Grading report cards

YOU CAN DOWNLOAD, BUT YOU CAN’T HIDE: With report cards being available online at some schools, it eliminates the possibility of children being able to hide their bad marks from their parents.

Personalized comments ensure better understanding of children’s progress

It can be tiresome to read the same cookie-cutter comments on report cards term after term, when trying to gauge your child’s successes and failures. That’s why some schools are taking steps to make understanding a child’s progress more personalized.

Having personalized comments enhances the instructors’ abilities give both students and parents a better understanding of the student’s progress and how they can build upon their strengths, says Marilena Tesoro, principal of Holy Name of Mary College School.

“Our teachers compose and use personalized comments focusing on what the student has learned, while identifying significant strengths and next steps for improvement, typically describing what the students know and can do,” she says. “The personalized comments on our report cards provide meaningful feedback.”

Upper Canada College has found another way to bring children’s progress to parents’ attention: after a three-year process, the school will be giving parents the option of viewing their children’s grades online, IT director Jim LaPlante says.

“We’ve tweaked our reporting process a bit, so it’s the first year of two being mailed and two being online,” he says, noting the midterm reports would be online, while the final reports would still be mailed. “For this year, we didn’t actually do it online, but we did use all of the online tools to produce the report cards, which makes it easy next year just to kind of flip the switch and put them online.”

While online report cards aren’t unique to his school you aren’t likely to find them in the publicly funded schools, LaPlante says.

“(The public school) systems usually aren’t as customizable as ours are,” he says. “But if you polled the local independent schools … they’re all kind of dabbling in it, working with the parents, seeing what works and what doesn’t.”

Communicating with parent groups is key to finding what works best, and for his school it has shown them that flexibility is the way to go, LaPlante says.

“You get some people who are saying we should do them all online, we get some parents who say they would like them all mailed right to them,” he says. “We try to give them as much flexibility in these kind of things as we can give them.”

For those who are concerned about their children’s grades being posted online, LaPlante says the site is secure in the same manner as email or banking is.

“We don’t post any information that’s not authenticated. We’re giving a unique username or password to the parent, so it’s as secure as the parent will keep it. We can see when they come in, we can monitor what’s going on that way.”

While some schools are changing the way report cards are written and distributed, Country Day School’s Junior School is changing parent-teacher interviews so students now make presentations to their parents and teacher.

Student-led conferences are a real role reversal compared to parent teacher interviews, junior school director Ann Wildberger says.

“It’s a shift for parents, it’s a shift for teachers and it’s a shift for children,” she says. “They all play a different role in the student-led than in the traditional one, but in this model, it’s child-centred and it’s strength-focused and it builds self-esteem for the children.”

Wildberger says she sees the need not only to include the child, but to have the child lead the conference simply because no one understands a child better than the child him or herself.

“Most children know exactly where they are,” she says. “Children know where they’re struggling, how they’re struggling, what’s causing their struggle, and it’s very empowering for them to talk about that and be reflective because when they own their learning, that’s when learning happens.”

The presentations last for about half an hour and involve work that’s been collected in a portfolio since the first day of school.

The children also write a reflection on their work, their progress, and then set goals for themselves for the year. Most importantly, Wildberger says the conferences are absolutely not graded, which she says helps ease the pressure when the children know they aren’t being critiqued on the presentation.

“I think a child feels more empowered, I think a child feels there’s more purpose to what they’re doing and why they’re doing it because it’s more focused on the goal as opposed to the mark,” she says. “You put the child in control of their learning.”