How to use these tools at your school
For principals, department leads, and teacher teams.
Start small
Pick one learning target that two or more teachers assess, and the proficiency scale you already use for it. Pick a team of three to six people who score that work. One target and one team for one semester will teach you more than a schoolwide rollout, and it costs one meeting a month.
Run the norming protocol monthly
Bring four to six pieces of recent student work on the target, with names removed. Follow the eight steps on page 1 of the protocol. The session ends with two numbers on the scoring sheet: exact agreement and adjacent agreement. Log them with the date and the one change the team decided to make.
After three sessions you have a trend. If exact agreement is climbing, the scale wording is getting clearer. If it stalls, the “one decision” column tells you which descriptor to rewrite next.
Write the credit rule once
In the same team, fill in the revision credit rule template for that target. Section 3 is the part worth arguing about: for each kind of support a student might get before resubmitting, decide how the resubmission counts, using the three columns in the grid. Write the decision rule in section 4 and post the student version from section 5 next to the scale.
Check the rule at the end of the semester
Section 8 takes ten minutes. Pull five students marked proficient under the rule and look at their next fresh demonstration on the same target. If most held the level, the rule is doing its job. If most did not, the rule is counting support as evidence, and section 3 needs tightening before anyone touches the scale.
What to do with the numbers
Share them with the team and with staff as a picture of how the scale is working. The log never records who gave which score, and the protocol asks you to keep it that way. Do not use agreement numbers in evaluations. A team that fears the number will stop producing an honest one.
What to expect
Teams commonly land near 70 percent exact and 90 percent adjacent agreement on a scale that has been normed a few times. Treat those as reference points. Your own number last month is the comparison that matters.
Adapting
Both tools are CC BY 4.0. Change the labels, the number of levels, and the support types to match your grading policy. Keep the attribution line.