It’s report card season in Ontario, and I don’t know too many people who are happy about it.

I don’t love evaluating student performance in general, and the persistent and poisonous focus on MARKS by most stakeholders in student learning is infuriating. Marks are a huge loss of information about student performance, in my rarely-humble opinion. Along with those percentage marks we have a much-less-valued-but-more-valuable evaluation of Learning Skills. My students mostly ignored those, I think.

In truth, the hero of the report card is The Mighty Comment. It has the superpowers of Explanation and Recommendation. It’s here that I can talk about what’s going on, why, and how to improve.

After all, assessment is for improving learning. Reporting a mark of 68% doesn’t do that.

So The Mighty Comment is our hope for the future, the only power that can save our students and their parents from receiving an all-but-useless document.

Let’s do it right.

I’m teaching in a high school, and we have both a provided comment bank and the latitude to write our own comments. The only rules are that we need to follow the guidelines in Growing Success and we have to keep it under 458 characters.

I read an interesting article at rs.io called The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Checklists.

Fireworks blazed across my brain. I need a checklist to make sure I’m doing what I want to do with every comment.

So I made one

The Report Card Comment Checklist (catchy name, eh?) is now live. I also included The Verbose Report Card Comment Checklist immediately after it to help explain what I mean. Please leave comments here on the blog if you can help me to improve it.

I sat with each of my students this term to review their marks, learning skills, and comments before I submitted them to my school admin team. I wanted them to know that I tried to write what I thought and that I cared about their improvement. I articulated their strengths and what I need them to do next. I asked them each to reflect on their comment (most of them needed to be prompted) and to tell me whether they thought it was fair, accurate, etc. One student found a typo (yay!) and two asked me to clarify what I meant. About five students said their comments sounded exactly like them, which makes me proud.

I have to admit that I made the checklist this evening; I may have to edit my comments a bit next week before they’re published.

You should just click the link for the complete version, but here it is anyway:

The Report Card Comment Checklist

Check each student’s report card comment and ask yourself these questions:

Strengths

• does it include at least one strength?
• are the strengths related to the course?
• are the strengths worded positively?
• do the strengths stand alone?

Next Steps

• does it include at least one next step?
• are the next steps related to improvement in the course?
• if a student reads the next steps, will they know what to do to improve?
• are the next steps worded positively?
• do the next steps stand alone?

Language and Tone

• did I check for spelling, grammar, etc.?
• did I read it out loud?
• did I listen for sarcasm and negative feeling in my voice?

The Point

• will the student feel that I care about their success?
• will the student “see themselves” in the comment?
• will the student want to continue to improve?
• will the parent understand how to help their child improve?