Specs and Standards-Based Grading

     I became a proponent of Standards Based Grading (it is quite similar to Specs grading) before I left the secondary level of schooling.  It made sense to me, grade students on mastery of the content/standards that were important to your class.  It was so much more concise looking at the assignments I was going to give and seeing how they aligned to the standards that they were going to be graded on.  I found that it cut down on needless busy work assignments that I never found the time to grade anyway.  I wanted to focus on the important standards for my class, not filling time, and standards-based grading helped me do that.  Now do not get me wrong, as the lone ranger of this model in my school, it was not an easy road to travel.
     The idea behind this type of grading is that you are looking for students to re-visit work and continue to improve on standards, and it also helped to focus on the specific areas of weakness instead of the work as a whole.  For example, I have many students that did wonderfully citing their sources and using correct grammar in their papers, but some struggled with explaining their evidence and linking it back to their claim.  So I then conferenced with them about this skill and gave them the practice to help them with this specific skill.  I didn't have to waste time on the skill of citation because I had already assessed that they had mastered that skill.  I also liked that it let the students know what was expected at every level of performance on every standard (I based the levels off the rubrics that I already used for their writing), this gave the students ownership over their learning and how much effort they wanted to put forth and invest in their own learning.  There were some students that said I am okay with a C because I plan to be a mechanic and I won't do a lot of writing in my profession.  I had to respect their choice and that allowed me time with the students that struggled but really wanted to push their knowledge to the next level.
     As I said, it wasn't an easy road because I had to conform to the school's grading system while trying to implement the standards.  For me, I would've rather had a report that listed each standard and how the student performed on each one, but that doesn't work with GPA and sports eligibility which made my life a bit difficult trying to convert it.  Another issue that I had with grading is that standards-based grading is based on a philosophy of constantly redoing to achieve mastery.  This put a lot of extra work on me, especially when all of my students wanted to redo things at the end of the semester; however, I didn't want to deny them a chance at mastery, so I ran myself ragged trying to keep up.  This is where I think that Nilson in her "Specifications Grading" book is a genius!  She talks about tokens.  Giving students a certain amount of tokens that they can use on redo's and late submissions would have been an extremely useful technique for me.  It would have put the ownership on the students to really put forth their best work in the beginning because they could only have so many redos.  Some would argue that this flies in the face of the philosophy of this grading style because it is about mastery no matter when that occurs in the course, but there does need to be ownership on the student to make sure they are submitting their best work the first time, and a teacher can only do so much.
     I think that this grading is where schooling is going, and I couldn't be happier about it.  From the two short years that I enacted it in my classrooms, I could see the students that were really self-motivated to learn at the highest level.  It really became less about the letter grade and more about where do I go from here?  How can I do better? And to me that is what schooling should always be about!