Detracking with Building Thinking Classrooms series: Grades that Measured What We Valued

Example of a set of students' grades in the Formative.com platform. (Image credit: Youtube.com: FORMATIVE | Getting Results with Formative: A Workshop for Data-Driven Admin)

In my final year in the classroom (2021-2022), my team and I detracked pre-algebra using Peter Liljedahl's Building Thinking Classroom techniques. I was asked by Illustrative Mathematics to share our experiences in a blog post after having success with their curricula. This series shares excerpts from that blog post, which can be found here, as well as extra photos and videos from that unforgettable moment in time.

To give support to my fellow educators who are currently deep in the BTC work, I'm sharing the experience here--one part of the system at a time.

Evaluating What We Value

Grades that Represent Growth

Building Thinking Classrooms outlines many ways to evaluate student learning. There were several untraditional ways for our students to earn grades based on our agreement with the BTC text to evaluate what we valued. Students earned grades for attending to the following aspects of our class: 

• maintaining participation points

• in-class assessment grades

• unit test scores (2-day testing structure)

• filling out their unit rubrics

• writing unit reflections

• completing unit test corrections

  
  

We took advantage of IM’s succinct and thorough seventh-grade curricular assessments and adjusted the tasks as necessary, since some of our curated lessons included content from multiple lessons. Because the students became used to articulating their reasoning, it became habitual for them to explain their thinking on their written assignments, even if we didn’t remember to require it! The impact of the collaborative learning environment and the IM curriculum asking such questions as “Explain how you know whether the slope is positive or negative,” or “What do the equations of the proportional relationship have in common?” was especially evident when a student referenced a classmate’s perspective when explaining an answer on an assessment.

We used Formative.com to push out assignments, home learning, ICAs, and unit tests. We loved the program for so many reasons: we could communicate with them through the messenger feature, we could follow their progress through the assignments and provide feedback in real time, we recorded their grades there, and used it in so many other impactful ways. It's a dynamic platform that worked perfectly for our needs. (Image credit: Illustrative Mathematics Grade 8, Unit 8, Lesson 9)

Rubrics for Review

We required students to hand in their completed rubrics and reflections. The rubric’s front side was composed of IM’s curricular learning targets of the unit derived from the standards, and the students placed checkmarks on the categories that indicated their perceived comfort level with the concepts. The backside was a rubric of “Communication, Collaboration, and Learner Traits.” It was here that students had another chance to self-reflect on their behavior and interactions as learners.

Pictured here is part of the Communication, Collaboration, and Learner Traits rubric we assigned our students to self-assess during and after we completed a unit of study.

Writing Reflections in Math Class

Our students also wrote detailed reflections about their overall performances for nearly every unit of study. We would read the reflections, provide specific feedback, ask students to refer to them throughout the units, and reference them during our individual student meetings. This level of engagement built a robust trust between us and the students; they knew how much we believed in them, how this new approach was impacting their understanding, and how much growth they had experienced from month to month.

A student reflected on his growth during the proportional relationships unit. He described areas in which he still wanted to grow and how much he enjoyed collaborating with his group members to make sense of the math.