Throwing out traditional grading practices

My primary focus as an educator is to facilitate student learning. As a teacher of English and philosophy, my purpose is to cultivate literacy in my students, enabling them to be informed, articulate, and capable of both navigating and utilizing language for the purposes of living well.

For many reasons, grades have always seemed to get in the way of my purpose. Over the years I have made several adjustments to my grading practices, and each step has improved but not resolved some of the issues. I’ve worked with students, interviewing them, surveying them and reading their reflections and feedback, and while I have definitely seen increased learning over the years, there remains too much focus on grades over achievement. So, after more study and reflection, I have decided to change the way grades are determined in my classroom.

I’ve decided that this year I will “go gradeless” when it comes to individual assignments. Rather than focus my attention on assigning a number or symbolic quantifier to student performance and products, my focus is on giving narrative feedback directly related to progress and achievement of curricular standards and goals: what was done well, where students could focus their energy and time, and how to improve — that is, which instructional strategies will guide their progress. The focus is on assessment rather than evaluation: I consistently check in with them, helping them learn about their own skills and understanding, guiding them to develop and strengthen by providing them with more direct, detailed and deliberate instruction.

This doesn’t mean students won’t receive grades at all, which are still required by current and future schools to gauge eligibility and ranking.  What it does mean is that students and I come to a conclusion about grades together, based on criteria that we both understand, with evidence and justification provided by the student who has done the learning. What it means is that students own their learning, that students value and evaluate their learning in ways that are most meaningful for their own growth and progress. Students and I confer, look over evidence and reflection, and decide what the grade is at conferences, which occur in time for midterm and semester grade reporting.

At the beginning of each unit of study, students are provided with the curricular goals and performance expectations. Students and I assess what particular areas need attention for growth and development and which areas are already mastered. Throughout the year I spend more time working one-on-one with students, both in class and online (through Google Classroom and other applications), assessing student progress and teaching students relevant strategies that foster their development.

A detailed progress sheet communicates student progress and performance in the class. Students keep track and record their progress as we move through the curriculum, and that recording is shared with the student’s parents via Google applications, allowing parents to see what their student is learning and accomplishing in the classroom. The sheet contains images and links to works in progress and projects completed. The intention is to make the classroom transparent, to make learning as visible as possible, and to be deliberate and focused on how each individual student can progress toward meeting or exceeding the standards set for learning. 

These sheets, along with revised and completed work that students will select, are brought to grade conferences. Before the conference, each student reflects on the standards to be evaluated, decides how well they have met or progressed on those given standards and goals, selects evidence to demonstrate learning and mastery, and prepares to explain why this evidence of learning represents a particular grade. In the grade conference, we discuss the standards and projects, student work and progress, and how the evidence matches up to the criteria given for success. Students should be able to reference particular goals and standards and explain how their work supports that evaluation. The student’s explanation of evidence is part of the final assessment, as such explanation should demonstrate understanding of the criteria and expectations. The format of the conference is conversational, and the intention is to assess student progress while giving student both ownership and voice in the final evaluation.

What the routines will look like

Each course I teach is designed to meet the state and district standards. Within that framework, students have many options to select the content and direction of their work. For example, in a unit on dystopian literature, students select from a list of approved works. The students and I work together to design projects that give students flexibility, allowing for greater creativity and engagement while still meeting the rigorous expectations of the standards. As students work on projects, we consider models and exemplars so students understand what are the criteria for success.

Students are given regular feedback, which may come from a number of sources. Depending on what we are working on, feedback may come directly from me (the teacher) or it may come from peer groups or individuals. Peer conferencing is a regular feature in my classroom; students are empowered to hone their expertise in areas of strength and share that expertise with their peers. Students are taught what to look for in their own work and in others’ work, they are provided with examples and mentor texts to compare and use as guides whenever possible, and they develop their ability to see their own work more honestly and accurately through reviewing and responding to others’ work.

In my classes, students  have a variety of tools for maintaining portfolios, tracking and recording progress, and communicating with the teacher and peers outside of school. Google Apps for Education (GAfE), Voxer, Padlet, YouTube, Remind, and Turnitin.com are all be employed regularly.

The rationale

We tend to think that grades represent feedback that enables students and parents and other stakeholders to see how well a student is performing in a class, and in this traditional system, we see performance as roughly equivalent to learning. But this isn’t always the case: I reflect on my own experience as a student, where the most meaningful learning I recall came from earning a C on a research paper. I learned about research, support, voice, structure… and humility — much more than I ever learned from any A I had received. The As felt good, to be sure, but the C taught me more.

I have observed similar phenomena in my own students, who regularly write reflections on what they’ve learned. At times the “A students” have a harder time articulating what they’ve learned because they just did the assignment; in these cases, an A usually represents compliance, not learning. Students who earn Bs or Cs, and even those who earned Ds, can often articulate in more meaningful ways what they learned, what they tried, and what they can do differently next time. That said, generally the grades equate at some level to the degree of compliance with directions given, holding them accountable for doing the work but not necessarily for learning from it. It seems to me that the degree of compliance could roughly equate to the common identities students form: I’m a A student or I’m a C student.

In addition, I had hoped that grades would motivate students to improve and excel. But in my experience, those who are most motivated by grades focus more on the grades than on what they are learning. Many students care more about “what she gave me” on a paper than what they learned from writing it or from the feedback I gave (which I’d hoped would transfer to the next assignment). Other students, who believe grades are earned rather than given, focus on how to earn and bank more points instead of how they’re improving or developing.  Even those students who can articulate what they learned find it difficult to transfer their learning, often resorting to claims like “I’m just a B student and I always will be.”

As a believer in the growth mindset, I don’t buy this line. We are not, nor should we be, defined by our GPA. We are more than our grades. How has schooling led to such limiting self-definitions? What does it mean to be an “A student” other than that “full compliance with whatever teachers asked”? Education should develop knowledgeable, healthy, creative, articulate, and literate citizens – not A, B, C or D students. Education should be about learning.

Because of this incongruity between learning and grades, I have been driven to find a meaningful solution, one where grades communicate actual learning and achievement, with fairness and opportunity for students to grow. I want to reinforce learning rather than see it as fixed within the boundary of a unit of study. I have spent years working on feedback practices that would foster growth and development of articulation skills, even focusing my M.Ed. (2006) research on effective feedback practices. In my quest I’ve read several books, articles, and even attended lectures and workshops on various grading practices, trying to learn how best to use points and categories to communicate what students were learning and how well they were achieving according to district and state standards.

Several years ago I attended a lecture given by Thomas Guskey, a professor of educational psychology at University of Kentucky. He spoke at California Lutheran University about how grades, and how most grading practices are fundamentally flawed. He reviewed several systems in common practice and showed how they are not only fundamentally unfair, but how little the grades at the end actually communicate what a student learned. He advocates for a standards-based report card at the secondary level, one that is not unlike those now used in many elementary schools.

Recently I read an article published in The Atlantic Monthly, in which the author states,

“Research shows that providing students with a number or letter in addition to quality comments prevents them from authentically reflecting. Quantitative grades also diminish student interest in learning, reduce academic risk taking, and decrease the quality of thinking. But beyond academics, as teachers, we saw the negative impact grades made on our students’ mental and emotional health.” (Lamb-Sinclair, 2017)

I am concerned about students’ “mental and emotional health” – in fact, it is what motivated me to begin a concerted effort to integrate wellness activities into my classroom last year, a practice I intend to continue after wholly positive feedback from students. The relationship between grades and student well-being cannot be ignored. Students will be healthier if they can focus on their intellectual growth. Students will learn more if the grades are removed because then learning is more interesting to them and their “quality of thinking” is unfettered.

A conversation about “going gradeless” seems to be happening everywhere. I have seen articles almost daily in newsletters from organizations like ASCD, NCTE, and Mindshift/KQED. In the last several months I have been following several fellow educators on Twitter who feel similarly. Several have put together systems that send grades to the background and put learning first. This summer I read books by Starr Sackstein and Mark Barnes, followed blogs by Catlin Tucker, Alfie Kohn, and Arthur Chiaravalli, and participated in chats and workshops with Alice Keeler.

All points lead me to the conclusion that shifting the focus away from a traditional points-based system is in the best interest of students. As we work through this process, I hope to be able to maintain the focus on student learning while helping students to flourish now and in the future.

Resources:

Barnes, Mark D. Assessment 3.0: Throw Out Your Gradebook and Inspire Learning. Thousand Oaks: Corwin Press, 2015. Print. https://www.amazon.com/Assessment-3-0-Throw-Inspire-Learning/dp/1483373886/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1501867249&sr=1-1&keywords=barnes+assessment+3.0

Chu, Charles. “How to Be a Great Student and Learn Absolutely Nothing at All.” Better Humans Coach Me, July 30, 2017. Online.

Guskey, Thomas. “Grades that Mean Something.” Kappan, October 2011. Online. http://tguskey.com/wp-content/uploads/Grading-4-Grades-That-Mean-Something.pdf

Guskey, Thomas. “Making High School Grades Meaningful.” Phi Delta Kappan, May 2006. Online. http://tguskey.com/wp-content/uploads/Grading-6-Making-High-School-Grades-Meaningful.pdf

Lamb-Sinclair, Ashley. “Why Grades are Not Paramount to Achievement.” The Atlantic Monthly, 16 June 2017. Online. https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2017/06/why-grades-are-not-the-key-to-achievement/530124/?utm_source=atlfb

Lipnevich, Anastasia, and Smith, Jeffery. “Response to Assessment Feedback: The Effect of Grades, Praise, and Source of Information.” Educational Testing Service, June 2008. Online. https://www.ets.org/Media/Research/pdf/RR-08-30.pdf “Overall, detailed, descriptive feedback was found to be most effective when given alone, unaccompanied by grades or praise.”

Sackstein, Starr. Hacking Assessment: 10 Ways to Go Gradeless in a Traditional Grades School. Hack Learning Series. Cleveland, OH: Times Ten Publications, 2015. Print. https://www.amazon.com/Hacking-Assessment-Gradeless-Traditional-Learning/dp/0986104914

See also YouTube channel, particularly this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DLnW5-OEPBk

Schwartz, Katrina. “When Schools Forgo Grades: An Experiment in Internal Motivation.” KQED/Mindshift – Teaching Strategies, 13 August 2017. Online. https://ww2.kqed.org/mindshift/2017/08/13/when-schools-forgo-grades-an-experiment-in-internal-motivation/

Spencer, Kyle. “A New Kind of Classroom: No Grades, No Failing, No Hurry.” New York Times, 11 August 2017. Online. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/11/nyregion/mastery-based-learning-no-grades.html

Wilson, Maja. Rethinking Rubrics in Writing Assessment. Heinemann, 2006. Print. https://www.amazon.com/Rethinking-Rubrics-Writing-Assessment-Wilson/dp/0325008566