Moving on from the world of admissions and enrollment and onto the end of a grading period processes. We have to manage posted grades, report card records, grade & comment review configuration. There are a lot of moving pieces, but with planning and testing you can have flawless academic report publishing.
The first year going through this is the most demanding, but if you give yourself a month of lead-in time if you are doing it for the first time and 2-3 weeks if you are already a frequent flyer, you will be alright.
So, what's the first thing to do?
1) Planning: The first thing I do is contact the relevant academic leaders at each campus and set up a meeting. This is ideally, a month before a publishing date. In our first meeting we run through a quick demo of the process, giving the team an overview of teacher input, grade and comment review, post/locking procedures, and finally the actual report card, what does it look like and how do we publish. This meeting does two important things, it shows the stakeholders the process, allows them to ask questions, and it can also give a timeline for meetings and deadlines. For instance, when do we want teachers to be able to input grades and comments? Great! Now when do we want to set up a meeting to review the grade input process.
Tip: During this initial meeting, highlight the flexibility of what you are able to do, even if it does not necessarily align with what you did in your old system. Those workflows may be in place because of a lack of functionality.
Okay, so we have our first meeting, the team understands the process at a high level, what's next?
This is where the team has to make some decisions, do we want to have a grade review process, do we want this process native in Veracross? Do we want to automatically post teachers' grades or allow them to enter the grades one-by-one. These decisions are school specific but inform your next steps.
2) Report Card Form: Let's imagine we want to do everything in Veracross, the first thing we have to do is create the Report Card Form(s). You are able to create as many forms as you need for the different uses at your school. For example, physical education classes may have different grading criteria than your AP Bio class.
Tip: You also can create one single report card form that has all sections available, grade status, numeric grades, comments, and so on. The drawback is this may cause some confusion for teachers who see a 'Qualitative' section, but their class has no rubrics, but it is easier in that you would only have to manage one report card form rather than three or four.
So now you have created your report card form(s). We need to apply these forms to your classes. This can be done easiest from the Review Class Configuration Query on the System Homepage. Filter the query to the classes you need and batch update the report card form field.
Tip: Another thing I like to do is use the 'Instructions for Teachers' field to give important information to teachers, i.e. grade/comment due dates, grading scale reminders, or even a link to a Google doc with school guidelines on grading.
Now that we have our report card form created and applied to our classes we open up the required fields on our agreed upon date. Generally, in a first year in Veracross I would open up the Report Card Form live with the school level academic team.
3) Grade Review: Teachers can input grades and comments. What's next? Reviewing those grades and comments. This process can be as complex or as simple as you would like. To give you a taste, I will walk through what we do at our upper school.
a. The first thing that happens is the academic team sends me their list of proofers. From here I set up the Grade Review Configuration Records. I will not be going through the set up process as Veracross has thorough documentation on the process, but suffice it to say, there are a plethora of options when it comes to configuration, it can be based on last name + grade level, homeroom + student group, grade level + teacher + student group. You can get very specific.
Tip: Don't forget to set up the Grade & Comment review section in the Faculty Portal ({system:grade_and_comment_review})
b. The second step is reviewing the review process (meta, I know). The academic team and I meet and clean up the review records that are not needed. There may be times where not every student needs a comment, maybe they have an A, maybe there was no significant drop off (i.e. a letter grade change). To do this we use Class Enrollment queries with those handy-dandy function fields:
After we have cleaned up the review records by deleting the records, or better yet, marking the review status as 'No Review Required' we can inspect the actual grades and comments.
c. Again we return to our function fields. These allow us to find the exact grade records that do or do not need comments. It allows our team to see exactly what teachers may be missing a comment even after the official grade review process. It is our way of triple checking our work.
From here we email the list of teachers and ensure that the necessary comments and/or grades are entered.
4) The report card itself: In the first year publishing report cards to the parent portal you will have to verify your report card/progress report. This is an additional step for each grading period. Now with the new Veracross school configurable documents you create your own documents during this process.
There are two main ways to handle the visualization of the report card, one way would be to use a test student, and another way would be to review/finalize the document after grades and comments have been entered. Either way you go, it is helpful to have a sample document of what used previously, this gives the team a jumping off point.
Back to the visuals, my preference is to use real data and wait for there to be grades and comments to see what it will look like to parents once published. This does mean building in a couple of extra days (or weeks) for document review and/or setting up the document live and running through the different document template options.
Tip: Generally when demoing a new document to my academic teams, I like to start with all the options enabled (date of birth, footer text, header text, and so on), this can help generate ideas about what is possible and potentially improve upon what was done previously in the old system.
Tip (pt. 2): Use the URL Preview in query visualization in your report card/progress report query to quickly scan all your students' academic documents!
5) Post/Lock Report Card Grades: Okay, 90% of the way there, the grades are in, the comments are reviewed, the report card looks good. Now we need to make sure there are no changes made to the underlying data. To do this, go to your school-level homepage, click on the Action Menu (Harry Potter scar), and select the Post/Lock Numeric Grades option. Choose your school level, year, grading period, and procedure(s). If you would like more information, there is great documentation on this process.
Tip: When considering what your Post/Lock grades procedure should be, don't just do what you have always done. There are a lot of great ways to reduce teachers' workloads with the Posting procedure in particular.
6) Publish, Baby, Publish: Everything is all set, now we can publish. Again, there is great documentation on the publishing process, so I won't get into the nitty-gritty. There are a few great new tools though. With the new filters on academic reports, you can stagger and manage your Publication process with greater control and flexibility. After publishing, do make sure to preview and test with a parent or two.
In sum, give yourself more lead in time than you might think, test, test, and test some more, and finally, be open to changes in this process, whether that be to the actual reports or to the workflows of teachers or admin.