2.  Respond to the following questions:

     a.  What would the behavior of a student who had accomplished this standard look like?

     b.  What are the specific activities and behaviors one might engage in to practice the standard?

     c.  What specific information and skills does the standard imply?

     d.  What are the skills and knowledge that should precede the standard?

     e.  What are the skills and knowledge that will come after students meet the standard?

 Students will be able to move towards reading multiple-syllable words and begin to identify their individual vowel combinations.

I believe what she means by this statement is that we as educators use assessment not as an indicator of intelligence or educational prowess, but rather as a progress report of where students are in learning. Through assessment, we are able to see if a student has been able to understand and learn what is being taught. If our students don’t pass assessments that are given, it’s our job as educators to modify either what and how we teach and/or what and how we assess that learning. 

Learning and grades can certainly coexist peacefully. While I don’t think grades are a necessity in marking a student’s progress of learning, they do provide us as educators some form of baseline to track an educational journey. Although there are innumerable ways to mark student learning that don’t involve an “A, B, C” or percentage rating of their learning, no grades would make the institution we have established around education very gray. What I mean by this is that grading allows for a more concrete answer as to whether a student is prepared to move on to a next grade level, or is prepared enough to attend higher learning institutions. Without those, we would have to formulate new ways of deciding those progress movements. Although grades are useful within the current institution, I do feel that learning should be more highly emphasized in a teaching sense than grading. Learning happens in many forms, and often times it can be hard to mark a percentage or box of whether an experience was “successful” or not.