What didn't work?

Following up the post on what did work here are some of the strategies that did not work or more likely need more time and more support to work.

Grade Recovery Days.
My plan was to have everyone who was not meeting the standards stay after on Monday afternoons. This is a great idea and supported by research. This is the idea of giving a behavioral penalty for a behavior rather than a grade penalty for a behavior. My students that needed the most help would not come to this afternoon day. I would try this in another year but I would make some changes. I would start from the very beginning of the year. If students did not come after school I would immediately call home on the first offense. After that I might start a line of email communication to keep parents updated on their student's progress.

Incompletes going on after the end of the quarter.
Students are so ingrained to think that the end of the quarter is the end that they would not do anything about incompletes on their report card. If they had previously received an incomplete in another class they knew from experience that eventually the incomplete would turn into a number grade. So all they had to do was wait and not think about it and it would go away. My fault with this was not being systematic enough about providing opportunities for them to fix the incomplete after the quarter had ended. If I had it to do over I would take the day right after the quarter ended and have students with incompletes work on finishing their work. With other students I would look back at the big areas where they might need help and tell them to focus on the cumulative semester exam. The next day we would move on to the next unit. Students who still had incompletes would have to come after school until their incomplete was taken care of. If they did not come or did poor work I would call home. This is not a great plan but it is what I would try next.

Integrade Pro (IGP).
IGP is a powerful grade-book program but it falls woefully short when one tries to use it with standards grading. The biggest downfall is that no matter how hard I tried to avoid it IGP is set up to, at the end, deliver one number for a student grade. What I wanted was many grades. Grades in relation to certain standards. Imagine a course on chemistry with 10 major standards for the year. Within each of those goals there might be 2 mini-standards. So at the end of the year a student report card would have 20-30 marks in relation to those standards. This report card would also contain a narrative section about the student. I imagine this to be one page front and back--growing the total report card from 1/2 a page for all classes to 1 page for each class. IGP cannot do this. Well it can do it but it can't do it easily and it can't do it in a way that is clear for students and parents to understand.

There are some other little ones but those were the big frustrations I had last year. Even with these I would absolutely continue down this road. A road to standards grading that tells me so much more about students than giving them just one number.