Google Classroom Tip: Using Grade Categories to Display Lesson Classifications

... and we're back - again!

Part One, In Which I Explain My Absence from the Blog:

I have to confess that the first semester of this school year has completely exceeded both my expectations for just how stressful, challenging, and unmanageable a semester could be, and my personal threshold for accomplishing anything besides making my way to school, working with kids, teaching them, and additionally helping them navigate the constant changes that uproot their routines and radically disrupt their sense of what is normal and constant (room changes, schedule changes, switching between in-person and virtual, teacher changes, daily subs, getting sick, staying healthy, all of it). So I haven't had it in me to sit down and write much.

But, behind the scenes, the heart is still beating here at LTT, and I've got a few things in the works, not the least of which is the YAMM tutorial which I hoped to finish over the summer, then hoped to finish during the first semester, and now intend to finish by the end of the school year. I have other projects in the works as well.

However, I can no longer forgive myself for neglecting the regular blog posts, so I decided to put up a quick tech tip (low effort, but high reward!) for those teachers using Google Classroom.

Part The Rest: Using Google Classroom's Grade Categories to Display Lesson Classifications

If you're familiar with Modern Classrooms' approach to classifying lessons as Must-Do, Should-Do, and Aspire-To-Do (on which I've written and hosted an entire episode of the MCP Podcast), you know that the "optional" lessons can and should still be included and presented to students who may want to deepen their understanding, but with the option to skip over them if they feel overwhelmed or want to prioritize work for other classes at the moment. If you're implementing a structure of Must-Do's vs. Could-Do's like this, it's important to make it as obvious as possible to students, who deserve to know what work they should prioritize (and which work they can deprioritize) without having to speak with their teacher.

Google Classroom has a feature called "Grade Categories" that ostensibly serves to automate point values for certain assignments (and, I believe, allows for weighting). However, back in the summer of 2020, a teacher and MCP community member on Slack pointed out another very cool feature of the Grade Categories (which she discovered in this video): when assigned, they appear in an otherwise empty spot on the Classwork page right next to the assignment post, and in a slightly different font and color to boot, so they stand out. A more obvious visual there could not be!

I started implementing this immediately, and I thought I'd share it here as well, as it's become an integral part of my workflow - every post in my Google Classroom has one of these labels.

To enable them, head to the Settings page for your Google Classroom and scroll to the bottom where you'll find the Grading settings. Here you can create your Grade Categories - mine are "Must Do" and "Aspire To Do."

You can set a default grade for each of these categories (I set mine to 1, since all of my mastery checks require 100% mastery, and this is a nice little automation that saves me a few clicks and keystrokes when I create my assignments), but you don't need to set this default, and you can also override it and change the point value of assignments when you create them.

Then, when you create an assignment, you can select one of the grade categories, and its name appears in a very obvious spot on the post itself. If you do this for all of your assignments, your students can easily see at a glance which assignments they must prioritize.

I don't know if Canvas, Schoology, or other LMS's have a similar feature to this (if you use an LMS besides Google Classroom and it has something like this, I'd love to hear hear about it - let me know at zach@learningtoteach.co!). But if you do use Google Classroom, you might want give this a try!