My history and iterations of SBG, Standards (Skills) Based Grading

Back in early 2011, I was home sick from school one day.  What does a teacher home sick do? Well, they read education blogs of course! (at least that’s what I do).  I spent the day in bed reading Dan Meyer (@ddmeyer), Shawn Cornally (@ThinkThankThunk), and Frank Noschese (@fnoschese).  I went back to school energized to try SBG out.  My awesome administrator from  CCCS, Grant Padmos, helped me to re-word what I got from Frank Noschese’s site and I implemented it immediately.  I decided to call it “Skills” Based Grading instead of “Standards”.  I didn’t like that the word standards implies that they would be school or state standards.

Here are the various iterations of what I’ve done.

2010-2011: original version

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2012-2013: I had 2 versions.  In both I’ve moved from the 0-4 scale to use a scale that matches grades, 0-100.  Version 1 said quizzes would be unannounced, which was inaccurate, because I announced all quizzes.  Also, version 1 had 95 as max score on 1st time and need to repeat perfection twice to get 100.  I changed that in version 2 so that students could get 100 the first time. The other big change in version 2 (for second semester) was a limit to 10 retakes total for the semester.  I wasn’t counting on the enormous amounts of students who got 80’s, 85’s, and 90’s, wanting to do retakes.  This was my first year at a new school and that was a different experience from my former school. It became a time issue for me and I couldn’t keep up, hence the limit to 10 per semester.

version 1:

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version2:

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2013-2014: still working on it