SBG + Holistic Rubric

Update: Check out my Star Wars Holistic SBG Rubric.

Sbg is coming together more and more for me.

My latest hang up was on how to grade, how to label grades, and how to calculate a percentage.

After tweeting with @druinok and @bowmanimal, here is what I've come up with. I will have four levels that are simply defined. Students will receive a level rather than a number, along with specific feedback. No numbers. Yet.

When it comes time to calculate a grade in the grade book, each level will convert to a percentage. Then I will average them all together.

Here is a student/teacher/parent/admin friendly picture of my holistic rubric.

The red is what I would think about while grading. The black is what students would be thinking while learning. Master and Expert are kind of confusing and I don't love Practitioner. I really like novice though. But these just sit better with me than Advanced, Proficient, Developing, Below Mastery, etc. Do you have any other suggestions? @mathtastrophe suggested Padawan, Jedi Knight, Jedi Master, and Jedi Grand Master. Maybe I do need something more teenager appropriate... Ninjas and unicorns anyone?

I posted the numerical scores on this so that I wouldn't forget them. Not sure if I should post them for everyone to see right away.

Here is my question. How would I go about communicating this? I want to get away from numbers on assessments and focus more on feedback. Obviously more descriptive feedback that just a level but still. Do I give students a copy of this with numbers on it? Then, aren't they still working for a percentage rather than learning? Do I wait until midterms and the end of quarter to put actual numbers in the grade book? That might be a nightmare and ignores students who want to constantly know their grade. But if I immediately convert the level to a grade, what is the point of the levels? I might as well go ahead and just call them percentages.

This is the last thing that is really nagging at me.  I don't want to be deceptive about how I'm calculating a grade. But it seems like if you tell them then it just loses some of it's meaning...or something.

So my two questions: What can I name my levels? When/how do I convert words to numbers?