Ben, there’s one more thing to add, I think, about SBG: How it lines up with the weekly/bi-weekly schedule we all find so powerful. Here it goes. (And I promise this is it! Like with jGR I am trying to show here how SBG can fit well with what we already know works.)
If you want to start using standards and 1-4 ranks in each standard to grade your students, you’ll find the process of assessment (i.e., collecting evidence of what your students know and are able to do against the standards) lines up well with the weekly/bi-weekly schedule that Ben has made so awesome.
Let’s say you use something like the standards I’ve posted. So you have five of them in year 1: hearing, reading, writing, interpersonal, and vocabulary. Throughout the grading period all you have to do is collect evidence from your students about how well they can complete the various tasks from each standard. From that evidence you’ll be able to give each student a rank of 1, 2, 3, or 4. And from those ranks you will be able to arrive at their overall letter grade using whatever overall letter grade rubric you’ve created (remember for me, an A is “a 4 in one standard with nothing else lower than a 3,” etc.).
The way I have found works best is to focus on only one standard for about a week or two before moving on to the next one for a week or two, and so on. All of the assessment during that time can be focused on that one particular standard (with the exception of jGR, see below*). So, for example, let’s look at the reading rubric:
4-able to translate a new passage into English that contains familiar vocabulary
3-able to answer English and L2 comprehension questions about passages we’ve read
2-able to unscramble L2 passage we’ve read in the style of textivate.com
1-little or no evidence of ability
For a one or two week period you can give little reading assessments at the beginning, middle, or end of a few classes. You’ll only need 3 assessments total, one for each level. The first one will be unscrambling a passage, the second one answering comprehension questions, and the last one a quick translation of a short passage. If you are thinking of a ten day, 2 week cycle (like in Ben’s new 2 week schedule), you’ll give an assessment perhaps on the third day, the fifth day, and the tenth day of the cycle–whatever works for you. Each assessment only takes a few minutes, which is one reason to be really careful when designing the specific tasks for each level!
By the end of the 2 week period–or however long your cycles are–you have collected a nice body of evidence from each individual student showing you how well each can read. From that evidence you then adjust the overall reading rank for each student, which in turn makes the overall letter grade go up or down accordingly.
The next two weeks might be spent assessing the hearing tasks in between all the awesome, daily CI you normally do. Or maybe it’s time to do writing. You can see how this helps variety in the classroom. The students will only do formal, written questions every 3-6 weeks. Dictations, freewrites, etc. will also be spaced out in the same way.
Note that the tasks for each level of each standard have been carefully chosen not only in order to be quick to assess, but also in order to be easily graded. When a students hands you a corrected dictation, for example, just scan for how many and what types of errors and either give the 3 or give a 0. Everything is basically pass/fail and very easy and quick to grade. Just ask yourself: Does this work warrant me moving the student to the next level? After a while it goes super quick.
Note that jGR is the only standard that is assessed daily via the all-powerful jGR rubric. In my 1-4 version of jGR I include the quick quizzes as part of jGR. In this way the quick quizzes can be a part of my SBG system without relying on x-points out of 10. Furthermore, you might have noticed that quick quizzes also fulfill the second level of the hearing rubric–because the questions are given out loud.)
All of the assessments done for reading, writing, whatever are in addition to the daily CI and the corresponding, always-running interpersonal-jGR assessments. We know by now that these jGR “assessments” happen all the time as a natural part of CI.
James