At St. Michael we have 4 quarterly report cards and 4 midterms. I have one favor to ask you. Please come to me if you ever have any concerns about your grades. I want you to focus on learning, and I DON'T want you to worry about grades. Worrying takes away your learning power.
I use both traditional grading and some non-traditional grading to evaluate student progress.
This year you will work on some interesting and challenging projects that require you to use several skills together. I will ask you to think deeply. These projects might take you several days to complete. When you work on projects like this I will try to give you an idea beforehand of what you should focus on (see Rubrics, next). In fourth grade, for example, you worked on a research paper. That's an example of integrating several different skills into one project.
For projects like research papers I usually use a Rubric like the samples below. I use these to evaluate how you've done on the individual parts, and on the project as a whole. A rubric tells you what's important as you work. Use them to help you focus on the most important things.
Here's how a rubric works:
Often, the purpose of a project is to help you improve your work with several drafts, so I'll encourage you to make it better. This doesn't mean that you didn't do a good job on your first draft, but that you need to improve it with a revised or second draft. Some projects go through several drafts before they're ready for a final grade. Each time you make it better you're also improving your final grade.
Some work is done with learning buddies in cooperative learning groups. A cooperative learning group requires 3 things of you and your learning buddies:
Your report card will include some group work grades, but most of your quarterly grade comes from your individual effort, just in case you were getting worried about being part of a group! Remember, I don't want you worrying about grades because that takes away your learning power!