Superintendent Berkshire Hills Regional School District (BHRSD)

The most effective schools and organizations regularly look carefully at their practices and work to reflect and reinvent themselves.

We’re engaged in that process and doing a deep dive into how we assess students, how they demonstrate their understanding, and how learning and growth are graded.

We are one of five schools in Massachusetts selected to participate in the Rethinking Grading Pilot, a two-year project that will create a small, diverse professional learning community of practice of high schools to provide MA exemplars of transformed grading systems (e.g., transcripts, teacher-level grading practice, feedback to students, and grading transparency).

We hope to make learning more meaningful, engaging, rigorous, and applied. In the coming year, we expect to support teachers and students in moving past traditional quizzes and tests to more progressive measures which might include portfolios, panel presentations, experiments, exhibitions and demonstrations, and self and peer review.

Teachers are planning now and we hope to pilot some new assessments as school starts in late August.

As always, feel free to reach out to me with any questions — Peter.Dillon@bhrsd.org

Next issue: I’ll share some updates on the start of school and some of the summer work that teachers and staff have been doing to support students.