When it was time for SLA teachers to brainstorm sessions for this year’s EduCon, Standards Based Grading was a no-brainer.

SLA faculty has been building, tweaking, tearing down, testing, implementing, arguing, and also agreeing about standards for 2+ years now. As with many things at SLA, people sometimes assume, looking at us at a distance, that we’re an educational utopia and the learning here just magically happens. We will be happy to disabuse you of that notion, and give you perspective on what building your own standards-based grading system involves, and how we integrated that with project based learning. To give you a full sense of that picture, we have a representative from each major discipline — and we all came to standards from a very different place:

• Mark Bey – Spanish
• Roz Echols – Physics
• Pearl Jonas – History (and a first-year SLA teacher!)
• Brad Latimer – Math
• Larissa Pahomov – English

Here’s our official write-up:

In the face of Common Core and increasing pressure from administrations, many schools are looking to produce more data about student learning. At SLA, teachers have responded to this shift by creating their own system of Standards Based Reporting. In this panel conversation, teachers from each discipline will discuss how they created standards language for their specific subject area, how they track student progress throughout the school year, and how they integrate the skills and reflection into their own classroom. The staff will also share the online system SLA uses to collect and report standards data with students.

If you have any questions or ideas in advance, we strongly encourage you to post them as a comment on our EduCon page — that way we can take it into consideration as we build our framework for the session.