April 7: Standards-based grading

This was the second half of my non-sub day this week, so I won't talk too much about it. Last week, we had a meeting of those of us who are venturing into Std-based grading. I'm really thinking of changing my grading again next year. This year, I did 70% assessments and 30% homework first semester and then changed that to 90% assessments and 10% homework for second semester. There is another teacher in my building who does 100% assessments. And she's a math teacher who assigns math homework every night! She says that she keeps track of homework and whether or not they turn it in, but it counts for none of their final grade. I REALLY like this idea. I find that I mainly do completion grading on these things anyway...so I might as well not count them as anything. Sooo, I'm thinking that next year I will break my grades up into reading, writing, listening, and speaking. Listening assessments will be my little quizzes that we do after stories. Reading will be very standards-based because I will design my test so that they are answering different levels of questions and can stop whenever they get stuck. I blogged about this last semester, if you are wondering exactly how I do this. Speaking would be based on re-tells. Writing would be based on free writes and fluency. Can they write 100 words in 5 minutes? Would a native reader understand the story? Did the author write with spelling and grammatical accuracy? With this, I would count a 3 as having the appropriate number of words and a native speaker would understand. 2.5 would be less words, but a native speaker would understand. 2 would be mid-level words, but very hard to understand. They would get over a 3 for wowing with content or accuracy. Thoughts??