Assessment for Learning: Shifting Teachers’ Focus From Grades to Growth
Presented by:
David Cluphf, Southern Illinois University Edwardsville
This poster shows how Assessment for Learning and a universal Grand Rubric help graduate teachers move beyond grades, fostering deeper engagement, reflection, and professional growth.
Keywords:
Assessment for Learning, Graduate Teacher Education, Grand Rubric
Abstract:
This poster highlights how Assessment for Learning (AfL) practices help graduate students—who are also practicing teachers—shift their focus from grades to meaningful learning. AfL strategies, including clear criteria, guided reflection, and actionable feedback, position assessment as a process for growth rather than judgment (Black & Wiliam, 2009; Wiliam, 2011). A central element is the Grand Rubric, applied consistently across courses to provide transparency and a shared language for evaluation (Brookhart, 2013). Together, AfL and the rubric foster reflection, professional engagement, and transferable practices that support teachers in bringing student-centered assessment into their own classrooms (Earl, 2013).
Outcomes:
1. Apply AfL principles to deepen engagement with course content and shift focus from grades to growth.
2. Use the Grand Rubric as a consistent framework for reflection, feedback, and transparent expectations across all assignments.
3. Transfer AfL strategies into their own classrooms, fostering student ownership of learning and professional growth through assessment as learning.
Hear it from the author:
Transcript:
A lot of my work is getting the school out of teachers. Most graduate students come in with habits school taught them; compliance, chasing points, avoiding risk. I get why those habits formed, but they get in the way of the professional judgment teachers and coaches actually need. Instead of thinking through their own situations, they slip back into performing for me.
So I use a simple framework built around three pieces: context, autonomy, and assessment as inquiry.
Context means we work from real situations; why a drill collapses under pressure, why a lesson loses energy, why something that looks good on paper doesn’t land with kids.
Autonomy gives students space to act, adjust, and explain their decisions, using feedback to sharpen their judgment instead of guessing what I want.
Assessment as inquiry shifts the focus from getting it right to making sense of what happened. Questions like What did you notice? and What makes sense here? drive the learning.
The whole goal is moving students from What do you want? to What makes sense here? That’s how we get the school out of teachers so they can learn the real work of teaching and coaching.
References:
Black, P., & Wiliam, D. (2009). Developing the theory of formative assessment. Educational Assessment, Evaluation and Accountability, 21(1), 5–31. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11092-008-9068-5
Brookhart, S. M. (2013). How to create and use rubrics for formative assessment and grading. ASCD.
Earl, L. M. (2013). Assessment as learning: Using classroom assessment to maximize student learning (2nd ed.). Corwin.
Wiliam, D. (2011). Embedded formative assessment. Solution Tree Press.