Simplified Grading Strategy: Major vs. Minor Grades [Episode 241]

Rebecca Joyner [00:00:01]:
I have done over 20 episodes on grading and assessment, but honestly, y’, all, it never gets old. There is always still so much we could talk about. And today I’m excited to do a deep dive, very thorough explanation of my gradebook breakdown and how I handled grades in my classroom. Now, you may be wondering, first of all, like, why are we talking about this in June? It is because your gradebook setup, like on the back end, that’s happening before school starts. You’re probably doing it early August, or you’re copying and pasting the one you used last year. And that is really a prerequisite to being able to apply a lot of the other grading tips I share throughout the year about cutting back on your grading. Like, some of you are set up not for success because of your grade book and how it’s laid out. And I want to help you be set up for success to have a simplified year where you’re able to grade less and still honor students and have a grade that really reflects how they’re doing well or not so well in your class.

Rebecca Joyner [00:01:05]:
So I want to share this now so you have time to kind of chew on it, potentially set it up before the new school year. So what we’re going to do is we’re going to cover what my grading strategy is, why I love it, and how to implement it practically. And then at the end, we’re going to troubleshoot a specific scenario that one of you sent to me about what to do if you are only allowed to grade summative assessments. So I’m excited to get into this. So let’s dive in. This is Secondary Science Simplified, a podcast for secondary science teachers who want to engage their students and simplify their lives. I’m Rebecca Joyner from It’s Not Rocket Science. As a high school science teacher turned curriculum writer, I am passionate about helping other science teachers, love their jobs, serve their students, and do it all in only 40 hours a week.

Rebecca Joyner [00:01:53]:
Are you ready to rock the time you spend in your classroom and actually have a life outside of it? You are in the right place, teacher friend. Let’s get to today’s episode. All right, first, what is kind of the origin story of my grading policy, the one that I have adopted for life and I will use as long as I possibly can if I ever go back in the classroom is a required grading policy from one of the public schools I taught in. It was a school wide policy and I loved it so much that when I moved to a private school and I had the flexibility to choose how I wanted to set up my grade book. This is the one I adopted. And I actually converted like the majority of the upper school to be on my side and do their grades this way, which was wonderful because then we were super consistent. And the reason I love it and the reason why so many other teachers found they loved it, there’s a bunch, but it’s that it’s just so simple. It’s so simple.

Rebecca Joyner [00:02:49]:
It’s easy to. Once you get it set up and students really understand it. And I’ll get into more of that in a minute of why it’s so great. But here is the basics. You split your grade book into two categories and two categories only. You have your major grades and your minor grades. Another way you can phrase this I’ve seen it done is like your summative grades and your formative grades. I personally like the terms major and minor better because those are more clear for students.

Rebecca Joyner [00:03:19]:
Like major, big, minor, feel small. Major grades are overall weighted like 60% of a student’s overall grade. Minor grades are weighted 40%. And so that’s going to get them a grade in your course for the quarter. And then you probably already have some sort of other overarching system where like a student’s grade for the semester is 40% Q1, 40% Q2, 20% midterm, and then their grade for the year is 50% semester one, 50% semester two. Like, there’s so many levels of waiting that probably happen in your grade book. But this is what I’m doing on like a daily quarterly. This is what the grade books looking like.

Rebecca Joyner [00:03:59]:
60% major, 40% minor. I know a lot of teachers like to have a lot of different categories. 30% test, 20% project, 10% lab reports, 20% labs. Like 10% homework. Like all these different things. But that is not simple. And I wanted my grading to be simple. And I wanted to be able to easily communicate value and worth and effort and importance to both students and parents.

Rebecca Joyner [00:04:25]:
I feel like when you have the major minor grade category again, major 60%, minors 40%. It’s just so incredibly clear what is going on. Major grades are things like tests, quizzes, and usually I have about a project per unit, but could also end up being about one project per quarter. Everything else I’m personally putting in the minor grade category, I’m putting labs, classwork, inquiry activities that I would check for completion because I would never grade an inquiry activity for accuracy. Daily bell work that I call prime times, that kind of thing. Okay, now that’s the general overview. Here is why I love it. It’s simple, intuitive, fair, accurate and clear.

Rebecca Joyner [00:05:08]:
Okay. Simple. It’s just easy to understand. Students understand major big, minor small. That’s it. They can always ask, is this a major grade or a minor grade? It just feels so simple. It’s also intuitive. What I do within those two overarching categories, and this is really, really important, y’, all, is the assignments that go in the gradebook within those categories are weighted by points.

Rebecca Joyner [00:05:36]:
So even though there’s an overarching percentage weight of 60, 40, within that 60% major grade category, things are have different point values. Within that minor grade category, things have different point values. Your grades are not going in as out of a hundred. Some things go in and out of 100 points, some going out of 50, some going out of five, some going out of 25. It makes it very clear for students to see how much something is worth. That’s what I mean by it being intuitive. And it helps for them to understand because for them to say like, what’s 60% of a major? Like that makes no sense to them. And even like if you do a quick little practice handout and it’s 10, you know, it’s not a big deal, but they got a 8 out of 10, you put in 80% in the grade book.

Rebecca Joyner [00:06:24]:
They see that those, a lot of those straight A students as bad when it’s like, oh, it’s just a 10 point thing. It really helps that way. It’s so much more intuitive if you wait by points that way. But I don’t like doing just an overarching points only system because then I’m not making sure that those major grades overall are mattering more. And that’s why I have just the two weighted percentage categories. I also feel like it’s a really fair system. It feels fair in that students who are quote unquote like bad test takers, they can still get a high C or potentially like a low to mid range B. If they do bad on every test, if they’re doing all their other things well, if they’re putting in that effort, they’re showing up to class, they’re coming in tutoring, they’re doing the projects like they’re still going to turn out okay.

Rebecca Joyner [00:07:10]:
And then those students who don’t really do any classwork or show any effort, but can just ace every test, they’re not going to make an A in my class. To me, A is like excellent, but they’re definitely going to be able to make a B, which to me I’M you know, I’m generally fine with. The other thing I love in terms of it being fair is, is that when you only have two percentage categories, there are plenty of grades going into each. When you’re having four or five categories in your gradebook, I guarantee you’re getting a progress report time, you know, in the middle of your quarter and you’re realizing that you’ve only had one quiz in the quiz category and your quizzes are worth 20% or labs are worth 30% and you’ve already done only done one or two. And so that one quiz or that one lab is counting for so much. And so if you bombed it, it’s really affecting your overall grade. And whereas when you just have major and minor, you’re always going to have like at least four major grades and then you’re going to have a gajillion minor grades depending on how much you want to grade of their classwork. So it just feels very, very fair.

Rebecca Joyner [00:08:09]:
In turn, it also feels accurate. I have used this grading policy with hundreds of students and I’ve influenced so many teachers to use it as well, and they’ve all attested the same. I’ve never once gotten to the end of a school year and looked at my students final grades and felt like they weren’t an accurate representation of where the students were at the I’ve never looked at a grade and be like, oh, I’m surprised that person got a C or I’m surprised that person got a D or I’m surprised that person got an A. Like it’s always worked out, which that tells me it’s a really accurate system. And then lastly, again, I’ve said this before, but it just feels really clear. I feel like when you sit down in a conference with parents or with admin and you’re evaluating how students are doing, again, you may think it’s clear to have labs, tests, homework, classwork categories and be able to say like oh look, their test average is bad or they’re, they’re not doing any homework, it’s bad. But the hard thing is again, if you’ve only had one test, then your test average is like not really fair. It’s pretty weighted unfairly because they’ve only had one opportunity to show how they can do on a test.

Rebecca Joyner [00:09:10]:
Whereas when you have major and minor grades as your categories, the major grades really represent again the summative assignments. It’s really representing the knowledge and skills that they have and their understanding, whereas the minor grades is really a lot more effort. Yes, I’M grading some minor grades still for accuracy, but most of them are graded for completion. It’s all kind of stuff that we’re doing in class. They’re all formative. It’s all throughout the learning process. So it’s really clear to look down and just look at these two categories and see, like, this is your major grade average. You clearly are struggling on test.

Rebecca Joyner [00:09:40]:
Your minor grade average is great, though. You’re doing great effort in school. We just need to figure out how to help you improve on your tests and projects, or vice versa. Your major grade average is great. Your minor grade is bad. You need to improve your effort in class or start turning in assignments or whatever. Or you can see it’s both and say like, this is clearly influencing the other. It just makes it really, really clear when having those conversations, when you’re just looking at those two overarching categories.

Rebecca Joyner [00:10:06]:
Now, how do you set up your gradebook and then how do you keep up with the grades on a daily and weekly basis? So I’m going to do my best to explain this to you, but again, this is kind of tricky because we’re not all looking at the same computer screen with the same learning management system in the same gradebook setup. And so you might need to find someone at your school who’s more tech savvy than me to help you manipulate your gradebook to make sure it’s set up right. But I’ve personally never worked in a grading system that wasn’t able to do this, so it should be possible. So take that into consideration. Okay, so I’m going to do my best to explain it. Here’s what you need. You need to set up your gradebook. So there’s two categories.

Rebecca Joyner [00:10:44]:
Again, I like to title them major, minor. You might want to do summative formative. You might want to do formal, informal, I don’t know. I like major, minor. Then those categories need to be weighted. I like to weight them 60%, 40%. That feels fair to me. Then within those categories, you need to set up grades to go in out of points, not out of percentages.

Rebecca Joyner [00:11:08]:
So you’ll know you did this right, because if you go in and click the plus sign to add an assignment to the gradebook, you should be able to change what the assignment is out of. Like, it shouldn’t automatically be out of 100 points. You should be able to change it to be out of 25, to be out of 50, to be out of 10. If you’re able to do that, that most likely means you have it set up for points and typically it’s something you’re just doing on the front end and you’re checking a box that’s it’s like sets the default and you want the default to be points. Now if you go in and you even type in though 20 out of 25 and then you look in the gradebook and it pops up automatically as 80, that means you have some sort of setting somewhere that’s defaulting to percentages. We do not want that, we want points. If I type in 20 out of 25, I want to look in the gradebook and see a 20 out of 25. That matters because this is the more intuitive way to weight assignments is by points rather than percentages.

Rebecca Joyner [00:12:03]:
That’s something they can understand better. Okay, now here’s how you decide what the weight of those assignments are going to be for me. Let’s start with a major grade category. Tests are always a hundred points. So that would go in out of a hundred. So an 80 out of 100 is 80 points out of 100 points, that’s an 80%. Quizzes are always 25 points. I typically do them once a unit.

Rebecca Joyner [00:12:27]:
And so a 20 out of 25 is an 80%, but it’s counting four times less than a test would. A test is going to count four times more. That’s important to me because a quiz to me it’s kind of like half summative, half formative. Like it’s partially summative but we’re still in the learning process and it’s still kind of like a mid time check in before the big test. So that’s why I’m wanting to make it worth less than a test. Okay. Projects might be 50, they might be 100 point major grades. It just kind of depends.

Rebecca Joyner [00:12:56]:
If this is like a one to two day in class project, I’m going to make it 50 points. If it’s like a three to four to five day in class project or like extended engineering design investigation thing like I have in some of my physical science units, that’s going to be a hundred point major grade. Okay. If you have a really long extended lab investigation like my ecosystem in a bottle for my biology ecology unit, that would be a hundred point test grade. So those are different ways I would weight major grades. All of those are graded for accuracy. Even if I’m. If it’s a project, it has a rubric.

Rebecca Joyner [00:13:29]:
Okay. Minor grades, there’s going to be some variety here. If I’m ever just spot checking something for completion, it’s Going to be like 10, maybe 20 points if it’s like stations or something. And I’m just like going through and I’m spot checking like okay, you did it. Now we’re going to get together and go over it and I just want to like reward you with points for having done it. That’s going to be like 10 or 20 points. Not a big deal. Activities that last like one class period are typically like.

Rebecca Joyner [00:13:54]:
Or a partial class period are like 25 points. One to two class periods are 50 point minor grades. Three or more class periods are 100 point minor grades. These are would be things I’m collecting and I’m grading those for accuracy. But I’m still putting them in the minor grade category because they’re not big grades. I do a prime time every day which is a daily bell ringer. Those are five points a day. They’re like open note quizzes.

Rebecca Joyner [00:14:18]:
And then I tally them up at the end of the week and I put the grade in out of 25. Sometimes it’s out of 20. If we’ve only had four prime times that week because we had a test one day or whatever. I’m not going to like double dip on a prime time and a test, but I have a whole episode on prime times as well. Link in the show notes you can check out but that’s how I’m waiting by points. And again, it’s very intuitive because it’s like, oh, this was a small little quick check. Like I’m never going to grade something for completion and it’s a hundred points. That’s insane.

Rebecca Joyner [00:14:44]:
But like something you just did. I’ll, oh, I’ll give you 10 points for that. 10 out of 10. Whatever. It helps too with the prime times too because those really matter. But they don’t matter enough that people are like stressed out or scared of them because it’s just five points a day. But they do add up. So there’s like a little bit of tension there but not enough that they’re really stressed out about it.

Rebecca Joyner [00:15:02]:
So that’s what I really like to do for how I’m weighting those. Now let’s talk about how I’m keeping up with these grades. So at the start of every unit because I batch lesson plan and I use. It’s our AKA science curriculum. So I use my own unit plans. Obviously I use them first before I share them with you guys. At the start of each unit I’m printing my packets for each of my students and then I’m going in the gradebook And I’m inputting every assignment with the point values. I anticipate it being worth.

Rebecca Joyner [00:15:28]:
And then when those things I. I anticipate collecting them and grading them. So this would be anything like a lab or some sort of activity or in class project that I know I’m going to collect and grade throughout that unit. There’s usually not that many because I try not to collect anything to grade for accuracy more than 1 per prep per week. So in a typical unit that’s like three or four weeks. I’m inputting right now three to four assignments. Other things I’ll put in later would be prime times. At the end of the week I would put those in again.

Rebecca Joyner [00:16:00]:
I, I don’t always put them in early because sometimes the week ends up, something comes up, there’s a pep rally or something. And so we only have four that week or whatever. So I put prime times in on Fridays at the end of each week when I tally them up. And then anything that I’m just spot checking for completion, like a little practice handout here or there, again, a stations thing, an inquiry, a pogo type inquiry activ that I’m just spot checking, I’ll put that in like again, like kind of on a whim. I like to do those on the days that we actually do them because then if students are absent, I’m almost always going to exempt them from it. So I’ll put in an X in the grade book. You may have another notation that you would use like maybe an E. So that way it doesn’t hurt them or help them.

Rebecca Joyner [00:16:38]:
That way absent students are not like overwhelmed by all these different things in the grade book. But then they’ll say like, oh, that’s something we did that day. But I’m exempted from it because I wasn’t there. So I should do the work because it’s going to help me learn it. But it doesn’t affect my grade. Either way hurt or help because I didn’t do it. Now you might be thinking, how can I commit to due dates on even some of these things? Like how could I even put in when a test is going to be. I always put in what I project it being.

Rebecca Joyner [00:17:02]:
I’ve never worked faster than I’ve projected. Most of the time I’m pretty good at pacing, so I’m on, on pace. Sometimes things take longer. Then I just go in later and move the due date back or move the test date back in the grade book. I’m never moving anything forward and, But I’ve just found that students and parents really like to see what’s coming and see that there’s a plan and see that I’m on it. I call every assignment an opportunity to improve your grade. And so I think they like to see these are the opportunities I’ll have to improve my grade in this unit. And that kind of gives them an idea of what that will look like now on a day to day basis, though, this is old school, but this is what I like to do.

Rebecca Joyner [00:17:39]:
I have a clipboard that is like my life and I carry it around everywhere I go for every class. It has like a printed seating chart that I have like I make it an aerial view of my classroom and I print it out and then I like erase their names and I change them every unit because I rearrange their seats. It has that and then behind that it has an Excel spreadsheet I make that’s so simple that I keep track of their grades by hand. Okay, the Excel spreadsheet, again, it’s literally just their names in alphabetical order from the gradebook by last name. So that then it’s really easy for me to quickly transfer from there into the computer system. I find that faster to go from my clipboard to the computer than from an individual assignment. Paper to computer, paper, computer, paper, computer. That just feels harder.

Rebecca Joyner [00:18:23]:
Whereas with my, my clipboard I’m just moving my finger down the line and just typing in the numbers really quickly. So I print a grading sheet for each class. Again, it’s blank. And then what I do at the top is like I’ll. So the, like the first column all the way down the left side is their names in alphabetical order by last name. And at the top I’ll like handwrite in the assignment. So I’ll be like, you know, cells lab, 50 points. I’ll put that in parentheses so I can remember.

Rebecca Joyner [00:18:49]:
And then I’ll mark things on there. If I’m going to spot check. Oh, I’m going to spot check that. Force and motion practice problems. All right, Motion and force practice, 10 points. And then I’ll go in right there and I’ll walk around the classroom with my clipboard and I’ll mark their completion grade. If they’re absent, I’ll go ahead and mark them as exempt or whatever. If it’s something I’m going to collect and they’re absent, I’ll highlight the little box on the sheet so I remember like, hey, they were absent.

Rebecca Joyner [00:19:12]:
Need to keep up with this. If it’s something they’ve turned in late I use little red tally marks and I mark each day it’s late so that I can remember. Cause we had a school wide policy where I had to take off for things that were late. But I just find it so much easier to have this physical thing to keep up with as opposed to all these papers. And then also the digital grade book. And then at the end of the day, one of my last tasks before I leave for the day is I just make sure the grade book is up to date. I review my little spreadsheet as I use each sheet up. Then I just print another blank one and I staple it on top of it.

Rebecca Joyner [00:19:42]:
So by the end of the year they have, each class has one that’s like five or six stapled pages together. When I do test grades at the end of the unit, that column, I actually record those test grades in a different color. Like typically I’m just using a black pen, but on that week I’ll use a colored pen. And so that way it clearly helps me kind of see on that printed grade book, okay, this was the end of the unit. And now we’re starting new grades after this for the next unit that we’re doing. It has worked so well for me. Again, I love the paper. It’s like the only thing I bring home every day, or I brought home every day was my computer and my in my clipboard.

Rebecca Joyner [00:20:15]:
And it just helps so much. And then the start of each class period, I kind of move one classes to the back of the pile, clip it in, and we just keep moving through. So that is a summary of what I do for my grading strategy. Now the last thing I want to address is a couple of troubleshooting things that I often hear that you might be thinking. So one of you reached out and said, we have a hundred percent summative grading practices. I am not allowed to grade anything for effort. How do I keep my students engaged? And how do I lessen grading while still providing feedback since I can’t grade formative assessments? And I thought this was a really interesting question because basically you’re saying for my grading system, you’re saying I can’t have any minor grades. A hundred percent of the grade book is a major grade.

Rebecca Joyner [00:20:58]:
And so for you, and I think some of these principles also will apply to you if you’re listening and you do standard space grading or if you have a pass fail class. Okay, so for your scenario where you can’t have major minor, I would say, okay, you just have all major grades. I would still weight those major Grades by point values like 125, 50, that kind of thing. And I would still be grading things and keeping track of them on my clipboard, whether that’s things I’m collecting and grading and giving them good feedback on and, or things I’m just spot checking for completion. And I would do that for data purposes. Okay. I want to have evidence when I’m in conferences with parents and students and admin of like, hey, we only have so many major grades, we only have so many tests and projects and quizzes, but we’re doing all this other stuff. And I just want you to see that this is what I’m seeing like when I’m spot checking these instructional resources for completion just to see if they’ve done them.

Rebecca Joyner [00:21:56]:
And it could be as simple as like a check mark or not like you don’t need to go throughout a 10 since you’re not actually grading it. Like they’re not doing them or you know, hey, these are some things I collected throughout the way and I provided feedback on it. If it had had a grade, they would have gotten like a 50% on it, you know, but it wasn’t for a grade because it was just formative. So we’re doing that still for data purposes. But I love it because it actually kind of takes the pressure off. Like you don’t have to spend a ton of time on your grading because again, it’s not going to go in the grade book so you’re going to provide feedback on things. But I would be doing a lot of peer grading, a lot of going over it as a class and it really puts the work back on the students for them to like self check, self grade, come get help when they need it. I would also, if you can see how creative you can get with those summative assessments with those major grades.

Rebecca Joyner [00:22:42]:
Again, I would really push back that not everything should go in out of a hundred. And then if possible I would do like 100 point tests, 50 to 100 point projects, or like lab practicals and then 25 point quizzes. I would see if you are allowed to do lab quizzes. Something where it’s like an open note after you do a lab. They can have all of the lab out in front of them, but you’re able to ask them some questions about the lab to make sure they really understood it and treat that as like a major grade. Also, I’d be curious if you could still do a primetime bell ringer. I would still do Prime Times and could it go in as a weekly quiz grade that counts as a major grade. And I would, I would keep that open note because I love to do Primetime’s open note.

Rebecca Joyner [00:23:20]:
I would encourage OpenNote as much as you can even for these summative assessments, because then that helps. Since you can’t motivate them by grading stuff for completion or even grading stuff for accuracy classwork, you can motivate them, but like if you do this classwork, you will be able to utilize these resources on your summative assessments. So that kind of builds in some motivation there. If you don’t even want to do that, I feel like here’s some good news for your scenario. Whether that’s standards based grading, pass fail, or I can’t grade any formative assessments, we have to accept that you can no longer use formative assessments to motivate students to do work that cannot be motivation. Their motivation will have to entirely be intrinsic and based on your ability to motivate and manage your class. But this is a great opportunity for you to audit your formative assessments and every instructional resource you’re using and make sure you’re not just doing any for busy work and quick, easy grades. Everything you’re doing should only be to help students and that’s going to help them care about every assignment they’re doing because they’re going to see the value in doing it to prepare for these summative assessments or these standards based grading rubrics that you’re using or whatever.

Rebecca Joyner [00:24:28]:
They will eventually learn, most likely the hard way, through the natural consequence of failing a test or failing some sort of summative assessment that doing the in class work and all those formative assessments that you’re not grading for a grade. There’s a direct correlation between doing those and putting in your effort and how you’re going to do on the summative assessments. But at the end of the day, y’, all, you cannot force them and it isn’t your job to. Here’s what is in your control and we’re only going to control the controllables, okay? You can control auditing your instructional resources to make sure they’re worthwhile so that you can really confidently be like, y’ all need to do this because this is going to help you. Like when you’re learning stoichiometry, you need to do practice problems so you can get better at stoichiometry. That’s something you need to do. You probably don’t need to do a crossword puzzle with vocabulary terms though. That maybe feels like busy work.

Rebecca Joyner [00:25:17]:
Another Thing you can control potentially rethinking some of your summative assessments to make sure they’re really solid assessments and that the grade students in your class get on their summative assessments really reflects those students and rewards those students who are motivated and trying in class to do the work to get there. Also uploading rubrics or answer keys or making a self grading assignment so that they can grade and self check themselves. I think really putting this back on students and then the last thing you control is like y’, all, if this is your scenario, enjoy the fact that you don’t even have the option to grade all this formative stuff. So like don’t spend all this time grading stuff when you don’t have to like redirect all that energy you’re spending not grading on things like classroom management, building relationships, lesson planning, that kind of stuff. Again, you’re still going to grade some things and have to give them feedback, but you can pick and choose more strategically what that’s going to be. I also still think there’s great value in like sharing all the answers with students and then saying, okay, which one of these do you want me to walk through? Going over? And then you walk through those and you’re like going over it as a class, but you’re not sitting there and correcting every single thing on their page. If they want you to do that, they could come in for tutoring. That’s a great way for them to get that help.

Rebecca Joyner [00:26:30]:
But it’s really going to put the work back in on the students to have to do this. And I don’t think that’s a bad thing. Okay. The last thing I’ll say about this specific situation is if you’re in a system like this, if you’re thrown into a new school or you’re tackling standards based grading, you’ve never had it before, something like that. Or you’re for the first time not allowed to grade anything for completion or whatever. Ask what others in your situation are doing and get feedback from them. And if student motivation is a major struggle without being able to grade formative assessments, like students just aren’t working because it’s not for a grade. Ask admin to help.

Rebecca Joyner [00:27:06]:
This is such a great thing that admin can make a school wide policy on to support teachers. Maybe it looks like in school suspension ISS or after school detention for students who are not participating in class because things aren’t for a grade. I don’t know. But I think if they’re going to make a policy where you can’t motivate them extrinsically by like grading things for completion or grading form and assessments, even for accuracy, then they need to be helpful in providing solutions to problems. That’s part of their job. They can’t just be throwing out policies and creating all these problems without offering solutions as well. And if your admin tries to gaslight you into thinking you’re the only one struggling with the policy, then ask them, say, hey, can you point me to some teachers then that you recommend I observe or I shadow or meet with? That way I can see how they’re managing this, how they’re keeping students motivated. That would be really helpful for me.

Rebecca Joyner [00:27:55]:
So put it back on them. I’ve been talking a lot about admin recently and pushing back on some things there and how to advocate for yourself. And I’ll link episodes about that in the show notes for you to reference. Okay, so I hope you found this episode helpful. I’m going to challenge you for your take home challenge to play around with your gradebook and see if you can set it up as the major minor. And if not, consider how you could simplify your grade book for next school year. If you are already in a situation where it’s just going to all be major grades, then let’s do an audit of our resources and make sure we’re really strategic about what we’re doing. And let’s make sure we’re making really good detailed answer keys.

Rebecca Joyner [00:28:32]:
If you use It’s Not Rocket Science resources, don’t worry, your answer key is already so detailed that then you can post for students you know on a private secure web server or you could print out and they can check and do some self grading themselves. So that’s a great way to use your time on the front end to save you time on the back end. And I hope it helps you this school year. If you want to check out any of those links I mentioned, you can find them in the show notes at it’s not rocket scienceclassroom.com Episode 241 and if you want more help with assessments, I have a virtual Professional development mini course called assessments. It’s a four hour virtual PD. It’s one of seven units in the secondary Science Amplified virtual PD course bundle. It’s a great one. It comes after unit 5 labs.

Rebecca Joyner [00:29:16]:
Unit 6 is assessments and unit 7 is work life Balance and Assessments is. It’s just a great unit. I mean I think they’re all great, but I really, really love it. We talk about this in detail amongst other things, and I’ll link that in the show notes as well. All right, teacher friends, that wraps up today’s episode. If you’re looking for an easy way to start simplifying your life as a secondary science teacher, head to itsnotrocketscienceclassroom.com challenge to grab your classroom reset challenge. And guess what? It’s totally free. Thanks so much for tuning in, and I’ll see you here next week.

Rebecca Joyner [00:29:50]:
Until then, I’ll be rooting for you, teacher friend.