Thank you for your patience while our staff is learning about grading through Standards Based Learning. At Friday’s professional development, our teachers worked on using Canvas and MasteryConnect to enter their grades. We worked on aligning our units to our standards and determining which assessments best allowed students to demonstrate their understanding. Here are some things to look out for.
For our Elementary School families, you should have received an email from MasteryConnect asking you to set up an account. This account will link you to your student’s MasteryTracker, which shows your student’s grades. We ask for some grace for our teachers as they learn all the pieces of MasteryConnect. If you notice that there is a mistake in one of the trackers, please kindly reach out to the teacher via email so that they can look into the issue.
For our Secondary School parents, we have finally been able to turn off the averaging function and the decimal point function in your student’s grade book. All assignments entered into the grade book prior to Friday might still have a decimal point and a number in the parenthesis. The number in the parenthesis is the score that the student received on that assignment. Any assignment entered after today will have a raw score of a 4, 3, 2 or 1.
Students should view their grades in the grade book by clicking on the show more details button in the top right corner. This will show the assignment grade, as well as the learning mastery grade. We ask for some grace for our teachers as they learn all the pieces of the learning mastery grade book. If you notice that there is a mistake in the grade book, please kindly reach out to the teacher via email so that they can look into the issue.
I have created the handout below that helps break down what you will see on Canvas for your child. In each unit, the teacher will determine which standard or standards they are assessing and then will provide feedback to students along the way. Teachers will collect assignments and assessments throughout the unit that demonstrate knowledge of the standard and enter them into the Canvas grade book. Students should monitor their grade book for feedback and to see their demonstration of knowledge grade.
Please have grace with our teachers while they are learning our new grading systems, as there might be a few hiccups along the way. We ask students to politely email their teachers with grading questions and clarification. If you have any questions about grading or Standards-Based Learning, please check out our website, and click on student support, academics, and Standards-Based Learning.
Thank you,
Michelle Gasser, Director of Professional Development