Throughout our grading transformation, we used several key PD elements:
- Professional Reading: As mentioned in History, two key books were foundational: Guskey & Bailey's Developing Standards-Based Report Cards (2010, read by administrators) and Ken O'Connor's A Repair Kit for Grading: Fifteen Fixes for Broken Grades (2011, read by all teachers). Along the way, smaller groups of teachers and administrators read numerous articles from many publications. Many of those articles are collected on Matt Townsley's excellent Standards-Based Grading resource page. We've given A Repair Kit for Grading and Cathy Vatterott's excellent primer, Rethinking Grading: Meaningful Assessment for Standards-Based Grading to new teachers to familiarize them with the philosophy behind our system.
- Conference Presentations: Many excellent presenters have informed and continue to inform our development. In several venues, teachers and administrators have individually seen Rick Wormeli, Ken O'Connor and Susan Brookhart. Dr. Thomas Guskey came to LV to speak to all of our teachers and administrators.
- Department- and Whole-Staff Discussion: Periodic 'book discussion' gatherings weren't the only collaborative activities in which the LVHS staff engaged in the first couple of years of SBL transformation. Our 'pilot project' teachers shared their findings with colleagues with departments and with the whole staff. Furthermore, the crucial elements of our policy were quite often hammered out in whole-staff meetings using consensus techniques. Yearly, informal groups of teachers have gathered weekly during the summer to work on their standards, assessments and rubrics together. Departments have used day-long meetings to settle on consistent policies for 'how to grade' recurring assessment items and assignments. Finally, members of our Building Leadership Team have gathered feedback from staff and students and provided leadership. For example, two BLT team members led the process that resulted in building-wide presentation standards, rolled out for the first time in 2017-2018.