I wanted to share a couple success that two different students have had this week because they worked hard and because the Standards-Based grading system allowed them to show what they know.

A couple weeks ago, students wrote some short stories about Danny the Surfer (they're posted on the wall outside the classroom if you want to see them), and in those stories they were supposed to demonstrate the use of six different types of sentence openers.  As you would expect, some students used six types of openers, some used only one, and many others were somewhere in the middle. 

Well, just this week, two different students who had originally not shown much variety in their use of sentence openers, demonstrated that they could in fact write, using all six types.  One student decided to demonstrate his new understanding by working hard to include them in his Anything Project.  Another student decided to revise a previous assignment, and both proved they could use a variety of sentence openers.

Here's what you should notice about these stories:
1.  Both students had an opportunity to grow.
2.  Both students took initiative.
3.  Both students did extra work outside of the normal course of assignments.
4.  Since Standards-Based grading reflects students' current and consistent understanding, their new understanding is not "averaged" with earlier scores as it would have been in a traditional grading system.  Therefore, both students currently have "3's" for this objective as opposed to an average of all scores - 1.5.

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