Welcome to the 2011-2012 school year!Grading and Progress Reports
“Good assessment is about expanding the assessment
repertoire because no single form is sufficient”
- Grant Wiggins, author of Understanding by Design
At SLLIS we do not use overall letter grades or number grades in our elementary schools. We report student learning with two specific tools throughout the school year: Narrative Progress Reports and Student Portfolios.
Narrative Progress Reports
Narrative Progress Reports are snapshots of where your children are each quarter. These reports are not cumulative and families receive a unique narrative each quarter. These reports are designed to answer three important questions for parents:
- Do the teachers really know my child?
- Do the teachers know what my child is mastering?
- Do the teachers know where my child is struggling?
In a Narrative Progress Report teachers provide the following information:
- Which units, short projects and long projects the class experienced
- How your child approached the work
- What types of/which questions they asked of the work
- Which discoveries they made that inspired further study
- Physical, intellectual and socio-emotional development
Those of you with older children may be very familiar with the Missouri Show Me Standards and Grade Level Expectations (GLEs). Our teachers use these standards and expectations to plan the sequence of skills introduced in each subject area at each grade level. If you have questions about how your child is progressing on any subject-specific skill, please ask your teacher and s/he will be able to explain when and how it is being introduced in the classroom and how your child is mastering it. Each year SLLIS distributes checklists of each set of GLEs for your reference. Teachers do not produce a tally of each checklist for the progress report.
Narrative Progress Reports will be distributed at the end of each grading quarter.
Download a template of the First Quarter Report Card here.
Student Portfolios
Our Student Portfolios are designed to answer slightly different questions for parents:
- What is my child producing?
- Which elements of his/her work make my child proud?
- How does my child synthesize complex ideas?
- What does my child know about his/her own learning?
Student Portfolios are built throughout the school year and remain in the classrooms. Students learn to select pieces of their work that represent a variety of concepts, skills and understandings from each unit. Students learn to reflect on each piece in their portfolio and, with some assistance from their teachers, explain their selection of each piece in the portfolio. Portfolio presentation days occur in the last six weeks of the school year as part of our culminating learning celebration.
Reporting student progress and success is a difficult task and one that we are committed to reviewing annually. At the end of the school year we convene a Progress Report Focus Group of teachers and parents to review how effective this reporting is for teachers, parents and ultimately students in understanding their own learning.