How Do I Grade?
An Exercise for Teachers

How you go about grading can contribute substantially to how confident students feel in your class, to how well they learn from mistakes, and to how they feel about the subject you teach. For many students, this will be their first experience with “grades.”
Before you give grades, ask yourself the following questions and note your reflections or new ideas about your practices:
Have I clearly stated (in discussions and in assessment rubrics) what grading system I use and what each grade means? ________________________________________________________________
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Do I use ungraded pre-assessments to:
___ Help students identify what they already know and can do?
___ Help me identify their misconceptions?
___ Let students pose their own questions about a new subject area?
___ Let students know where they are going (what the learning goals are)?

When I grade student work, do students see what they got right and where they still need to improve? ________________________________________________________________

If you are grading something other than a test or quiz (such as a project, an oral presentation, or a research paper), ask yourself:

___ Do I use a common rubric for students, even when I offer them choices about how to demonstrate their learning?
___ Do I provide feedback early and often, so that students can use my grading criteria to guide them while the work is still in process?
___ Do students have opportunities to see and talk about their ongoing work using the grading criteria I have created?

Notes: __________________________________________________________
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Have I clearly stated how students can revise their work or improve their grade in other ways? __________________________________________________________
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What other feedback do I give to students besides a letter grade? Do my students understand how that feedback connects to the grades I give them? ________________________________________________________________
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Excerpted from Fires in the Middle School Bathroom: Advice for Teachers from Middle Schoolers (New Press, 2008), by Kathleen Cushman and Laura Rogers, Ed.D., with the students of What Kids Can Do.