Anyway, I've never been in a school that officially does SBG, so I've been trying to incorporate it "unofficially" for the past few years. Three years ago, I changed my entire curriculum design to focus around out 30+ standards in Algebra 1. That same year, I stopped putting an overall grade on tests, subscoring by standard instead (although I put the overall grade in my online grade book). I've had varying degrees of success. Some students really get it and say things like, "Look, I knew how to do everything except *specific section name.* I just need to work on that." Others still only care about their overall grade and struggle each test to add up the points earned out of total points.
Last week we had parent conferences on Thursday and Friday. For the past few years, I've had students fill out a self-assessment. While I've had this practice for a while at the end of each semester, doing it for parent conferences hadn't really crossed my mind. It's been amazing because it saves me almost every difficult conversation. My students have been very honest about themselves, their work ethic, and where they are in the class. I begin my conferences by having the parents review the self-assessment, and we go from there. (One day I would like to have student-led conferences, but this is as close as I can get for right now.)
This year I added a space at the bottom where I listed the standards we have covered so far in Algebra 1 and next to each, I wrote "mastered," "approaching," or "not yet." In the corner, I did write an overall grade because I knew some parents would ask. We spent most of our conference then talking about the standards, which ones really came from middle school and are a concern if not mastered by now, which are the most challenging and not really a surprise to be an "approaching." Most importantly, we barely needed to have a separate conversation about what each student needed to work on...it was embedded in everything else we had discussed. And they have opportunities! I shared with each parent how the reassessment process works and how their child can continue to work towards mastery of each standard.
I left each conference feeling hopeful that each student would continue to grow, and I like to think that the parents left with a clarity about how to help and empowered to help their students achieve even more. It was a really positive experience which is not typically how I've felt about conferences in the past. We didn't just talk about how their student is "great" - we had data to show what even my highest achieving students can keep working on. We also didn't talk about "concerns" - again, there was data to show exactly how to improve. As exhausting as it can be to meet with 30 parents in a day, I left wishing we had more days like this.
