Whether you are in math, ELA, science, design, art or a multitude of other subjects most share a learning process of input, process, output, feedback. In education we have often lacked the feedback portion of this loop. We give students assignments, give them some type of instruction around the knowledge and processes required to complete the assignment and have them complete the work. Once the assignments are turned in, we then give them a grade and expect them to know that numerical score means. However, what happens when there are multiple issues with an assignment or they don’t understand what the grade means? The result is that they become frustrated, devalued and checked out.

Changing the Grading:

In the past, I used a rubrics to assess student learning and grade assignments. However, I never gave the rubrics to the students ahead of time, this lead to them not directly knowing what they would be assessed on or how their assignments were scored. I often had to answer questions and explain my process to them or to parents. During the pandemic, I decided to change this practice with each assignment I was posting the assessment rubric with the assignment when it was assigned to the students. I then begin to look into how I could create more consistent rubric and found that most LMS (Learning Management Systems) can house standardized criterion with scores attached. Now the different systems call these different things, but they often function the exact same way. I took this idea and started to build criterion line-items for my rubric based primarily around my state benchmarks. As I was starting to build these line-items, I found that I need some more specific items that my state benchmarks didn’t cover, so I added what I can task-specific items. These task specific items were criterion that were more geared towards my specific needs such as file organization or grammar in technical writing. This lead me to highly consistent rubrics that could be readily reused with assignments or across multiple assignments. An added benefit of this that I hadn’t initially thought about was since I was using the outcome system from the LMS, when I graded assignments the system was building learning data on my students. This process changing my grading and allowed me to go paperless in my classroom, one component was missing though I realized as I was getting into the processing of the grades in my classes and that was direct feedback.

Better Feedback:

During the pandemic, I overhauled my grading system to accommodate the various new and different activities that we were doing in our new environment. After changing my grading system, students were asking many questions about what they did wrong on assignments or how they could improve in the future. This lead me to change my expectations about classwork and resubmission’s. I wanted to move towards a model in which student were encouraged to redo assignments rather than hound me for extra credit at the end of each card marking. The first task was to begin to give students direct feedback on their assignments, but I found this added significant time to my grading process and I realized that most of the feedback I was giving for a given assignment was mostly the same. So I started to craft feedback comments that would be specific to the common mistakes I found students making, but also pointed them in the direction of the corrective action that they would need to take. I organized these feedback comments, into lists that were grouped by topic or need. This allowed me to have the list of comments up for a given assignment or topic and easily copy and paste them into the feedback box of our LMS. Over time, I found that this sped up my grading process, but also gave my students the information that they needed to successfully fix assignments and resubmit them.