and advisors see directly what’s happening in each topic in your class

When can I use it?

Soon!  We’ve got it pretty much coded up, and we’re just working on polish.  We want to get feedback from you all before we launch it, of course.  If you’re interested in a sneak preview, please email me at riley@activegrade.com .  You’ll get a chance to see the feature early and affect how it works before we release it publicly!

Will it be free?

Your base subscription will stay exactly the same.  We will be charging for storage, but we have a little gift in mind for our existing customers

Are you sneaking in anything else?

Why, yes! As we work, we always think of ways to improve ActiveGrade, and those improvements get wrapped into releases.  Our biggest improvement involves the way you use the gradebook.  Right now, when you click on a cell for a student and standard, you get a little popup dialog that floats over the gradebook.  We’re changing that a little – instead of popping up over your view, the details will slide out from the side of the screen.  We think this is better because it gives you much more space to see what’s going on, and it doesn’t block your view of any of the other data.

There are a few other small improvements that you may not even notice; just things that have been bugging us for a while.

I want to see these things for myself!

Great! We want to know what you think of them.  Please email me at riley@activegrade.com and I’ll get you on the list for sneak previews.

I got into Standards Based Grading because it was better for my students.  It’s more specific, it’s less judgemental, it’s lower pressure, and it’s more useful to them.

Fantastic! BUT: you can get more out of it.  SBG is good for your teaching, too.  Standards-based grades are useful because they pinpoint the weak spots in your teaching, in your assessment, and in your students’ learning.

Quick Example

I gave a quiz every Friday.  I always put 5 or 6 quick questions on there.  This took about 15% of my total class time for the whole year so I was very careful to plan this strategy well.  Watch this video for one way to make quick decisions about what to test in a thoughtful and systematic way.

Use SBAR to Plan Instruction

I taught high school math, and mid-October my grades would look something like this:

Click to zoom.

Each student has his own row, and each topic in the class has its own column.  This view is sorted by class average, so the topics that I think my students are the most skilled with are on the right.  The ones I think they’re least skilled with are on the left.

Before SBG, I plodded along the chapters of my text book, inserting inspirational / fun lessons when I could.  After SBG, with data analysis like this, you can address those weakest topics first.  Even if you feel you need to stick to the book, you could mix in one weak subject per week in a review session or activity.

Side note: compare this view to my grades before SBG:

What do I teach next? From http://tracker.moodle.org/browse/CONTRIB-248

Use SBAR to Plan Assessment

The grades in your gradebook are measurements that you took.  There are no exact measurements. So: your gradebook is full of inaccuracies.  Sorry!

Grades are inaccurate, imprecise, and they get stale. A measurement you took last month no longer has so much to do with what a student knows today.  A measurement you took on class photo day includes all sorts of noise from student social nerves.

SBAR can help you know how accurate your grades are.  The more measurements you have, and the more recent they are, the better.

When I planned my weekly quizzes, I’d try to assess all of the new topics of this week, plus the topic I hadn’t assessed for the longest time, plus the topic I had assessed the fewest times total, plus the topic the class is weakest with.

Sorted by last date assessed

Sorted by number of times assessed

So.

This is a really easy way to look at your data once a week and use it to improve your instruction and your assessment.  Your students may or may not notice what you’re doing, but you can be more confident about all of your opinions about skill levels.  Imagine going into a parent conference saying things like “I’m confident about this grade because I measured it three times,” or starting a conversation with a student with “you have this low grade in this topic, but we haven’t measured it for two months. What have you learned since then?  Do you want to measure it again now?”

Talking about your data will feel a lot better when you’ve thought about it like this.  This will give you and your students a feeling that grades are really connected to knowledge – and not only past performance, but live, continuous performance.

Please leave questions or suggestions in the comments!

We were recently in Charlotte, NC for the Huffington Post’s What is Working expo.  It was a great chance to meet other entrepreneurs (we had a surprisingly good time with our closest competition!) and also some big name types like Arianna Huffington, Will.i.am, and Scott Case of Startup America.  When I was a teacher I really had no idea how much value can come from meeting lots of people – there’s the direct value of sharing stories and lessons, and also the more intangible value of forming a network that wants to help you.  ActiveGrade is a good product built by passionate people and, it turns out, other people enjoy helping us! This isn’t very surprising in retrospect, but honestly, when we started out, it didn’t really occur to me that I could get so much help.

Startup America and the Huffington Post deserve a lot of praise for realizing that this is an area of weakness for new small businesses.  Starting out we didn’t know a lot of people and we didn’t have a lot of expertise, and we never could have gotten invited to participate in an expo at the DNC.  We’d like to thank them and, more specifically, Deborah Chang (@debryc) for connecting us with Koda Wang, Chief of Staff at the HuffPo, who invited us to participate.

Koda Interviewed me for the Huffington Post!  The room was so loud with so much energy for so long that my voice is basically just constantly cracking for the whole thing:

But, even before it was starting to look like we were going to have some success, folks right here in Iowa City were already reaching out and welcoming us.  Amanda Styron  and Andy Stoll organized a weekly social event we were invited to after Michal helped organize Bar Camp Iowa City (and explained how “Good Job” ruined a generation).  They ran Seed Here, which is always organizing events to help people meet each other.  The EDC operates out of Cedar Rapids and has given us advice and invited us to several Pitch & Grow and Innovation Expo events, where we’ve met collaborators and colleagues. Startup America also invited us to attend the Clinton Global Initiative earlier this year, where Michal spoke as an entrepreneur to business leaders.

The Innovation Expo: tons of people eager to hear about us and help us

Josh Cramer has been our business mentor and given us consulting help through CramerDev, his software shop that also focuses on community development.  Now, the Iowa City and Cedar Rapids Creative Corridor is ramping up, hoping to provide yet another means of support, and the city of Iowa City invited us to meet local business leaders and helped us look for affordable office space.  Lee Groeschl from the business school at the University of Iowa has encouraged and advised us, and the business school awarded us $1000 in a business plan competition! The Silicon Prairie News did us the honor of naming us a “Startup To Watch” this year and making us a whole topic on their site! Vault and Busy Coworking have set up affordable places for small (tiny) businesses to have desk space and a little professional camaraderie.  We’re in the process of making our new home at the Wesley Center, a local nonprofit that has some extra space and likes helping local artists.

ActiveGrade setting up shop 

Plumbing and reclaimed doors from the university

What I’m trying to get at, in what feels like ten billion words, is that a lot of people are trying to help us and there are a lot of opportunities to find.  From the national level like the Huffington Post and Startup America to the local level like the group that meets for drinks on Burlington Street every Thursday, people are eager to work hard and connect one another.

And this is just on the business side!  We started our business based on our connections with other teachers at our school and teachers on twitter like Dan Meyer, Frank Noschese, Kate Nowak, Shawn Cornally, (here in Iowa City with us!), and the 200 other teachers I follow on twitter.  Elizabeth Statmore wrote us a lengthy email full of legal advice mere weeks after my formal announcement that I was starting a business, and encouraged us from the get-go!  Sarah Harper-Smith was my colleague at Scattergood and is a teacher at our oldest pilot school, in Washington.  Everyone on our Advisory Board last year (a new one is coming up soon!) volunteered to help us guide ActiveGrade in the right direction!  Our customers have been passionate about SBG and ActiveGrade and have written us hundreds of emails and comments with feedback, speculation about future designs, and encouragement.  That takes a lot of time, and we are grateful for the work you put in.

When we left Scattergood, Michal and I thought we were going to be entirely without community, but there’s a huge number of friendly, supportive people that want to hear our story and tell us theirs.  There’s a lot to do and a lot of people that want to do it.  We feel so lucky to be in the position we have gotten to.

So. To the local people who’ve helped us with encouragement and advice: thank you.  To the teachers we’ve met and the teachers we’ve tweeted: thank you! To the people who’ve made the proverbial big time and still want to help the little guys make a difference: thank you!

Thanks, everyone. ActiveGrade is helping a lot of teachers already, and has been a lot of fun for us to build so far. We’re so excited to see where it takes us next!

We’re honored to have been invited by The Huffington Post to participate in their entrepreneurship expo at the 2012 Democratic National Convention in Charlotte, NC next week. It looks to be a great opportunity for us to connect with policy-makers, business leaders, media, and fellow entrepreneurs.

The expo is part of HuffPo’s What Is Working effort, which seeks to highlight the “opportunities that are available, the surpluses of creativity, ingenuity and compassion that can be poured into job creation.”

“We are planning to use two necessarily partisan events — the Republican convention in Tampa and the Democratic convention in Charlotte — as powerful platforms for presenting what should be a fundamentally bipartisan issue: what we the people can do to accelerate job creation and fill job openings.” [via]

Education is priority number one for creating a strong workforce and we’re proud to say ActiveGrade is most definitely one of the things “working.”

Riley and I (Dan) will be attending, so if you’re attending the convention or in the area let us know if you’d like to get together. And if you have anything you would like us to relay to these policy-makers and leaders (let’s keep it civil!) be sure to let us know in the comments.

A couple weeks ago we sent out a survey to ActiveGrade Teachers. We wanted your opinion on what features would be most helpful and valuable.

We’ve Already Completed the Top 3 Ranked Features:

Simple email and print report templates

1. More Overall Grade creating options: like be able to give a grade based on the number of standards mastered.
   Current Status: COMPLETED
2. Improved email and print report options: Like simpler reports that look good.
   Current Status: COMPLETED
3. Ability to transfer students from one of my classes to another one of my classes.
   Current status: IN FINAL TESTING

We’ve been hard at work implementing many of these features before the start of the new school year. In addition to the options we gave, people mentioned many other features that they would also value, in some cases, above many of these. Some of the features mentioned are actually already in existence and we just haven’t done a good job of letting you know they are there. For others, we have questions about them and would like to hear your feedback.

Additional Features You Mentioned

Pre-loaded Common Core

This is on the way.  Actually, we are not going to pre-load them because I think there are different ways of implementing them.  Instead, we are formatting CSV files to be import ready.  This way, you can take the ones you need, tweak the tagging and wording (I find the wording far too long and unmanageable in many cases) if you like, and upload them straight into the program – wallah!  The Middle School Math and LA documents are already done.  Contact us if you’d like me to send them to you.  Eventually, they will be available on the website.

Print reports that show the standards students have mastered and average score by tag

Both of these have just been released.  To be clear, “mastered” standards are standard that students have achieved a “green” in.  It doesn’t matter what you label it.  So, be sure to slide the green color to whatever score means “mastery” to you.  You can do that in the rubric editor in the Administration view (just be sure to apply that rubric to the appropriate standards).

Also, the report that shows the average score by tag has potential complexities.  If you use tags simply, there won’t issues.  If you use tags to do a lot of organizing and have many sub tags, there is no way for the program to know which ones you want to report on and which you just use for your own sense of organization.  For example, if you have standards in the class tagged in a “5th grade” collection and within that you have them subdivided into “Reading skills,” “Writing Skills,” etc., the report will show the average score on each of those tags, even though you probably don’t care much about the average of the “5th grade” collection.  So, there are improvements to be made there in the long run.

Parents and students should be able to have different logins.

They can.  You can create parent accounts just as you do student accounts.  Then within a parent profile, you can say who their children are.  Then they can login, just as students do, and they will be able to see all of their children’s classes. Here is a link to the help manual that explains how to set this up.

Click on a student’s name and sort the standards in order from lowest to highest for that student

You CAN do this.  Hover over a student’s name and a little drop down menu arrow appears.  Click on it and select “sort this row from low to high.”  Wallah!

You can also click on a column header to sort all the students in order of how well they understand that particular concept.

Sort the standards from lowest to highest for this row

Would like students to be able to respond directly to my feedback in the gradebook

Good news – you can already do this too!  When in class view, click on the gear menu in the upper right, then click “Overview.”  Toward the bottom of the screen that appears, there is a checkbox that says “Allow student, parent, and advisor comments.”  Check it.  Now when students, parents, or advisors login, and click on a bar in the bar graph, the history window will slide out from right as usual.  At the bottom of it, there will be a comment box.  When they leave a comment, it will show up in your gradebook along with your comments (when you click on the appropriate cell).  If you’d like to receive email updates once a day with new comments that have come in, click on your name in the upper corner of your screen.  Then click ‘Account Settings’ and choose the “Alerts” tab.  There you can enable daily email digests.

Would like to be able to weight the importance of different standards and determine overall grades based on different groups

You can do this too.  The way to do is to organize standards into collections (like tagging them).  So you can have an “advanced” group, a “core” group etc.  Then, when you create an overall grading policy, make a custom one.  There you can set criteria like this: “To earn and ‘A’ students must earn at least a 3 in all Core Standards and a minimum of 2.5 in all Intermediate Standards, and a minimum of 2 in all Advanced Standards.  In this way you can put more emphasis on certain types of standards.

Don’t count blanks as zeros (if a student doesn’t have a score for a standard yet, it skews their whole grade)

You can opt not to count blanks.  When you create or edit an overall grading policy there is a drop down menu that asks how you’d like to count blank scores.  Just choose the option that says “ignore blank scores” and you’re all set!

Calculate the Mode rather than the Mean or Median

This one we have questions about.  The reason we haven’t added mode is because if a student took 5 assessments gauging her ability to add and received these scores –  1, 1, 2, 3, 4 –  her score in the gradebook would be a 1.  Clearly the student struggled at first and then improved over time. A ’1′ doesn’t seem to be the best reflection of her current understanding.  I would like to hear your thoughts on this one.  Is there something we are missing?  Is the example I gave a rare one that just wouldn’t happen?  Maybe if you give a ton of assessments, this wouldn’t be an issue so much.  What do you think?

Better tutorials for getting set up.

We are working on this as we speak.  We totally understand that the program can be confusing especially when you log in for the first time and are met with a blank gradebook.  We haven’t given a lot of guidance, and we apologize.  We are creating a set-up wizard that will hopefully be ready in a couple weeks.  This will automatically appear for new accounts.

Copy an assessment to another class, better exporting, and improved student interface

These are all features we are aware of.  We don’t have specific timelines for them, but have not forgotten them.  The student view has been improved in some ways already so that students can see the rubrics that are determining the scores as well as easily see the description of the standard.

I think that about covers it.  I hope you have learned things you didn’t know and feel more informed about where we are headed.  Again, I would love your thoughts on the above features – are there ones you would second as being highly important to you?  Are there ones you have further ideas or questions about?

Let us know!

Why Grades Should Be Separate

We Are What We Report

The Many Purposes of Grading

It’s About What You Know, Not What You Did

Why Grades Should Be Separate

Don’t Forget: It’s Not About Grades

Perhaps my greatest blog post ever: You Wouldn’t Believe The Dumb Answers I Get

You’re a Novice at “Not Being a Jerk:” Non-Academic Standards

All of our writing is inspired by our reading. I wish I could create a compendium of this sort of post.  If you have a post you’re proud of or that you like, please leave it in the comments and I’ll add it up here!

@cariteske brings up a great concern w/ #sbar to @russgoerend – Wants to develop students w/ work ethic? Deadlines/confrontations are nec.

— Shaelynn Farnsworth (@shfarnsworth) July 30, 2012

A common complaint: SBAR doesn’t teach work ethic.

Hey: Teaching is personal. Grades don’t teach anything.

Standards-Based Grading is scary. It brings big changes that can stir up old emotions and new fears. Here are four big fears that was see again and again, and tips for helping people embrace the change

1. SBG Doesn’t Penalize Students For Missed Work, Behavior, Class Participation, or Attendance

It’s hard to let old ideas go.  We are used to grades penalizing students for not meeting certain behavioral or time management expectations.  The question is: should information about one’s behavior and time management skills be mixed up with one’s ability to understand the key learning concepts of a course?

While we may still want to give students feedback on how their behavior affects others and how their time management skills will inhibit them in life, we still want to give clear feedback on how well students understand course material.  Both bits of feedback can be given, both can affect consequences, but the feedback should be given separately.  A student who gets a “C” for late work should not be confused with a student who gets a “C” for not being able to successfully complete any of the math problems.

Standards-Based Grading allows us to do both.  We can still emphasize the importance of kindness, respect, timeliness, and personal responsibility while giving clear feedback about content mastery.

2. In real life and high school, you don’t have the opportunity to redo bad work (it reinforces bad habits in students)

One of the complaints about SBG is that students can “retake” tests.  This, the story goes, encourages laziness; students don’t have to try hard because they know they can just retake the test again and again.

This can be an outcome of SBG, but it certainly doesn’t have to be.
How to avoid this situation:

1. Don’t think of them as, and don’t call them,“retakes.”  In SBG students have many many opportunities to show that they understand a concept.  They may demonstrate their mastery in multiple different assessments (like quizzes and tests), or through group discussion, silent work time, or meetings with the teacher.  The point is to stress that students’ understanding will evolve and they should be able to demonstrate that growing understanding.  The idea is NOT that students should retake the exact same test because they didn’t study the first time.
2. Have rules about reassessment.  If a student has been demonstrating a low level of understanding of a concept on multiple assessments and wants to improve their score, let them know that they can’t just take a quiz anytime they want.  Some teachers have “Reassessment Applications.”  A student must specifically state which skill they think they have improved on and what they’ve done to improve on it since the last assessment.  This allows students to reach understanding at their own pace, but doesn’t allow them to take assessments lightly.

Multiple assessments are a good thing; they give students an opportunity to demonstrate mastery in different ways and many times.  Retake free-for-all is too much work for the teacher and sends the wrong message to students.

3. The Grade Report is Difficult to Understand. It’s hard to know a student’s academic performance

My guess is this happens for two reasons:

1. There is often no overall grade on an SBG report card
2. Standards are uber long-winded and hard to make sense of unless you want to spend hours studying each report card

Here, too, there are solutions.
Standards-Based Grading and Overall Grades can go together.  There are ways of summarizing a student’s mastery of concepts into a single grade to give parents and administrators a quick overview.  For example, taking the percentage of standards currently mastered can easily be turned into a grade.  If there are 20 standards in the class, a student has mastered 15 of them, then she has a 75%.  There are many nuances within this solution and many more ways of translating mastery into a single summarizing score.

SBG tries to focus attention on helping students master the content, but a summarizing grade can be useful as well and doesn’t need to be left out entirely.  The problem is when the summarizing grade is the only feedback given to students; then it defines them and monopolizes their focus.

Secondly, while schools are often beholden to state or national standards, I think it behooves them to pare down the wording into manageable, comprehensible chunks.  It is difficult to accurately assess a standard that is a paragraph long, it is difficult to look at a gradebook quickly and know which standard is which, and it is certainly difficult to look at a long grade report full of 30 different paragraphs each describing some concept you are supposed to be good at.  No wonder parents and students say they can’t make sense of them.

Make standards easy to understand and a lot of complaints will disappear.

4. It doesn’t let students show progress.  A 3 out of 4 is a 75%, akin to a D or C

Again, this is a problem of translation.  If students don’t know what a 3 indicates (often it indicates proficiency), their only choice might be to translate it into percentages and letter grades.
The solutions:

1. Make it clear that the scale can not be translated to percentages.
2. Give them rubrics to help them understand their scores.  Like 1=Beginning, 2=Developing, 3=Proficient, 4=Mastered.
3. Use letters like M and P to mean Mastered and Proficient, instead of numbers.
4. Give them an alternative way to translate the grade.  For example, mastering 80% of the standards = an 80%.

Students may be surprised at the beginning of the year when they don’t have good scores.  This is because they are used to being graded on whether they’ve turned in and completed homework, not on whether they’ve mastered the material.
As the year goes on, they will see their scores improve as a reflection of their increased ability and understanding; in this way SBG shows progress FAR better than traditional grading systems.

Other common problems with implementation

1. Schools try to mix grading schemes in confusing ways.

Overall grades can still be useful and used appropriately with SBG.  What’s not helpful is when a student’s grade is based mostly on mastery but 20% is still based on homework and classwork.  Weighting like that leads to muddled meaning.  It doesn’t clearly communicate what we think is important.  Do we, as teachers, really think it’s most important to focus on and haggle over a couple percentage points?  Or do we think it’s most important that students focus on becoming better learners, thinkers, and doers?  Make your grading policy clear, and don’t use an average.

2. Each school or teacher within a district implements SBG differently

While autonomy and personal discretion are great, it’s problematic when teachers have different interpretations of SBG.  As students and parents struggle to understand the new system, they will become frustrated and disgruntled if each teachers’ grades have different meanings.  Students and parents often fall back on “at least in the old system, I could read the grade report; everyone knows what a ‘B’ is.”  Standards-Based scores and grades can be easy to understand and react to as long as reports are consistent from class to class.

This post was inspired, most recently, by comments from the following article: http://www.thenewstribune.com/2012/06/11/2176310/kennewick-board-to-hear-grievance.html#.UA6izu7iwTI.twitter

What if teachers used all the time they spent mindlessly number crunching (grading) to reflect on student thinking and planning next steps?

— Sam Evans (@samevns) July 27, 2012

Right. This is why we should stop caring about the difference between “Quiz 3″ and “Homework 12.”  As a teacher, you get valuable information from both assessments, and that’s what we care about.

You don’t have a lot of time.  Forget about Quiz 3 and Homework 12.  Focus on what your students know.

If Homework 12 doesn’t tell you or your students something about what they know, stop wasting time.

Hi everyone!

We believe that Standards-Based Grading is about giving effective feedback to students so that they can take ownership of their learning.  We also believe that SBG can provide you, the teacher, with really valuable data that can help you tailor your daily lesson decisions to what students are ready for.

It is with those beliefs in mind that we have retooled the gradebook view in ActiveGrade.  Read on to learn how:

1. Recency and Frequency overlays help you decide what concepts need to be assessed
2. Sorting standards and students helps you see what skills need attention, what students are struggling with most, and how to group students for class activities
3. To easily do everything right in gradebook view without having to hunt through other menus
4. To bulk import standards with descriptions, tags, rubrics, and combination methods

Recency and Frequency

Once there was Quick Stats, and they were a good idea, but now there are Recency and Frequency Overlays and they, together, represent a fantastic idea.

The standard Mastery View, shows you the gradebook color-coded according to what students have demonstrated they understand.

Recency view

Now you can also choose, in the upper left corner, to see the Recency Overlay.  This will color-code the cells according to how recently you have assessed that student in that skill.

You can also choose the Frequency Overlay.  This will color-code the cells according to how many times you have assessed the student in that skill.

To learn more about using these, go to this section of the help manual

This all gets even more useful when you apply a particular sort.

Sorting Students and Standards

Students

Sort students in order of mastery of a standard

By clicking on a column header, you can sort students in order from lowest to highest.  In the Mastery view, that means you can see which student is struggling the most with that concept.  In the Recency view, you can see which students haven’t been assessed in the longest period of time.  In the Frequency view, you can see which students have bee assessed the least.

Standards

Sort standards by student

If you click on the drop down menu next to a student’s name, you can sort the standards in order from lowest to highest for that student.  Again, this means different things depending on which view you are in.  In Mastery, you can see which standards that student struggles with the most.  In Recency, you can see which standards that student might need to review.  In Frequency, you can see which standards that student has been assessed on the least.

Sort on the Class Average row to get an instant overall picture

Instead of sorting on a student’s name, sort on the class average row.  Now you can see, on average, which concepts the class struggles with the most, or which standards you’ve assess the least recently or the least often.

Sort by class average in Frequency View

With this information, you can make quick decisions about what concepts need to be reviewed,  what concepts should be assessed again, which students are ready for advanced work, and how students can be grouped together to work on class projects.

(tip: to return to an unsorted view, simply remove the sort from the filter bar at the top of the gradebook).

To learn more about sorting, go to this section of the help manual.

Do it all from the gradebook!  Who needs configuration menus!?

Add students

Add students right in gradebook

Create student accounts and enroll them in your class all in one move.  Just start typing (you can even type in the email address right here).

Add Standards

Create standards and put ‘em in the gradebook, all in one move. Just start typing (default rubrics and formulas will be applied, you can change them in administration view).

Removes students and standards

Remove standards and students from the class by clicking on the drop down menu next to their names.  (This will remove them from the class, not permanently delete them).

Create, find, and archive classes in Quick Class Switcher

Create New Classes

Create a new class straight in the Quick Class Switcher drop down menu.  Start typing, hit enter, class made, bam. (You can add more details from the overview screen, found under the gear menu).

Archive Classes

Don’t want last year’s classes cluttering up your Quick List? You can also archive classes off of your quick list. Just hit the “x” next to the name.  That class will no longer show up on your list, but you can search for again in search box at the top of the list.  Once you’ve found it, it will show up in the list until you remove it.

Grading periods!  Oh! How Easy to filter the gradebook by timespan!

At the top of gradebook, click on the grading period. You can create a new grading period right there. Type the name (ex. Quarter 3) and a date range if you wish.  You will then be able to confirm the name and dates.  Finally, you will be able to choose the standards that should be included in that grading period and whether an overall grade should be calculated for that period or not.

This will help you quickly see student progress within a given period of time.

 To learn more about navigating the new gradebook view, go to this section of the help manual

Bulk Standard Uploader

If you have a spreadsheet of your standards, you can upload them in all in just a few minutes.

Essentially you need a CSV file (a format that programs like Excel and Numbers can save in) that looks like this:

Standards ready to upload to ActiveGrade

When you import, you can set a rubric and and combination method to apply to the whole set.  If you want to tweak them further, you can do that as you always have in Adminstration with the “I want to…” menu.

To learn more about how to bulk import, go to the Online Help Manual

We’ve got some great improvements, almost ready for you.  If you like trying new things and giving feedback on hard work – which I know most of you do! – read on!

New Uses:

• Decide which topics to focus on next with data about how many times you’ve assessed them, how long ago you assessed them, and how accurate your scores are
• Quickly look at small date ranges and groups of standards to compare pre-test scores to post-test scores.
• Upload more data via CSV to cut down on setup time

AKA New Features:

• Toggle the gradebook between mastery/proficiency, recency, and frequency to plan your classes
• Sort the gradebook in two new ways to find your classes’ (and your instruction’s!) strengths and weaknesses
• Drag columns around to organize standards in sensible ways
• Create new grading periods on the fly from your gradebook to delve deeper into your data
• An updated, modern look with cleaner, task-oriented navigation
• Denser information – 50% less whitespace on the gradebook so you can see patterns more easily
• Some back-end improvements too, like bulk uploads of standards from CSV, quicker entry of multiple items, etc

I’m so excited to get these tools released – I hope they’re going to make it easier for you to use your grades for the good of your students.  I want you to be able to flick on your computer and instantly answer the questions you have about where your class is and how your students are progressing, and I think these new features will be really useful.

However!  I’ve said, “these new features will be really useful” before, when actually “these new features will be really confusing and kind of pointless!”

Please Help!

These will be ready generally in two or three or four weeks, but if you’re interested in helping us refine interfaces, make usability improvements, better explain what we’re aiming for, or telling us we’re headed in the wrong direction, please write riley@activegrade.com and I’ll get you set up with our new Department of Making Sure People Like It BEFORE Releasing It!  Basically, you’ll go to http://www.trymyui.com/worker/signup and then record a video of your first impressions of the new features when we give you special access to see them early.  The video will just be your computer screen and your voice, so we can see what you’re doing, where you think you should click (which we hope will be where you should click).

So just email me directly at riley@activegrade.com if you’re interested, and I’ll get you set up!

Thanks! I’m excited to start using your feedback more directly in the design of the app!

Riley

In 2007-8 I had a beautiful year of teaching in which I presented myself to my students as an expert coach. I taught math, and I worked with each of them to find something in math that interested them. I helped them practice mathematical curiosity, creativity, and communication.  Students in my classes that year learned more about math than any of my other classes ever had. It was glorious, and student reviews of the class showed an enthusiasm and verve I hadn’t seen before. I had helped them find new wonders.

And then… I betrayed them all.  Students who had finally come to love math in my class found themselves suddenly right back where they’d been for TEN YEARS: getting a C.

I actually didn’t see it coming – I thought we were in some sort of renaissance where subject matter and investigation were the most important things, and the importance of the final grades would be trivial. After all, what’s an “A” in the face of epiphany and wonder? When I was preparing their final grades for the school, I forgot that these grades were so important to students, and their parents, and even their choices after high school. A ding on your GPA could be the difference between getting in to your school of choice and being locked out!

This was a big wakeup call.  I realized it was unfair to run class without respect to the context of the school, and I think it’s unfair for a school to run outside of the context of the wider community.

But: I still want to run classes like the old “salons” from the renaissance!  So?

4-Step Proposal for the Education Renaissance

Here’s my four-step plan for starting a renaissance without betraying anyone: full community participation, transparent communication, and a transition away from sorting and towards supporting.

STEP ONE: TEACHERS AND STANDARDS-BASED GRADING (SBG)

The first step can be done by teachers today –  in isolation or in PLCs. In private – without even telling students, parents, or principals – teachers can keep separate, standards-based records. They can use common core standards or five standards they made up on a napkin, but here’s the important part: defining what you want students to learn, and then checking to see if they learned it.

This doesn’t require a change away from grades, GPAs, homework, participation points, or extra credit. The teacher can just pick a few target skills or topics, and pay special attention to whether the students are learning it.

Specific suggestion for teachers: Every month, pick one standard, like “My students use appropriate vocabulary.” Every week, for each student, write down your estimation of that student accordingly. You’ll find you have no idea for most students, and that’s ok: you’ll be forced to think of ways to improve what you know about what your students know.  Maybe your standard is too general or too specific, and that’s ok, too: you’ll learn the right level for your standards. You’ll love the focus you get as a teacher from specific teaching and assessment goals. You’ll start to feel more empowered as you decide what’s important in your class and what’s not. Your assignments and feedback will become more purposeful. You’ll be able to form teams of students based on homogeneous or heterogeneous skill levels. All this, and you don’t even have to tell students you’re doing it – you don’t have to worry that this is going to freak anyone out. Identify a practice you want to cut – like grading homework, or preparing complex materials – to make time for this, and it will infuse the rest of your time with new vivacity.

STEP TWO: DEPARTMENTS, SCHOOLS, AND SBAR

(KEEP THE GPA)

This is where administrators can help.

Teachers are going to love step one so much that they’ll be eager to start reporting grades entirely in  Standards-Based Grading (SBG) – transforming it to Standards-Based Assessment & Reporting (SBAR). Parents and students have to be ready for this, though, and that means the whole school, or at least the whole department, has to be on board. This is a big change, and parents and students must believe that it’s a good one… or it will be a bad one.

It has to be clear how SBG is going to work in terms of the old system. If you’re deciding something as drastic as “I’m not going to assign homework!” or “Lateness doesn’t count!” you’ll be causing a big stir, and it’s your responsibility to incorporate all relevant stakeholders (internal and external) in the decision.  This means parents, the school board, and of course students and teachers.

Specific suggestion for teachers/administrators: if the whole English department wants to start reporting grades in terms of standards, get some resources together to send home with students. You can download some things we’ve created at ActiveGrade  and make alterations to fit the department. Clearly say that you are CONSIDERING this and want input from parents and students.

Once the community is ready, you can move to actually sending home standards-based grade reports. Here are some parent frustrations we’ve heard about that you want to look out for:

• “How can I tell what Johnny is missing or still needs to do?”
• “I just want an overall impression of how Hikma is doing! What is all this?”
• “What is his GPA??”
• “Your 3, 2, 1 scale is incomprehensible! Bring back A, B, C!” (this happens even if your scale is binary and EXTREMELY, UNBELIEVABLY COMPREHENSIBLE).

This is a big change, and even people who said they wanted it will be uncomfortable. Your school or department should expect this discomfort and react by validating it: “Yes, it makes sense that you would want to know if Johnny is doing ok. I’m sorry to keep you in the dark – we’re trying to give you more information, not less! What if we sent home a summary every week, or tried <xyz>?”

GPA can still be calculated at this point. Schools can require a level of “proficient” in 75% of standards to get a C, 85% to get a B, etc. If you’re still doing grades, you should keep students and parents informed of those grades throughout the year – remember not to underestimate the importance of grades to parents and students, so they should be involved as much as possible in the transition to SBG/SBAR.

STEP THREE: EXTERNAL PARTIES, WHOLE-SCHOOL

SBAR… AND NO GPA

This is where you can start to involve colleges, employers, and other consumers of school data. Once your whole school is using SBAR,  GPA becomes entirely for external parties. The GPA is for ranking students and exporting all of your hard work as a single number so that colleges and internships can understand it.

Your software should be able to export SBAR in more meaningful ways, though. A school engaged in SBG should be able to:

• give detailed reports of student proficiencies, complete with a portfolio of that student’s demonstrations so admissions teams can explore them for niche fits or have them summarized for high-level impressions
• provide recommendation letters as a part of these summaries
• give students and parents  full access to these reports, including some editing or customizing options for them to highlight different strengths and tailor it for specific purposes

Colleges want to admit students that will serve and be served well by admission. This kind of powerful description SIMULTANEOUSLY improves the colleges’ ability to pick the students they want AND REHUMANIZES EDUCATION. We can deal with the streamlining necessary to move students through a huge, national education system… without insulting the students by reducing them to a single average.

STEP FOUR: RENAISSANCE SALONS WITH COMPETENCY-BASED EDUCATION (CBE)

This is where every community member can get involved with education – the biologist who spends 4 hours available over Skype every Monday, the mechanic who has students come to his shop for an hour every afternoon, the parents who come to help with maintenance, the business who creates internships or apprenticeships.

GPAs eliminated, our schools can loosen up the schedule – eliminating “Algebra 1” and replacing it with a set of competencies. We get a chance to really think about whether every student needs to know every trig function. We give students a chance to soak up their interests and avoid topics they don’t like, but retain the power and responsibility of requiring them to achieve mastery of fundamentals like literacy and numeracy.

Software can not only generate schedules but generate schedule options the staff and community resources of our school can support and the students can choose. Schedules can be refreshed every month, and – voila! – no child will be in a class moving too slow or fast for more than 3 weeks. The stigma of being “held back” or “skipping grades” diminishes because working in your own best direction becomes the standard for everyone. Our teachers, parents, and businesses can be involved in refreshing, interesting, and USEFUL teaching opportunities with smaller and more focused time periods.

As a school, our mission could  shift from “every student has had 300 hours of math” to “every student is prepared to welcome the challenges and opportunities of whatever community they land in.”

With my mission accomplished, I can go back to teaching. I can be a mentor, a resource, a coach, guiding students towards interests and helping them identify and celebrate their strengths. I can run my class according to where my students are and what they’re interested in. When my students exceed me they can find other resources.

SEE?

There are technical and sociological hurdles I skipped over with some clever text formatting. No system will be perfect for everyone. Some people will never be convinced. Students might not choose to study the topics that are good for the economy. We might forget to make them practice and then when the power goes out they won’t be able to add. Et cetera.

There’s a lot of work to be done. There’s science to do. Use this proposal as a starting point for concrete imaginings, if you like. I want to hear your proposals, too.

MY ROLE (WHERE I’M COMING FROM)

For me, ActiveGrade is a commitment to this idea on a deep, life-risking level. Michal, Dan and I have all risked our careers (and retirement savings) to make a tool that can enable our communities to make this transformation. Technology can take some of the bureaucratic overhead off of the shoulders of teachers and administrators and put it on computers. I would never want to take human relationships out of education – I want to free people from the HASSLE AND PAPERWORK of organizing community-scale education.

Right now we use GPAs and averages because they are the most complex communication we could do with pencil and paper. No one has time to make all the reports and schedules I’m talking about. But we have a new medium in the internet, iPads, and laptops. We have a LOT MORE BANDWIDTH for communication, but we’re still wasting it on our pen-and-paper averages.

ActiveGrade’s not perfect, but we’ve spent every day of two years on it, pursuing this vision.  Check out our work and jump on our bandwagon, or help us refine our vision.  Our blog is at activegrade.com/blog, we’ve made resources for you to read and share at activegrade.com/resources, we’re on twitter at @ActiveGrade (@AGMichal, @RileyLark, @floatingboxes), we do Google+ hangouts to talk with teachers, we present, learn, and create at conferences.  You can join our mailing list from the homepage at activegrade.com.

We need help developing (now hiring!), we need help spreading the word, and we need help refining the software.  If you like our vision, please help!

Sincerely,
Riley

This proposal was inspired by the first co-creator’s camp put on by Source Media, and is cross-posted on their blog with some alterations: http://iowatransformed.com/2012/04/co-creator-camper-proposes-a-set-of-next-steps-to-help-bring-vision-developed-at-camp-to-fruition/