Every teacher at Burlington High School is reading “Making Grades Matter” by Matt Townsley and Nathan L. Wear. This is part of an ongoing plan to change the way teachers at BHS grade: from a more traditional method to what is known as “standards-based grading.”
The book’s premise is laid out in the first chapter. It argues three key points:

1. Grades should communicate students’ current levels of learning based on standards.
2. Homework should serve as ungraded practice.
3. Students should have multiple chances to demonstrate their learning.

One of the central points in the book is that teachers should not grade homework because homework should be a place where students can make mistakes and learn from them. To incentivize homework completion, the authors discuss rewarding students with “healthy snacks,” having a class celebration for collective homework milestones, earning a “free pass” on future homework, or even getting to leave class early.

Math Teacher Gordana Pobric says she is wary of transforming homework into ungraded practice.
“If we’re not calculating grades [for homework], then I’m just worried that not all students are on that level to understand they need to practice to get better,” Pobric said.

The authors believe that the problem of homework incompletion will solve itself as illustrated by a graph of the “a-ha” moment, where students start completing their homework again once they realize that homework helps you to learn.

History Teacher Ian Lowland has been meeting with the Social Studies Department on Thursday mornings to read and discuss the book. He believes that if teachers don’t continue to learn about the best way to teach, “we have lost our profession.” Still, he has some concerns.

“Some of the stuff that they recommend isn’t going to work in every subject,” Lowland said. “The math teachers are upset [and] the science teachers are upset because some of the things they are recommending – they wouldn’t physically have the time [for].”

In 2014, the Vermont Board of Education established proficiency-based standards as a graduation requirement for all public high schools, starting with the Class of 2020. This shift moved schools away from relying on credit hours to determine graduation eligibility, instead emphasizing student mastery of skills and concepts.

Between 2014 and 2020, staff at Burlington High School worked together to create rubrics and curriculums, but BHS English Department Head Jill Kelley said that during the pandemic much of the work done was lost.

“We were poised to start reporting out on those proficiencies when COVID hit, and we lost our building, and there was a lot of turnover, and so we didn’t fully go to the implementation stage of reporting,” Kelley said.

Starting in 2012, English Teacher Peter McConville was the interim co-director of the Partnership for Change that led to things like our current graduation proficiencies. The program connected with the community and provided time for interdisciplinary groups to work together on shifting instruction and assessment towards proficiencies. As BHS restarts the move towards PBL/Standards-Based Grading, McConville is concerned about the issue of time.

“I mean, reading this book, it’s always like, time? Time? Time? It’s like a question mark that I put in the margin [of the book] all the time,” McConville said. “I’m like, ‘when are we going to meet? When are teachers going to be able to do this? When are we going to be able to create these standards?’”

Pobric shares a similar worry.

“I don’t have time in my work schedule to switch to standards-based grading, create rubrics and targets, or explore new ways of grading,” Pobric said. “I use my prep block to plan lessons, grade papers, answer emails and help students who need extra help.”

According to an essay by Matt Townsley himself, switching to a standards-based grading system will increase teacher workload. However, standards-based grading can be implemented in a variety of ways in schools, and our administration is still in the process of deciding what aspects of it to include in our new grading system.

“The goal is not to look at this book as a manual,” Principal Sabrina Westdijk said. “It’s meant to be food for thought. It raises a lot of very common issues and challenges and decision points that a school has to think through if they’re going to move towards alignment around standards or skills.”

One of the biggest decisions to be made is around grading.

BHS teacher Ben Heintz explained that what would be an “A” in traditional grading typically would be a “3” out of “4” in SBG. Getting a “4”, Heintz says, means “exceeding the standard” – which is difficult. This has led some students to be concerned about how a shift to standards based grading might affect their GPA.

“I think if you went around Vermont and interviewed people at 20 schools, you would hear a lot of different stories about GPAs,” Heintz said. “At U32 they never really quite answered what a four was [and] it was hard to get a four.”

Champlain Valley Union High School has already made the transition to standards-based learning and grading and is still on a letter grade scale. The difference there is that every course has what they describe on the CVU website as “KUDs”, which explain what students should “Know, Understand, and be able to Do by the end of the course”.

Currently, BHS is on a three-year plan to implement SBG. Teachers reading this book is only the first step in this renewed effort. If everything goes according to schedule, by 2028 we will be at the last step, analyzing data.

So, how could this book change Burlington High School?

“I honestly don’t know [what kind of impact this book could have],” McConville said. “In some ways, I feel like the conversation we should be having before this book is around culture. How do you create a culture of learning and a culture of people desiring to learn and to want to improve?”