They Why and How of Progress Reports

It's that time of year. We've had our students for four and a half months. It's a reasonable amount of time to get to know them, identify strengths and weaknesses, try out some strategies, gather data to see how their doing. It's the time of year when teachers all across the country are sitting down, usually late at night or on the weekends, averaging quizzes and tests, entering grades into the computer, scouring journals and papers for glimmers of proof of progress. It's the time of year when I always consider quitting.

My first year of teaching I was blindsided by grades. I was teaching sixth grade in a large rural consolidated school north of Burlington, VT. There was no formal system for grading or keeping grades or entering them anywhere. On my first day of work I was handed a binder with the state standards which I promptly put on a shelf to gather dust. No one asked me to pull them out, so I didn't think of doing so. The only curricular textbook I had was from the Everyday Math program, so I presumed the folks at the University of Chicago knew what they were doing and I wouldn't have to worry about it as long as I stuck to the program. As for reading and writing, social studies and science, I floundered through self designed units loosely based on topics like "Mysteries" and "the Solar System," and just hoped to God the kids were picking up something useful. Occasionally I would find standards to throw in my lesson plans, but if I didn't no one would know or care.

And then I had to come up with grades. I needed a letter for each student in the areas of Reading, Writing, Math, Social Studies and Science. Perhaps there were some other ones, like Spelling or Homework Completion, I can't remember. It is only fair to say I made them up. In the end, after panicking for 24 hours, I looked at a few quiz and test grades, thought about how the kids fared in my classroom, and I gave them each a letter. A. B. Hmm, C +? I am pretty sure I even wrote them directly onto the reports by hand.  I knew it wasn't right, but I was so busy trying to figure out how to teach all of those subjects, I couldn't manage to actually grade them. No one ever challenged or questioned me about it. There was no space on the report card for comments, so I didn't have to worry about that.

The following year, determined to have my grades be based on something, I purchased a palm pilot and downloaded a free trial of Easy Grade Pro. I graded every assignment and recorded observational scores during class.  I was too cheap to buy the full version, so about a week before the end of the first term the software expired and I lost all of my grades. For the second year in a row I just made the letters up. I would kind of throw each kid up on the wall and stare at them with one eye closed, stepping closer and farther away for perspective, and say, "Eh, she's a B. Yeah, totally a B." Again no one seemed to mind. I mean, after all, the kid really was a "B."

In New Hampshire the grading system was equally amorphous. Each grade (ex. Kindergarten, First, Second, etc.) in my school had their own report card and the teachers at each level could choose what and how to grade as long as every class in the grade level was the same. We were expected to teach the state standards, but we were not expected to report on them. There were no rubrics or scales or criteria for the numbers we assigned (for some reason numbers were supposed to be more accurate than letters, but teachers and parents alike considered them analogous).

I was once again teaching a new grade in a new school, but this time with a new baby at home, so I repeated my strategy of focusing on instruction rather than evaluation and neglected to record any meaningful grades for the entire semester. When January rolled around I resorted to my gestalt method, using the single sentence comment line to justify the 2s, 3s and 4s in my class (I didn't assign any 1s or 5s for fear of attracting attention).

I got in trouble when a fellow teacher in the district attended his daughter's progress conference. He and his wife wanted justification for the 3 in Reading, when obviously their child was reading above grade level. (She was.) "She doesn't challenge herself with her independent reading," was my only excuse. In truth I had no idea what level the child was reading on, since I had focused my efforts on the struggling students. She was doing fine. I thought that was enough.  The mom left the conference livid, and over the next two years as I sheepishly worked closely with the fellow teacher in professional development I never forgot my transgression. I would never again assign a grade with no support to back it up.

Flash forward to this past weekend, when I spent three solid days crafting comments for this round of progress reports. Things have changed since my first year of grading (or rather, NOT grading) ten years ago. No Child Left Behind took the country by storm. The Common Core has arrived and it looks like it is here to stay. Charter schools are able to demand as much as they wish from teachers without the constraints of Unions or contracts. Standardized assessments, and assessments of any kind, are paramount.

Over the course of the semester I grade student work each week, assigning each assessment or experience a number between 1 and 5 to describe the level of mastery on a particular Common Core Standard. We are expected to record the grades in an online program and then return to work families every week. I do not. But I do my best. This process is time consuming, and as a working mother I cut corners where I can. The benefit is that at the end of the term I have a healthy handful of "grades" to draw from, as well as a stack of 18 pieces of communication with family members, when I sit down to write comments. My hope is that no one next week will say, "My child is a THREE?!" They've seen it coming.

For each child I write a comment for reading comprehension, reading foundations, writing, language, math, social studies or science, and social emotional progress. Each of these comments has one paragraph explaining what we did over the course of the semester, and a second paragraph about the child's individual performance. Much of the content is cut and pasted from previous reports or generic narratives I craft ahead of time. But each comment must be thought out, confirmed with evidence, and revised a bit to suit that child. I look back at grades, sift through their journals for writing samples, think for a moment about classroom performance, try to throw in a line about something anecdotal or personal. All in all, from first thought to hitting SUBMIT on the final report in the computer, the whole process takes me about an hour per student. I have 25 students. That's over three full work days of reflecting and writing about my students.

This is great. It's the way it should be. But in the midst of all that reflecting and writing, I also have to continue teaching. My school gives us a three half days of report writing time, which adds up to about 12 hours. The other 13 hours need to come from my family and my students. I am not such a great mom or teacher leading up to Progress Reports. My biological children watch a lot more TV than usual. My husband does a lot more dishes. My students do a lot more worksheets and maybe even watch a video or two. The 13 hours have to come from somewhere, and last I checked I'm not exactly going to the gym every day or hanging out with friends at the pub.

When I described this process to a friend who stopped by to drop off his kids for a play date today, he said, "Is it necessary?" I stopped, not knowing what to say. "I mean, is there value to it? Do you need to?"

My initial response was, "No. I mean ,who really reads them anyway?" Then I thought for a moment and corrected myself. "Actually, it's a good opportunity for me to stop and reflect, to think carefully about each kid. By having to write about it, it helps me to evaluate where we are and what needs to change in order to get where we need to be. So yeah, I guess it's valuable."

Necessary, however, I don't know.

As I move into this next phase of teaching, the phase where I should sure as hell know what I am doing, and I should be able to teach without so much stress and not quite so many hours of work each week, I am continually asking myself, "Is it necessary?" Good is great. Great is better. But in order for me to sustain this work I so long to do, I must do only what is necessary.

I must assume it is.