Friday, December 13, 2019

Proficiency Grading Update


Over the last 2 months, department heads and the administrative team have been working hard to remedy the scoring and reporting issues encountered over the past few years at BFA. Department heads have been extremely flexible in adding additional meetings and extending meetings to answer essential questions and dig into possible solutions. So far, we have completed about 18 months of planning and work over the past 2 months.  Meetings with teachers have occurred during in-service days in October and November to receive feedback to the PBGR requirements, and department head meetings have occurred on 10/2, 10/28, 11/4, 11/22 extended meeting, 12/2, 12/11 extended meeting.

Below you will see a snapshot of our work during our most recent meetings.

On November 22 department heads met at Central Office for a four and a half-hour work session that was separated into 3 parts:
  1. Deep dive into the Vermont Education Quality Standards
  2. Questions we have about the EQS.
  3. Answering "Why" questions for BFA as a basis for our next steps.
On December 2nd and 11th, the department heads started to build a system of scoring and reporting that is easily understood by students and parents.  Our work, next week with the faculty, is to receive feedback from the staff on the proposal.  From the feedback, we will be providing training to the staff during the January in-service to create documents for every class that clearly communicates how course scores will be determined.

Parent working group:
Our plan is to convene a parent working group in January to provide feedback into our proposed scoring and reporting system.  Also, we will be enlisting the parent group to plan a communication strategy so all parents can access their student's scores and understand the information.  Next week we will be announcing a date for the parent group.  Please stay tuned as we will e-mail an announcement home.