Building Trust and Accountability through Report Cards
by Amy Bowker
January 29, 2016
Report card time is here again. For me, it’s a dreaded time since I don’t believe in marks and find that report cards do not give enough feedback for students and parents.
My students this year have been working on self assessing and are pretty bang on with it now. They self assess how they do on projects and even their learning skills.
I work on their report cards with the marks they have decided they deserve by self assessment and also my marks. I enter in their marks and corresponding comments into the report card software. When I’m finished, I print the report cards out and hand them back to the students. I give them time to read through them, look at their grades and comments.
All of their completed assignments and rubrics have been handed back to them previously and they are stored in their Student Led Conference binder. The students have access to these binders all year round and are encouraged to bring them home to show their parents. They also refer to these binder when looking at their report card.
I always begin this process by talking to my students about how a grade doesn’t really reflect what you know and if they are upset in any way, to come and chat with me about it instead of leaving upset.
Then, I hand out the report cards. Some of my students were excited and some were so nervous. I gave them quiet time to read through them and some were thrilled with their report cards and some had questions about certain grades.
If they had any issue, they were to circle the mark and say exactly why that mark should be changed. Then, when the class was working we met and discussed their thoughts and mine.
I have to say that being really organized using Google Drive helped me pull up all their grades, self assessed or teacher assessed and then we could really discuss it.
Some students made quite persuading arguments and their marks were changed. Some students forgot that they self assessed themselves with a certain mark and that influenced their grade. Some students disagreed with their learning skills mark that they had written themselves and I had to remind them that they decided on that qualifier and grade themselves.
The process of sharing the report card before it actually goes home has been essential in my classroom. It helps the students learn, consistently self assess, demonstrates mutual respect and trust and reduces stress since they know exactly what will be going home to parents on February 4th.
I would highly suggest that other teachers use this method as well.
Here are some thoughts from my students:
I think that it’s good that Mrs Bowker does that because before we go home with our report cards we know our grades, we have more confidence and are not stressed out. -K.A.
We don’t have to worry about how our parents are going to react to our marks because we know what grade we got and we agree with the marks. -L.A
I like how Mrs Bowker lets us see our report cards before they go home so we can check our marks and tell her if we disagree with them and we talk about the marks so we aren’t upset. -L.J.
I like that Mrs Bowker gives us our report cards so we know what level we are at and how we can improve. -H.A.
