Dear Weary English Teachers (Part 2),

​First things first. I am in love with two Twittersphere things at the moment: #BookSnaps and #TeacherStats. Without even really knowing the full story, I jumped on both bandwagons… (Kind of like the sad, awkward kid trying to make friends).

But that’s not what I promised. I promised grading hacks, which is really the dangling carrot.
As I mentioned in my previous post, I have made an intentional push to get my students writing MORE in the last couple years, largely in response to AP curriculum. In order to maintain whatever sanity remains along the way, I’ve been forced to find grading solutions to manage intake as high as 95+ essays every week.
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In this series, I want to start with my favorite: holistic grading. I’m starting here for one big reason. Holistic grading, while my favorite grading hack, requires the biggest shift in mindset about grading and feedback. It’s not for everyone, and I get that. For me, though, it is eeeeeverything.

Why I Grade Holistically

Here’s why I love it.

• Life assesses you holistically. Work colleagues, personal relationships, and all others do not approach your work or actions with a rubric. Feedback, if any, is general and based around overall impressions. The same goes for most college assessment. In fact, Penny Kittle tweeted the reality of college grading the other day. If college, work, and life in general will assess students holistically, shouldn't we be preparing them for those expectations?

• It shifts ownership. Traditional grading, including criteria rubrics, are completed by a teacher who slaves away, circling and commenting. The rubric goes back to the students who shrug it off and move on. The fact of the matter here is that no rubric – no matter how well written – is as valuable as a student internalizing a holistic understanding of proficiency. Instead of spending hours marking up drafts, I invest class time to reviewing the characteristic of anchor scores and then instead, simply score essays. In this model, my students know what it means when there is a “partially proficient” at the top of their paper or an “advanced.” While holistic grading requires frontloading (See Below) to achieve this, it builds a richer understanding of what the expectation is.
• Holistic grading can be consistent and adaptable. My pal and Pre-AP teacher was laughing at her students just before finals. After presenting their final writing task and going over the expectations, they asked how it would be graded. Before she could say, one of them chimed in saying (essentially), "Duh. It'll be the same rubric we've used all year." My favorite thing about teaching AP is that I can always talk in 4’s and 7’s because the AP Free Response scoring guides are well defined with clear separation of what one score means compared to the next. Talking in general criteria like position, evidence and explanation, and prose, I can very easily adapt the same rubric (and therefore, the same expectations) to a wide range of assignments. Sometimes it is as simple as changing the Argument FRQ scoring guide to say debate/speech/project instead of “essay.”
• Holistic grading is skill focused, not requirement focused. I have seen so many rubrics that have something like “Works Cited” as a criteria. “Works Cited” is not a skill; proper citation and implementation of MLA format is, but instead of assessing the students ability to create in-text citations and proper formatting in the essay, the absence of the list of citations will result in zero points, when in fact, they did demonstrated some understanding. When graded holistically, such issues don’t happen. Rather, their understanding of proper formatting is represented in the scoring guide.
• More meaningful discourse. Rubrics limit peer discussion about writing. When we present students with rubrics about “evidence integration,” “conventions,” and (my all time favorite) “creativity,” they feel limited to those areas for evaluation - and often struggle to talk about them. A rubric becomes a checklist of what feedback they are “allowed” to give. When we ask them to look at the writing holistically – and frontload appropriately – they talk about things like organization, development, and voice. Then, it’s up to them to specify how those thing can improve, putting more ownership on the student. The fact of the matter is, we all hate when they “revise” by adding commas or switching out words. Giving them a holistic aspiration adds complexity to their analysis.

​So, basically, I love using holistic grading. Fortunately for me, I have holistic scoring guides created by AP which I have adapted to general writing styles. Creating holistic rubrics isn’t difficult, however; it’s the preparation to use them which can be daunting. Therefore, I wanted to walk through the process I use, noting a few of the strategies I have found helpful along the way.

How I Grade Holistically

Don't panic! I never use all of these methods adjacent, but I do hit the basic steps in the process for each new holistic rubric.

• Pre-Assessment
  • I make students write with minimal preparation. I never intend for it to go into the gradebook as is, but it is easier to work from a draft when introducing a holistic assessment tool. For instance, this year, I started with a general “This I Believe” essay for diagnostic purposes. This gives students a shared writing task which we can refer to in our study of the holistic assessment tool.
• Introduce Levels of Proficiency, or Norming
  • The first step in frontloading holistic grading is for students to deeply understand what proficiency looks like. This requires the same norming that assessors do at the national AP reading, ACT, SAT, etc. Whenever implementing holistic grading, everyone has to be on the same page. I have used different methods to build this understanding over the years, including:
    • Illustrated Analogy: I like to explain the different anchor levels of proficiency to my students in terms they understand. Being a huge Disney fan, I describe each level of proficiency as a different Disneyworld experience. (For instance, a 2 – or novice – feels like the car broke down outside the parking lot whereas an 8 – or advanced – is similar to meeting your favorite princess, without having to wait in line). I’ve had students develop similar analogies with great results as an introduction to holistic grading. [I wish my illustrated analogy wasn’t at school, so I could add it here…Sorry.]
    • Rubric Synonyms: Placing the students into 9 groups, I ask each to study their level of the rubric and pick out synonyms that capture what that score looks like. For instance, an appropriate synonym for an AP 6 is “formulaic” in that a 6 is perfectly adequate, if not a little dull. Students then place their words (on sticky notes) on posters I have created for each score. Once all synonyms are placed, I move along the wall of posters, discussing which words appropriately fit each score or moving them to a more appropriate score. This helps distinguish the nuances between scores.
    • Peer Assessment Guides: To help students pick out what “thorough development” or “sophisticated voice” looks like, I provide charts with common criteria for each score. This is where I put concrete things like paragraph structure, evidence integration, and sentence variety. Presenting it this way allows me to connect the abstract criteria of a holistic rubric to concrete skills and attributes. One that I use for the 2016 Synthesis FRQ on Monolinguals is shown below.

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• Exemplar Study
  • This is such a huge part of holistic grading that probably presents the biggest problem. For students to recognize the abstract expectations, they need to see them in writing. Unfortunately, this means a lot of work for the teacher – but just for the first year, I promise. I always review at least one sample with students. This is usually a quick bell ringer where I ask them to score or an activity where I ask them to compare their own to the sample. One of my favorite exemplar activities is what I can my Evidence:Analysis Ratio. Using two highlighters, I ask students to highlight evidence in one color and analysis in the other. When done on a high scoring essays, this demonstrates to students that sophisticated essays are built on rich analysis instead of other resources. On the flip side, I’ll also give them a low sample and ask them to pinpoint opportunities for revision, usually in conjunction with a minilesson on a particularly weak skill for the class. Yes, it is a lot of work that first time you roll it out, but you can always pull students samples if you are talking about a past work or make a quick sample yourself. I have also had student aids make a sample for me in the past. The good news, if you pull a few samples of each major writing assignment, you will have a library to pull from for future years.
• Table Reading
  • After this preparation, it is immensely helpful to have students review the work of their peers. While they may struggle to diagnose their own writing, students quickly adapt to the role of assessor. Prior to putting the papers in to their hands, I select a volunteer or a pre-selected draft that I have blocked out the name on. I model, using think aloud, how I score the essay to demonstrate how I use the rubric. This allows me to make sure that students not only recognize what accurate assessment looks like but also rationalize my scoring decisions on their writing. Then the assessment goes to them, requiring them to practice with the rubric and demonstrate their understanding of the expectation as they read through their peers work. Holistic grading always makes more sense when you are looking and comparing to a pool of work.

​This methodology seems time consuming, and it can be – especially at the beginning of the year. However, the process becomes internalized and the preparation lessens and lessens. It is additionally helpful that the rubric does not change much from one assignment to the next, making the expectations clearer as the year progresses. 

That said--

Grade Holistically, Only If...

... you are willing to commit to the mindset so it is done with fidelity.

Holistic grading isn’t the fix-all some people think it is. As a member of a PD committee recently, we found that teachers craved holistic rubrics, but in practice, they seemed to fall flat with students. This emphasizes the important of preparation when using holistic grading. If you frontload at the beginning of the year, as I described above, and reinforce the expectations with students, holistic grading is the grading hack you always wanted. However, that said, it is obviously a yearlong commitment to do it properly.

Additionally, holistic grading is not for process work, but summative. In my world, process work (draft checks, body paragraphs, etc) is meant for feedback, not a grade. It does no good to grade an intro paragraph holistically when you are trying to direct their specific revisions. Rather, feedback is appropriate. (In a later post in this grading hacks series, I’ll talk about how to manage that step of the process). Basically, just recognize when holistic is appropriate and when it is not. On-demand writing of any kind is great for holistic grading. 

Finally, the student perception of feedback from holistic grading is a challenge. Some students – most even – expect the details comments written throughout. Nonetheless, we know that pain of seeing those annotated drafts dropped in the garbage on the way out. As mentioned, I’ll talk about time saving feedback in the future, but holistic grading can only work as feedback if you have properly normed the levels of proficiency. It also requires you to foster a growth mindset with the students that move away from mastery of skills to overall improvement. Students need to understand the merits in moving from a 2 to a 4 or a 6 to an 8. In fact, I have found that holistic grading helps students recognize improvement a little more clearly (especially if you have them progress monitor!). It is the process work in between - with feedback - that is going to re-teach and re-direct.
 
And that’s what I got. My WHY, HOW, and ONLY IFs of holistic grading. Like I said, it is more of a mindset change that needs to carry out throughout the year. But, if you do so with fidelity, it has been one of the biggest grading hacks of my experience. It makes it possible to get through 5 essays in 10 minutes, or 60 essays in just a couple hours. I'd rather spend the process work leading up to a summative take my time. After all, a summative assessment should be a student's best chance for success.