Evidence-Based Grading and Wellness
Eric Ramos - Physical Welfare Director
In Physical Welfare, many of us are, or have been, Coaches, Club Sponsors, and Athletic Trainers. We spend a lot of our time with students outside of the structured environment of the classroom, mentoring and getting to know kids on a more personal level. We have always focused our professional discussions around these personal relationships, as our subject matter (physical fitness, nutrition, mental illness, saving lives, learning to trust) often is of a more personal nature. What we have found is that Evidence Based Reporting is all about the PERSONAL conversation between the student and the teacher, which has made it a natural fit with our content.
The creation of assessments, the gathering of evidence, the conversations around learning, and the day to day instruction all look and sound now very personal. As Director, I felt the shift when I started in my new role and heard it, teachers began talking about various evidence that was being gathered, and what this might mean about student learning. My perception was verified when a teacher, who was returning from taking some time off, proclaimed “everyone is talking differently now.”
Assessments have become focused on putting students in a position to show what they know, how they can use this new knowledge, and how we can capture that as evidence, as opposed to simply what they have memorized.
This new type of assessment required us to rewrite our targets and refocus our instruction around the student experience. Conversations around the assessment of our students entered a never-ending cycle of check the targets, create the assessment, give the assessment, have team discussions around the evidence, recheck the target, tweak the assessment, etc., etc.
In Physical Welfare, we have long been asking and answering the question “what do we want them to know?” Although that question is still being asked, it is coupled with, “How well do they need to know it?” and “Will we have enough evidence for this standard?”
Furthermore, EBR has allowed our Professional Learning Community to strengthen by encouraging teams to create common assessments and calibrate our instruction, and grading, to gather common evidence. Common evidence and common assessments throughout a common curriculum are essential for meaningful conversation about student learning to take place on any team.
There is a certain level of give-and-take that is essential for this to work. Once a teacher has the experience of having a conversation with a student that shifts from “how many points” to “how can I show evidence of my learning”, that teacher has shown a willingness to work towards creating more opportunities for those conversations to take place.
Due, in part, to our Physical Welfare content being heavily skills based, creating specific skills that we want students to focus on was relatively easy to do. Once we had identified the skills we felt were needed to put students on the path to lifelong wellness, we had to create gradations of those skills to promote our student-teacher conversations around this learning.
This focus on the targets and the gradations of learning has allowed conversations to take place around evidence. This, in turn, has allowed everyone, teachers and students, to focus on specific skills and dive deeper into that learning than ever before.
The creation of assessments, the gathering of evidence, the conversations around learning, and the day to day instruction all look and sound now very personal. As Director, I felt the shift when I started in my new role and heard it, teachers began talking about various evidence that was being gathered, and what this might mean about student learning. My perception was verified when a teacher, who was returning from taking some time off, proclaimed “everyone is talking differently now.”
Assessments have become focused on putting students in a position to show what they know, how they can use this new knowledge, and how we can capture that as evidence, as opposed to simply what they have memorized.
This new type of assessment required us to rewrite our targets and refocus our instruction around the student experience. Conversations around the assessment of our students entered a never-ending cycle of check the targets, create the assessment, give the assessment, have team discussions around the evidence, recheck the target, tweak the assessment, etc., etc.
In Physical Welfare, we have long been asking and answering the question “what do we want them to know?” Although that question is still being asked, it is coupled with, “How well do they need to know it?” and “Will we have enough evidence for this standard?”
Furthermore, EBR has allowed our Professional Learning Community to strengthen by encouraging teams to create common assessments and calibrate our instruction, and grading, to gather common evidence. Common evidence and common assessments throughout a common curriculum are essential for meaningful conversation about student learning to take place on any team.
There is a certain level of give-and-take that is essential for this to work. Once a teacher has the experience of having a conversation with a student that shifts from “how many points” to “how can I show evidence of my learning”, that teacher has shown a willingness to work towards creating more opportunities for those conversations to take place.
Due, in part, to our Physical Welfare content being heavily skills based, creating specific skills that we want students to focus on was relatively easy to do. Once we had identified the skills we felt were needed to put students on the path to lifelong wellness, we had to create gradations of those skills to promote our student-teacher conversations around this learning.
This focus on the targets and the gradations of learning has allowed conversations to take place around evidence. This, in turn, has allowed everyone, teachers and students, to focus on specific skills and dive deeper into that learning than ever before.