Shakalakabra: Hang Ten on This Standards-Based Grading Wave

[BradMoser]

Presentation Title

Shakalakabra : Hang Ten on This Standards-Based Grading Wave ‍♀️

Abstract / Session Overview

Yo dudes and dudettes, learning mastery can talk to the Canvas grade book with a couple API calls and it’s well worth it. Join us on this, our second wave of, adventure as we will share the do’s and don’t of making scores from Outcomes and Learning Mastery automatically skimboard over into your Gradebook for reporting. Much like the cold beach shower rinsing the sand off, this session will clean up your procsss for connecting the two grade books.

Details

Wed. July 10th, 10:55 AM- 11:35 AM ( 40 Min )

Once we rolled out Canvas to our schools teachers took off. Then we had a question that our World Language teachers asked that challenged us. They have adopted a new way of grading that included standards and a new grade scale. I knew there was a solution with Canvas but not totally sure what it would be. Canvas has a hidden secret that is so rad. Reporting on standards is crucial to drilling down and providing insight for each student into what they are learning and where they land on specific standards. We've leveraged the radness of standards and outcomes but also need more. We needed the values from Learning Mastery to report back to the Canvas Gradebook so we could then translate all the scores into a single grade for that class which is reported back to the state. I hope to share what and why and how we made this happen.

We had to use some API calls to make this work and we've elected to only sync once a day, but, it works and takes the process off the shoulders of the teachers from having to manually transferring scores from Learning Mastery to Gradebook. Come hear our story. 

Resources

• Handouts, resources, links to come!

InstructureCon 2019

Read More Presentation Blogs

[jwaldvogel]

We're diving into this in our district- I'm excited to hear about your journey. Thanks!

[BradMoser]

Excited to share what we have learned and to learn from your experience too. 

[rislis]

Have any tips on getting teachers to "buy in" to this journey?

[BradMoser]

 @rislis ‌, great question and I think we are still working through that. You could try to force them by changing their gradebook to be reported by standards? LOL....but that can be rough. 

Here's an idea. One way is to help them consider, "what's in a grade?" I have seen this used by having all teachers come to a room. Then give them a paper. Have them answer questions about grading for example,

• Do you give extra credit?
• Do you penalize late work? 
• Can students turn in work multiple times?
• Do you have a deadline where work can no longer be submitted?
• Does the grade include behavioral points along with academic score?

Then have them wad it up and snowball it. Have them throw their answers to the middle and pick up someone else's ball. Then you can use a human-map to display the answers as a group. It's powerful to see the variety of grading techniques. 

Ask them, how do we as a school feel about the variety of grading practices? How much of the grade in a course should be academic and how much should come from on-time and other effort and conduct?

If they want grades to reflect more academic in nature, then standards-based grading can help. 

That's just one idea. Hope it helps. 

[tom_chambers]

@BradMoser I just ran across this as we are discussing the challenges of "translating" the outcomes/learning mastery into letter grades and parent/student communication. This presentation looks super interesting and may help us with this process. I don't see the link to this presentation material. Would you be able to share the presentation and perhaps API information with me? Thanks much!

[BradMoser]

Hi @tom_chambers 

Thanks for the comment. This is the presentation. As for the specific API info, you can see the screenshots of what I got from our IT folks. I don't know if they have the specific command lines in a form that is shareable. I can ask.