Students, teachers, parents, administrators, board members, and commu-
nity members all come to share a sense of responsibility for learning and
accounting for progress.
Reporting to Parents
Because the main concern in reporting is communication, schools need
to design reporting systems that are easily understood by those receiving
the information. Although educators want to report everything that they
believe parents must know about a child’s progress, good intentions and
important information sometimes get lost in a fog of educational jargon.
For that reason, parents should help design reporting systems.
Some design groups include parents; others rely on parent surveys,
interviews, or focus groups. For example, Margo Montague, an educator
in the Bellingham Public Schools in Bellingham, Washington, developed
a report card through a process of teacher design, parent response, and
final revisions. A committee of teachers developed a set of items they
believed were significant to each child’s cognitive development. With the
help of a consultant, they presented these items to parent focus groups.
The parents were asked to interpret the meaning of each item, and the
focus group leader noted parents’ confusion about any item. The teacher
group revised the reporting process, using the focus group’s comments as
a basis. In the end, they arrived at a report card that had significant mean-
ing for teachers and parents. (This process is described more fully in Chap-
ter 6 of Assessment in the Learning Organization, Costa & Kallick, 1995.)
The John Lyman Elementary School in Middlefield, Connecticut,
used a similar process to develop its report card. After careful considera-
tion by teachers and parent groups, they developed a report card that uses
the rubric shown in Figure 14.1.
Figure 14.2 is part of the Lyman school report card. This figure shows
how teachers report data on 4th graders’ growth in work habits, which are
listed under Habits of Mind linked to citizenship. Lyman educators have
also developed detailed rubrics that describe students’ level of perfor-
mance on these work habits. Figure 14.3 contains the 4th grade rubric for
two of those habits: (1) makes appropriate choices to complete tasks and
Reporting Growth in Habits of Mind 259