High school teacher and instructional coach Tony Winger laments how traditional classroom grading practices lead to grades becoming a distraction from learning—a commodity students feel they work the system to attain—rather than a clear message to students and parents. Teachers' passion for their subjects is too often met with students' pragmatic concerns about grades.To ensure that assigned grades reflect the learning teachers believe is most essential, teachers need to clarify for themselves and their students the knowledge, types of reasoning, skills, and connections between abstract concepts and life that students must take away from a given course. This learning—as well as nonacademic skills, such as completing assignments on time—can be broken into grade components that are assessed separately and then averaged into an overall class grade.Winger demonstrates how he has used this approach successfully in his high school sociology class and gives suggestions for how to deal with students who turn in work late and those who request extra credit.

Grading to Communicate

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