I think this book is really helpful for teachers rethinking grades. Okay. In Rethinking Grading: Meaningful Assessment for Standards-Based Learning, Cathy Vatterott offers a framework for standards-based grading to reflect student progress and learning, and she provides examples from elementary, middle, and high schools. Still, …
It is Friday morning, and I am not in school but writing about it. For now I feel like I am in some dimension of utopia, but I realize we, our schools, have yet to arrive at some utopian destination. Indeed, we are far from the sort of schools our students deserve, and yet there are teachers who create these wonderful communities that make possible many of the points listed above (conversations with students, feedback over grades, and learning over testing). Utopia doesn’t have to be a work of fiction. We can imagine utopia as a direction — a direction I intend to keep running toward when the “real” school year begins and elements of dystopia loom.