Oxford+Hills+Middle+School

Oxford Hills Middle School Standards Based Grading May 27, 2010 Submitted by Debbie Gott and Libby Gurnee __Notes from meeting with Principal__ Oxford Hills Middle School is a grades 7 and 8 school with 8 sending elementary schools. Oxford Hills Middle School has approximately 550 students.

They had a K-12 Standards Based Grading committee with parents, board members, principals and teachers to work on standards based grading. They do both; standards grading and give a letter grade on report cards.

First year each content had to come up with 4 standards for the report card. Principal said teachers are still different in grading but are more similar now. Both high school and middle school started at the same time. Middle school was more agreeable. A big struggle was the fact behavior was not counting towards the grade. Teachers didn't like it at first. They have accepted it now for the most part. There is a separate section on the report card for behavior that promotes learning.

The middle school was arranged by small teams, but now they are content teams to work on standards in each content. They are working to go back to small teams.

LA is 90 minutes long that is back to back to a 30 minute study hall for intervention and extra help.

trending in grades (?) and accumulating grades (?)

All we do is progress reports for the whole year.


 * Top ten hot topic list – for standards based grading. Set up in teachers room for teachers to comment and write concerns and suggestions.

All committee members read the book, __Fair is not always Equal.__

__Notes from meeting with Teachers__ We met with a 7th grade teacher and an 8th grade teacher.

They feel like using IC for standards grading is not very efficient and takes up a lot of time. Scoring one assessment for two standards was difficult as they had to keep clicking back and forth. IC is not compatible with standards based grading.

LA – standards

Reading Writing Research Presentations

Behavior standards (behaviors that support learning) in each content.

Ic is not for standards based grading.

They have no common assessments (?)

Biggest unexpected thing that happened when they went to standards based grading is the amount of time standards based grading consumes and dealing with IC.

Teachers felt they had a great tech person to help them deal with IC, but it was still very difficult when they switched to standards based grading.

Best First Steps: departments picked out standards and talked about them.

Academic Monitor Group:

Academic Monitor groups meet once a week.

Pair up with another teacher and monitor students, time for students to see teacher if needed, checking in with students. Only 14 students or so per group. The purpose was to get to know a group of students and to monitor their academic progress. If they are failing, there is at least one person in addition to the teacher from the class where the student is failing knowing and dealing with it. For example, teacher and the academic monitor teacher might call home to work out a plan with parent. Academic monitor teachers makes sure student is seeing teacher during this time etc...

Safety net for teachers and students. Take care of paperwork, notices, meetings, etc...

__Comments and Questions from our visit:__

Very nice people and very gracious to meet with us and give us their time.

Are they really doing standards based grading? Their system is not what we expected to see concerning standard based grading.

What do parents and students think of Oxford Middle School standards based grading.