Report cards! Dreaded and hated by most teachers due to the time and effort it takes to create it. Over the years, the trend from personal comments to letters or numbers has meant that children’s identities are rooted in generalized achievement scores. The tidal wave of standards-based curriculum and standardized testing that we have seen in America has just amplified this notion that students can be distilled into neat categories and ranges of “achievement”, with schools even getting graded based upon these scores and public funding of these schools determined by these ratings. However, this type of ranking of schools doesn’t differentiate the demographics and resources that are utilized in the pursuit of learning so it seems unfair to be graded against a standard that really doesn’t exist. Likewise, report cards rarely reflect the nature and ability of the individual student, which should be as unique as their fingerprint. We all know that the best report cards are the ones in which the teacher speaks to the individual because a grade just doesn’t say enough. However, it’s a time-consuming process to craft it.

It was in the spirit of customizing the documenting of progress in REAL time that it was decided that the digital portfolio app SeeSaw could be used as a replacement of the ole’ report card. Also, due to the ability to instantly post the learning, there was hope that this transparency would improve the dialogue between the school and the parents.   We had high hopes as we embarked upon this experiment.

The Experiment: Hybridizing Edu-Media and Traditional Reports

During this past year, with the convention of writing report cards every 6 weeks, an effort to simplify the teacher workload and create a more “user-friendly” reporting system for parents was launched. Now, in theory, the expectation of teacher comments on the report card was done away with and the learning was documented on SeeSaw, thus parents could rate and respond to the progress in real time. However, instead of ripping report cards away, we tried to transition parents by rebranding it an “Evaluation of Learning” using the ManageBac platform, still posting numerical grades minus the personal teacher comments.

Prior to the “Evaluation of Learning” being posted on ManageBac, teachers designed at least 1 conceptual rubric, primarily for the unit of inquiry, which needed to be shared with parents prior to their notification that this report was ready to view. In this way, parents could use these conceptual rubrics as a way to understand what the numbers meant on the “Evaluation of Learning” in terms of their student’s progress. If you look at the examples of these conceptual rubrics, you will see that some common language is in there, such as “meets expectations”, so that parents might know where their child stands as a learner.

During this SeeSaw trial, as a school we looked at 4 things: the quality of our grade level posts, the frequency of posting, having a variety of posts to showcase growth, developing student agency with the posts and creating systems that foster positive habits around the use of digital media. Some questions we asked were:

1. Quality: Do our posts really communicate the learning that is taking place. How is the sound or visual quality of our postings? How do our captions or labels communicate the learning?
2. Responsibility: Who is posting? Is it only the teachers or do we have students involved?
3. Frequency: How often are we posting? Daily? Weekly? Monthly?
4. Diversity: Are we only uploading videos or photos? Do we only make posts about the unit of inquiry or are we representing the growth of our literacy skills and mathematical thinking?
5. Systems: What were the habits and routines when using this platform? (example: reading out loud a piece of writing in Grade 1 but read aloud a piece of prose in Grade 3–are these helpful exercises that develop our presentation and viewing skills?) Or should we give time in class to students to read/listen to comments that others have posted and encourage thoughtful responses to them?

What worked well

There is no doubt that the platform of SeeSaw is powerful. Students could engage with each other, as well as parents, so there was a lot of opportunity for feedback. In our class, we posted weekly to the student journals, so parents were well-informed and it made it easy to have a conversation about their child. As, with the activities feature of SeeSaw, we could save time and go paperless on assessments.

So was learning demonstrated more regularly?–Indeed!

What needed improvement

One of the reasons to move away from report cards was in order to give more timely feedback to students and families. This was a worthy goal.

But it took enormous amounts of time to listen to audio/video posts and “grade” it. I can’t speak for other teachers, but I often spent an hour a night (at home), listening to students explain their learning. This I loved–not the drain on my personal time of course, but the data.  However, giving timely feedback to students?- it wasn’t possible unless I had caught them while they were actually posting because most 1st graders couldn’t see the comments I made on a post and it wasn’t easy to give them class time to go on their journals to read a post (plus, not a lot of 1st graders can read what I wrote–at least not at the beginning of the year). So the comments were mostly just for the parents’ benefit.

Also, from a whole school perspective, we did not have consistency in our using this SeeSaw platform for the documentation of learning. Needless to say, a parent with a 1st grader and another a 4th grader, the amount and quality of posting looked very different in the different grade levels. Our school didn’t have norms or expectations so reporting progress was spotty, at best. When you think about why reports cards are so prevalent in education is because there is a standard– Pretty much no matter where you go in the world, in any given grade level, you will receive a consistent reporting of grade level expectations. We really needed criteria and clarity when it came to our posting on SeeSaw, and guidance on developing informative conceptual rubrics. 

So, as I reflect on this, I  think the benefit from this change was that the administrators didn’t need to spell check the ManageBac comments. And, from a parent’s point of view, neither the ManageBac’s Evaluation of Learning nor the SeeSaw posts answered the question, “Yeah, but how is MY child doing?” because it burdened parents to sift through posts and cross-reference the conceptual rubrics to understand how their child was evaluated. With the Seesaw journal news feed, it made it really hard to understand what a student needed to work on in order to improve, and where they stood with grade-level expectations because a teacher rarely made comments or captions using those terms.

When we surveyed families in the spring, we had a very low response rate (less than 50%), which implied that our good-natured parents were too polite to complain, or they couldn’t read the English-only survey. So we didn’t have a lot of feedback on this experiment. This was a shame since we really needed to hear their opinion.

What was discovered?

Not every idea is a bright one so you can learn a lot from failure. If we can all agree that report cards are designed for parents, then using multiple platforms created confusion.

I understand why we didn’t completely wean them off the ManageBac Reports but, at the end of the day, with our transient population, parents needed reports to show their next school. In the end, sending a perspective school a downloaded PDF of a child’s SeeSaw journal wasn’t a viable option. These school administrators, much like our parents, lacked the time and patience to sift through these activities to determine where the child was in their learning journey.

Now that isn’t to say that we need to throw the baby out with the bath water. Using SeeSaw to document learning was fantastic and it definitely provided fodder for important conversations with parents. However, SeeSaw, in its current format, is not designed to be employed in the way that we used it. It is a form of edu-media, a Facebook of learning, and doesn’t have the capacity at this time to use it in the way we intended. So, as a school, we needed to have guidelines on how we “graded” a post and what captions we needed to put on a post so that it informed parents of their child’s progress. That is an easy fix, in my mind, to have standard criteria across grade levels.

And the ManageBac report?–ManageBac is not a flexible reporting system, so to try to innovate our report cards around this platform is impossible. We either accept this status quo or find another platform.

Our strength then was really around those conceptual rubrics, and if we wanted to simplify report cards, using those statements in the phases would make it very easy to copy to paste into the reports. However, this doesn’t make our reports personal, and it certainly doesn’t speak to the character of a child, which I know can be subjective however is the heart of what makes a report card so important. These sentences demonstrate that a teacher really strives to KNOW a child more deeply. As a parent, this is what I scan for in the comment box of those reports; and, as a teacher who receives a new student’s report card, this is what helps me to build a relationship with them as they assimilate into their new environment.

Where to go from here?

Since I am relocating to another school, I cannot say how this hybrid reporting system will be improved, but, I would personally take this trial back through the Design Thinking process:

 

Who is this report card for?

What are their needs?

How might we solve them?

Why this prototype might work? Why might this prototype fail?

What feedback do we need in order to improve?

When can we get this feedback and from whom?

How will we use this feedback to improve our design?

I think after embarking upon the Design process, several launching off points of prototypes would be revealed. Furthermore, a lot of clarity would come from these collaborative discussions which would help re-design reporting.

 

Dear Reader, I do hope that you will appreciate the risk-taking that was involved in this attempt to re-imagine reporting. And I hope it makes you reflect on how your school might consider how learning is reported to families. If your school is also underway with an innovative way of approaching reporting or perhaps you have a great idea, please share in the comments below. We ALL can benefit from this.