I grew up in a public school setting that encouraged the rat race of grades and rewarded all A’s students with gold cards that granted them all sorts of privileges, e.g. off-campus lunches, reduced ticket prices at the movie theater, ice cream socials, etc… It was an exclusive and rather toxic environment that was completely taken for granted.
I have since worked as a teacher at an independent K-12 school that in lieu of grades uses narrative assessment and a metric of 5 C’s (character, creativity, critical thinking, collaboration, and communication) and I’ve been astounded at how effective this model can be in reducing the air of competition and helping students learn for learning’s sake. Particularly with the collaboration metric, we see students recognizing the value of others’ ideas and input in reaching a goal. I would love to see this method adopted more throughout schools, as it would undoubtedly help to curb the hyper-individualist mindset that keeps partitioning us off from one another.
Thanks for sharing your reflections, Ginny. I like the 5 C framework you present here. What I like most is that they are specific and communicate to students the types of qualities we want them to develop.
I’m curious to hear more about how the assessments are communicated to students. Are they given some sort of written feedback on those five criteria in addition to a written narrative assessment? Or are those embedded within the narrative? Thinking about how to adapt this to my context.
Josh - teachers write quarterly narrative conference reports touching on the 5 Cs as reflected in whatever curriculum was covered. Students and parents attend a conference with the teacher to discuss it in detail.
High school students participate in writing the reports, giving assessments of their own work and the 5 Cs.
Thanks Daniel. You’re right on the money here. We often focus on how grades often demoralize students who fall lower on the distribution, but the fact that we use the underlying frame of a distribution betrays something about what we are trying to do with grades. The way the system is set up is not good for either the lower or higher performing students. It can be demoralizing for students who are struggling to know that they are lagging behind their classmates and also deceiving or demotivating for high-performing students who may have a false sense of achievement and feel that they have mastered a certain field when there is always more to learn. Of course, there are some objective aspects that grades are correlated to under the hood, but the question is whether those things are what is most important AND if traditional grades accurately communicate those intentions to students.
I think that the narrative evaluation of each student, regardless of the specific form it takes, is critical in helping to add color to the picture that traditional grades paint. Without those comments, we run the risk of diminishing the humanity of our students.
I think you’ve successfully lit the fire under me for next week’s post :)
The problem gets compounded when schools encourage mediocrity by suggesting that special education students focus on a passing grade as opposed to understanding the material or mastering concepts/processes.
I was homeschooled for my entire education and we never did grades. I think receiving constructive criticism and well-earned praise would mean more to most students than an arbitrary letter (who's to say the teacher doesn't give the kid a low grade because they're having a bad day?). That's what makes homeschooling so much better: the parent can alter the speed of their kid's learning so they never have to feel like they're stupid for not being at the same level as the other kids. Probably a lot of kids think they're stupid because they were never good at taking tests.
Ah, I feel this. I went to a hippy Montessori school through 8th grade and didn't have grades until high school, which I truly believe helped me develop a significantly deeper love of learning. There were minimums, but no maximums. It also allowed me to jump into arguably one of the most competitive high schools in the country (not a humble-brag) without the added pressure of feeling like A's were the "one true goal". Well rounded self-directed learning turns out has served me well!
I'm not a throw out all grades advocate, but things like self-review and tying grades back to your own personal growth are so important.
Thanks for sharing your experience, Sam. Feels like your early experiences with grades helped to ground you in a way that was helpful in carrying you through, even when you left for a more traditional school setting.
My son attended a “free school” from grades K-3 that was nonetheless part of a public school district. No grades really (though they were officially assigned), written assessments and combined age classrooms. It was hectic, but I liked it as a parent who volunteered a lot there. It is well documented that students from these types of schools (and homeschoolers) tend to do well in regular high school and college. These schools, as with homeschooling, require much more work from parents, and I think that is the key to their success (or should I say to the students’ success).
The other thing about this school was that it stressed experiential learning. This is a key to success as well, I believe. My teaching experience tells me that the more the kids can get their hands on things and move around, the better they perform and the happier they are. With video games and other sedentary activities so prevalent in their lives, the more they can touch and move in class, the better.
And finally, I agree that differential teaching and assessment can help with learning. The mixed-age class model has problems, but is generally good if the level of readiness is reasonably similar.
Parental involvement and experiential learning are both very valuable. We all need people who believe in us and this is especially important for kids, whether it comes from their parents or other adults in their life.
On your note about the power of experiential learning: I credit much of the success of our engineering program at Harvey Mudd to our focus on experiential learning throughout the curriculum. Students learn better AND it's more fun!
Thank you. I attended the University Elementary School in Iowa City Iowa in the 1950s. No grades until high school. I learned what education was and was not. My daughter attended Sarah Lawrence.
Very interesting, thanks for sharing Anna. Curious to hear more about your daughter's experience at Sarah Lawrence! What were her takeaways and reflections?
This is a concept that I’ve espoused most of my educational life and beyond. Even in grad school, I saw classmates getting wrought up about their grades and losing sight of their actual knowledge and skill in applying it. I read about a middle school using multiple intelligences to identify some strengths and weaknesses; and then utilizing this to give positive feedback to everyone for their contributions to project learning. The individual was also expected to strengthen in their weak areas as well. Through the group-learning project, many academic areas were covered, including math, writing, history etc. and it became much more meaningful through context. As an OT (and through many other experiences and learning), I have become aware of the role of context and meaning in memory. If we want students to retain information, then it must have context and meaning to them. We also need to value problem-solving skills and reasoning as well as the ability to question and analyze information. So many people seem to be wholly lacking in the ability to listen to and read information such as scientific studies and understand how to approach and dissect it; including its limitations, validity and biases. Additionally, having conducted numerous cognitive and functional assessments, it is important to understand that a score or grade is only part of a larger picture and may be harmful and relatively meaningless without further analysis and inquiry.
Thanks Michele, I really appreciate you calling out the need for developing skills to critically analyze and dissect information. This feels like it will be increasingly important in our current age of the LLM.
I’m retired from the education game now but I still find the topic of student evaluation to be very interesting. We were expected to teach to a clearly defined set of outcomes with standardized testing done a various grade levels. In many instances the results were used to evaluate teachers. The tightly timed courses allowed little opportunity for deeper levels of understanding or application. As a result, creative teachers were stifled and curious students were left with a sense of ‘so what’! In that system the myth was that evaluation guided learning. In theory yes- in practical application the opposite was true.
Thanks, Gerry. Assessment is tricky in deed but there's a lot of room for innovation. My hope is that by thinking a bit more creatively about how we assess student work, we can help cultivate a love for learning for students while also helping them to build the types of skills that we deem important and that standardized tests attempt to measure. One big problem, as you note, is that as soon as we put too much focus on performing well on the test that balance becomes hard to maintain.
All this fuss about grades is primarily parent not student driven. All my grade cards had ‘could do better’ because studying was just one of the things I did. Most teenagers have sex, friends, fun, sports, and studying as priorities, roughly in that order. There are a lot worse things than low grades; bullying for one! The idea that grades = performance is ridiculous to students; we all know where we stand in a class intellectually without grades. For most, your ability to build a friends network is more important than grades and in the long run more valuable. Think emotional intelligence! The only negative impact of low (not ‘poor’!) grades I remember for us was having to ‘report’ to our parents.
It's interesting that you bring up the different dynamics between parents and students. This feels especially true to me for younger students, but by the time they get to college I also see a lot of this drive to perform in students as well.
Those early years have a lot of power to help students develop a healthy and balanced view of what life is about and understand that academics are a part, and only a part, of a flourishing life.
From a homeschool mom emeritus: if you had not performed well in those standardized tests, your mom might have shifted to daily or weekly grading so that you could have improved to match the external standard (which itself is a type of "grade" of the homeschool mom).
AP teachers know they need to deal out grades in detail so that their students will rise to success on the external test. In general high school home schoolers need to objectively frame their work so that their transcript is not just Mommy grades.
But grade inflation in schools lays then open to a similar charge. And even grade inflation in college. It's always the external assessment that validates.
Thanks for the comment. It's not that the measures of objective performance in certain subjects weren't always there. It was just that those grades were communicated to me in a way that helped me develop a healthy relationship with grades and not become overly focused on the number or letter. Agree that the external validation is helpful and was valuable to benchmark my learning.
Where I think we get into trouble is when we put to much focus on the grade as *the* thing we're shooting for.
Another brilliant take from a brilliant teacher. Your students are lucky to have you. Thank you, from a fellow iconoclastic teacher and a similarly-ruined perennial autodidact.
This commentary is completely naive on so many levels. This type of Utopia serves only the privileged class, who have an endless source of resources that perpetually enable them to excel with parental guidance and support, while those without this, fall even further behind. This system being imagined, is the worst available. It creates an even larger equity gap, and refutes all empirical data that has determined that grades are still the best indicator of student achievement than any other measure. That, along with regular quizzes, provincial/state exams, and regular standardized assessment. I live in British Columbia, Canada where we got rid of grades until Gr. 10 and all provincial exams, replacing it all with meaningless assessments in Gr, 4, 7 and 12. All it tells us is that parents don’t know that something is wrong until it’s way too late. No grades means exams are bad, and school districts have now cancelled exam prep week for teachers, and are being pressured to ditch them entirely. It’s all on the teacher to determine how a student is doing, but teacher bias has NEVER been mentioned. Since this rolled out, student achievement has plummeted, and the percentage of the lowest performing students has skyrocketed. Grades are an important tool in any educational system for ALL children. It’s foolhardy to promote otherwise.
I like that you argue the opposite of the author. I hope the author replies. I’ve seen, as a substitute teacher in Oregon in the US, that Covid sort of validates your reasoning. Many students fell way behind and lost the drive to learn during the school lockouts. The schools, which needed passing grades to move students up and make room for more, gave them passing grades no matter their performance, and now many are struggling to keep up, especially in high school.
I believe much of these problems can be traced to the workload of the teachers, especially in post-secondary schools, but even in primary and secondary schools. In order to balance their lives, teachers and professors will try to assess students with the least amount of effort and especially time that gets the job done. I know that was the case when I taught chemistry at the community college level for a term. With only 7 hours class time (and hence pay), I spent over 60 hours a week dealing mostly with assessment and preparation. It’s just not possible to give the necessary time to assessment unless you are salaried and tenured and already have experience with your subject. As a substitute teacher for pre-K to 12, I don’t have to deal with assessment, and teaching is awesome.
I see a compromise approach such as the author outlines as the best path here.
As for your complaint of eliteness, I agree that in the real world, at least through the community college level, school is often just a baby-sitting exercise, where real learning is a privilege. So many kids have been pretty much abandoned by their parents because of economic pressures and poor parenting that schools are unable to focus on learning. With the overall system in which public schools operate, combined with this child care reality, schools are left to focus mainly on keeping students safe, nourished and calm. Not optimum indeed!
Thanks for your comment, Bob, and for sharing your experience.
You are right that effective assessment is a lot of work! What was successful in my experience as a homeschooler was that I got plenty of individual attention and feedback. One of the best things we can do for students is to try and figure out how we can best leverage our resources to provide this type of experience for students. Especially in the early elementary years, I'm convinced that there are few things more important than one-on-one attention for each student.
Hi Tara, thanks for your comments. To be clear, I'm not suggesting that we completely eliminate grades, and certainly not that we eliminate all assessment. I still use grades in all my classes. It is critical that students get feedback on their work and suggestions on how to continue to grow.
What I *am* suggesting is that we take a critical eye toward how grades might be hindering learning. My experience as a kid helped me to develop a robust love of learning for its own sake before being introduced to the competitive ecosystem of grades and standardized tests. The point is not that we should never have grades or standardized tests. I'm not sure that I'd be where I am today without standardized tests as they provided external validation of skills I learned when I was homeschooled! But we do need to be thoughtful about how we use them and consider the unintended consequences they might be having on students and their learning if we make them too much of the focus.
As I point out at the end of the piece in referencing Goodhart's Law, when a measure becomes an outcome, it no longer remains an effective measure. This happens often with grades. The test is supposed to be an independent measure of learning, but this fails when performing well on the test becomes *the* goal.
My experience growing up and my goal in my own teaching is very different than the situation you are seeing in the schools around you in British Columbia. By deemphasizing grades I give *more* direct and actionable feedback to students than if I were only to give them grades on assignments. Assessment and feedback is critical to learning and we must give our students plenty of it. I just don't think that a letter grade at the end of a course is an effective measure of what students have learned.
If you're curious to learn more about how I'm doing this in my classes, I'd encourage you to check out a few other posts I've written about it.
I understand all of what you are saying and my comments stand firm. What you, as a well educated teacher imagine, is a far cry from what the reality is when rolling this out across an entire system. I am boots on the ground, living this nightmare in real time. We got rid of grades over many years, following the same blueprint of „better learning“ which you have outlined here. These ideas are not new, they’ve been around forever, yet when these ideas have been implemented systemwide, they have failed. Every single time. Because when reimagining new and groovy ways to replace time worn effective methods to measure student achievement, all that is accomplished is a watering down of standards.
If you have proof of successful outcomes systemwide of these methods you promote, which illustrate better student achievement, I'd be happy to review it. Meanwhile, the decline in student achievement our kids have experienced in such a short period of time is staggering. https://www.fraserinstitute.org/studies/collapse-of-student-testing-in-bc-high-schools. Most kids require really clear direct explicit instruction with very clear expectations to indicate where improvement is required. Your grown up mind may believe all that you state, but the evidence of what kids need, and want, and how they view objective measures, is a much different reality. Despite all that has been tried, the single best source for that indicator, is letter grades and regular standardized measures. Along with regular assessment. Other measures such as group projects, essays and other misc. subjective measures, pale in comparison. Overwhelming empirical data has demonstrated that of all kids, those that are disadvantaged benefit the most from these measures, and isn’t this what we should be striving for?
Active parental engagement and guidance appears to be a key underlying factor for student success, regardless of the method of assessment. Suggesting that this behaviour is the exclusive preserve of a so-called 'privileged class' is a baffling statement.
Welcome to public school in 2024. This should not be a surprise, given that media headlines today suggest owning a home and having a 2 parent family is a privilege also. Back in the day it was a worthy goal we strived for, and now we are chastised for it. This is also baffling. But back to school. The classroom is the one area where merit, and not class, race, or gender determines how a child succeeds. And part of this depends on the highly successful education system of which letter grades are an integral component. If there is a more equitable system that has been proven to be more successful to measure student achievement, let’s hear about it. But pontificating about its removal based one one‘s singular experience, is foolhardy. And dangerous.
As a student who felt pressured by my family to achieve A’s as the ultimate goal or I’d be viewed as a failure or disappointment I sadly would cheat in subjects I was challenged by because I didn’t want to upset my parents. On the other hand I was also rewarded for every A I got and received praise from them, which I craved, so getting an A was a way to guarantee the affection I was otherwise lacking. I wanted to learn but the environment or method of teaching in these traditional classes weren’t set up for the individual attention I needed if I couldn’t grasp a concept or idea. I do remember the one class I had (which was a trade subject) we received a “grade” based on our efforts. I thrived in that class because I felt free to make mistakes and ask questions, while learning at my own pace. I also felt taking a test wasn’t also a true indication of me knowing a subject well. I could always make an educated guess by ruling out the obvious choices that weren’t correct or just chance it and circle an answer. I was more of a hands on learner and found if I could apply what I learned to a real life scenario successfully I had truly understood the subject. That style of teaching also helped the information stick more in my brain if I could relate it to an experience. So many of my memories in public school felt like the only reason to “learn” was for the sake of performing well on our next test. It was more memorization I suppose than actual learning. Another memory I have of letting the pressure of grades get the best of me was when I signed up to take an upholstery class. it was one subject I had absolutely zero experience in and didn’t know anyone personally who could teach me. I wanted to learn how to sew since it did not come naturally to me but knew it could be a useful skill. Since we couldn’t move on to the next composition until we passed the current task I would have someone in class more skilled sew my projects for me because I was so behind and really struggling. From a grade’s point of view I was definitely failing, I just couldn’t grasp the concept at the pace they were moving. So because I didn’t want my parents to felt like they wasted their money on me I cheated again and missed out on learning to sew. Now as an adult it’s so freeing to learn subjects that are interesting to me, at my own speed and in the manner that helps me best retain the information. Even shadowing someone and asking questions has helped me learn in a much shorter timeframe than I would have in the public school setting because there’s no pressure to get an A. The poor experience I had with grades, along with other reasons, is a big motivation for me to provide a different opportunity for my child, which is why I plan to homeschool one day.
As a part of a team that started a new high school in Philly upon principles of grading less (I agree with you on the fact that some measures are important as determinants of standards) I wholeheartedly agree with the sentiments here. we engaged in, maybe the opposite story where we received students who had been graded all their lives, and we wanted to offer fewer grades and more narratives. Practically speaking, going from a grading mindset to a narrative/feedback mindset was a huge challenge the school is still reconciling.
Thanks Jane. I can imagine that the practical challenges are substantial. Are there any high level takeaways or lessons learned from that process of moving to more narrative evaluations that you might be able to share for folks (like me!) who are interested in charting a similar path?
I wrote about some of the ways we might reconceptualize this idea of grading with an eye to learning and to equity here a few years ago: https://schoolofthought.substack.com/p/gradeless-or-grade-less. The post includes some lessons learned. I would say that my own feeling is that grading less, not going gradeless, feels like the optimal balance. Our evaluations can serve as windows to further engaged, equitable and authentic learning for all, and should not instead be de-motivating, de-energizing, curiosity-killing markings (like they could have been for you) that indicate privilege, resources or mark the “completion” of learning.
I grew up in a public school setting that encouraged the rat race of grades and rewarded all A’s students with gold cards that granted them all sorts of privileges, e.g. off-campus lunches, reduced ticket prices at the movie theater, ice cream socials, etc… It was an exclusive and rather toxic environment that was completely taken for granted.
I have since worked as a teacher at an independent K-12 school that in lieu of grades uses narrative assessment and a metric of 5 C’s (character, creativity, critical thinking, collaboration, and communication) and I’ve been astounded at how effective this model can be in reducing the air of competition and helping students learn for learning’s sake. Particularly with the collaboration metric, we see students recognizing the value of others’ ideas and input in reaching a goal. I would love to see this method adopted more throughout schools, as it would undoubtedly help to curb the hyper-individualist mindset that keeps partitioning us off from one another.
Thanks for sharing your reflections, Ginny. I like the 5 C framework you present here. What I like most is that they are specific and communicate to students the types of qualities we want them to develop.
I’m curious to hear more about how the assessments are communicated to students. Are they given some sort of written feedback on those five criteria in addition to a written narrative assessment? Or are those embedded within the narrative? Thinking about how to adapt this to my context.
Josh - teachers write quarterly narrative conference reports touching on the 5 Cs as reflected in whatever curriculum was covered. Students and parents attend a conference with the teacher to discuss it in detail.
High school students participate in writing the reports, giving assessments of their own work and the 5 Cs.
Thanks for sharing, Ginny. Sounds like a great structure. I especially like how high school students participate in evaluating their own work too.
Love the 5 Cs!!!
Some late-night rambling and incomplete thoughts -
C- and D-students, and even B-students, haven’t experienced deeply, or even enough, of what success feels like.
Conversely, A-students are missing the innovative power of failing.
Is there anything more devastating than being labeled a [Letter-grade]-student? Even, or especially, in casual or overheard conversation?
Does effort need to equal identity?
Thanks Daniel. You’re right on the money here. We often focus on how grades often demoralize students who fall lower on the distribution, but the fact that we use the underlying frame of a distribution betrays something about what we are trying to do with grades. The way the system is set up is not good for either the lower or higher performing students. It can be demoralizing for students who are struggling to know that they are lagging behind their classmates and also deceiving or demotivating for high-performing students who may have a false sense of achievement and feel that they have mastered a certain field when there is always more to learn. Of course, there are some objective aspects that grades are correlated to under the hood, but the question is whether those things are what is most important AND if traditional grades accurately communicate those intentions to students.
I think that the narrative evaluation of each student, regardless of the specific form it takes, is critical in helping to add color to the picture that traditional grades paint. Without those comments, we run the risk of diminishing the humanity of our students.
I think you’ve successfully lit the fire under me for next week’s post :)
The problem gets compounded when schools encourage mediocrity by suggesting that special education students focus on a passing grade as opposed to understanding the material or mastering concepts/processes.
I was homeschooled for my entire education and we never did grades. I think receiving constructive criticism and well-earned praise would mean more to most students than an arbitrary letter (who's to say the teacher doesn't give the kid a low grade because they're having a bad day?). That's what makes homeschooling so much better: the parent can alter the speed of their kid's learning so they never have to feel like they're stupid for not being at the same level as the other kids. Probably a lot of kids think they're stupid because they were never good at taking tests.
On another note, your doughnuts look great!
Totally agree, Kailani. Glad to hear your experience with homeschooling was so positive and formative as well.
Thanks for your note on the doughnuts too! They were very good and much easier to make than I expected!
Ah, I feel this. I went to a hippy Montessori school through 8th grade and didn't have grades until high school, which I truly believe helped me develop a significantly deeper love of learning. There were minimums, but no maximums. It also allowed me to jump into arguably one of the most competitive high schools in the country (not a humble-brag) without the added pressure of feeling like A's were the "one true goal". Well rounded self-directed learning turns out has served me well!
I'm not a throw out all grades advocate, but things like self-review and tying grades back to your own personal growth are so important.
Thanks for sharing your experience, Sam. Feels like your early experiences with grades helped to ground you in a way that was helpful in carrying you through, even when you left for a more traditional school setting.
My son attended a “free school” from grades K-3 that was nonetheless part of a public school district. No grades really (though they were officially assigned), written assessments and combined age classrooms. It was hectic, but I liked it as a parent who volunteered a lot there. It is well documented that students from these types of schools (and homeschoolers) tend to do well in regular high school and college. These schools, as with homeschooling, require much more work from parents, and I think that is the key to their success (or should I say to the students’ success).
The other thing about this school was that it stressed experiential learning. This is a key to success as well, I believe. My teaching experience tells me that the more the kids can get their hands on things and move around, the better they perform and the happier they are. With video games and other sedentary activities so prevalent in their lives, the more they can touch and move in class, the better.
And finally, I agree that differential teaching and assessment can help with learning. The mixed-age class model has problems, but is generally good if the level of readiness is reasonably similar.
Great post, and I will subscribe to see more!
Parental involvement and experiential learning are both very valuable. We all need people who believe in us and this is especially important for kids, whether it comes from their parents or other adults in their life.
On your note about the power of experiential learning: I credit much of the success of our engineering program at Harvey Mudd to our focus on experiential learning throughout the curriculum. Students learn better AND it's more fun!
Thanks for subscribing!
Thank you. I attended the University Elementary School in Iowa City Iowa in the 1950s. No grades until high school. I learned what education was and was not. My daughter attended Sarah Lawrence.
Very interesting, thanks for sharing Anna. Curious to hear more about your daughter's experience at Sarah Lawrence! What were her takeaways and reflections?
This is a concept that I’ve espoused most of my educational life and beyond. Even in grad school, I saw classmates getting wrought up about their grades and losing sight of their actual knowledge and skill in applying it. I read about a middle school using multiple intelligences to identify some strengths and weaknesses; and then utilizing this to give positive feedback to everyone for their contributions to project learning. The individual was also expected to strengthen in their weak areas as well. Through the group-learning project, many academic areas were covered, including math, writing, history etc. and it became much more meaningful through context. As an OT (and through many other experiences and learning), I have become aware of the role of context and meaning in memory. If we want students to retain information, then it must have context and meaning to them. We also need to value problem-solving skills and reasoning as well as the ability to question and analyze information. So many people seem to be wholly lacking in the ability to listen to and read information such as scientific studies and understand how to approach and dissect it; including its limitations, validity and biases. Additionally, having conducted numerous cognitive and functional assessments, it is important to understand that a score or grade is only part of a larger picture and may be harmful and relatively meaningless without further analysis and inquiry.
Thanks Michele, I really appreciate you calling out the need for developing skills to critically analyze and dissect information. This feels like it will be increasingly important in our current age of the LLM.
I’m retired from the education game now but I still find the topic of student evaluation to be very interesting. We were expected to teach to a clearly defined set of outcomes with standardized testing done a various grade levels. In many instances the results were used to evaluate teachers. The tightly timed courses allowed little opportunity for deeper levels of understanding or application. As a result, creative teachers were stifled and curious students were left with a sense of ‘so what’! In that system the myth was that evaluation guided learning. In theory yes- in practical application the opposite was true.
Great article!
Thanks, Gerry. Assessment is tricky in deed but there's a lot of room for innovation. My hope is that by thinking a bit more creatively about how we assess student work, we can help cultivate a love for learning for students while also helping them to build the types of skills that we deem important and that standardized tests attempt to measure. One big problem, as you note, is that as soon as we put too much focus on performing well on the test that balance becomes hard to maintain.
So good to read a thoughtful and balanced reflection on what's really important.
Thanks, Steve!
You may also enjoy this previous post from a few weeks ago: https://joshbrake.substack.com/p/what-to-teach-young-people
All this fuss about grades is primarily parent not student driven. All my grade cards had ‘could do better’ because studying was just one of the things I did. Most teenagers have sex, friends, fun, sports, and studying as priorities, roughly in that order. There are a lot worse things than low grades; bullying for one! The idea that grades = performance is ridiculous to students; we all know where we stand in a class intellectually without grades. For most, your ability to build a friends network is more important than grades and in the long run more valuable. Think emotional intelligence! The only negative impact of low (not ‘poor’!) grades I remember for us was having to ‘report’ to our parents.
It's interesting that you bring up the different dynamics between parents and students. This feels especially true to me for younger students, but by the time they get to college I also see a lot of this drive to perform in students as well.
Those early years have a lot of power to help students develop a healthy and balanced view of what life is about and understand that academics are a part, and only a part, of a flourishing life.
From a homeschool mom emeritus: if you had not performed well in those standardized tests, your mom might have shifted to daily or weekly grading so that you could have improved to match the external standard (which itself is a type of "grade" of the homeschool mom).
AP teachers know they need to deal out grades in detail so that their students will rise to success on the external test. In general high school home schoolers need to objectively frame their work so that their transcript is not just Mommy grades.
But grade inflation in schools lays then open to a similar charge. And even grade inflation in college. It's always the external assessment that validates.
Thanks for the comment. It's not that the measures of objective performance in certain subjects weren't always there. It was just that those grades were communicated to me in a way that helped me develop a healthy relationship with grades and not become overly focused on the number or letter. Agree that the external validation is helpful and was valuable to benchmark my learning.
Where I think we get into trouble is when we put to much focus on the grade as *the* thing we're shooting for.
I needed this as I’m in my second year of teaching public school. Lots of good information sir!
Thanks Doug. All the best to you in your teaching!
Another brilliant take from a brilliant teacher. Your students are lucky to have you. Thank you, from a fellow iconoclastic teacher and a similarly-ruined perennial autodidact.
Thanks Kelly, I appreciate your kind words!
This commentary is completely naive on so many levels. This type of Utopia serves only the privileged class, who have an endless source of resources that perpetually enable them to excel with parental guidance and support, while those without this, fall even further behind. This system being imagined, is the worst available. It creates an even larger equity gap, and refutes all empirical data that has determined that grades are still the best indicator of student achievement than any other measure. That, along with regular quizzes, provincial/state exams, and regular standardized assessment. I live in British Columbia, Canada where we got rid of grades until Gr. 10 and all provincial exams, replacing it all with meaningless assessments in Gr, 4, 7 and 12. All it tells us is that parents don’t know that something is wrong until it’s way too late. No grades means exams are bad, and school districts have now cancelled exam prep week for teachers, and are being pressured to ditch them entirely. It’s all on the teacher to determine how a student is doing, but teacher bias has NEVER been mentioned. Since this rolled out, student achievement has plummeted, and the percentage of the lowest performing students has skyrocketed. Grades are an important tool in any educational system for ALL children. It’s foolhardy to promote otherwise.
I like that you argue the opposite of the author. I hope the author replies. I’ve seen, as a substitute teacher in Oregon in the US, that Covid sort of validates your reasoning. Many students fell way behind and lost the drive to learn during the school lockouts. The schools, which needed passing grades to move students up and make room for more, gave them passing grades no matter their performance, and now many are struggling to keep up, especially in high school.
I believe much of these problems can be traced to the workload of the teachers, especially in post-secondary schools, but even in primary and secondary schools. In order to balance their lives, teachers and professors will try to assess students with the least amount of effort and especially time that gets the job done. I know that was the case when I taught chemistry at the community college level for a term. With only 7 hours class time (and hence pay), I spent over 60 hours a week dealing mostly with assessment and preparation. It’s just not possible to give the necessary time to assessment unless you are salaried and tenured and already have experience with your subject. As a substitute teacher for pre-K to 12, I don’t have to deal with assessment, and teaching is awesome.
I see a compromise approach such as the author outlines as the best path here.
As for your complaint of eliteness, I agree that in the real world, at least through the community college level, school is often just a baby-sitting exercise, where real learning is a privilege. So many kids have been pretty much abandoned by their parents because of economic pressures and poor parenting that schools are unable to focus on learning. With the overall system in which public schools operate, combined with this child care reality, schools are left to focus mainly on keeping students safe, nourished and calm. Not optimum indeed!
Thanks for your comment, Bob, and for sharing your experience.
You are right that effective assessment is a lot of work! What was successful in my experience as a homeschooler was that I got plenty of individual attention and feedback. One of the best things we can do for students is to try and figure out how we can best leverage our resources to provide this type of experience for students. Especially in the early elementary years, I'm convinced that there are few things more important than one-on-one attention for each student.
Hi Tara, thanks for your comments. To be clear, I'm not suggesting that we completely eliminate grades, and certainly not that we eliminate all assessment. I still use grades in all my classes. It is critical that students get feedback on their work and suggestions on how to continue to grow.
What I *am* suggesting is that we take a critical eye toward how grades might be hindering learning. My experience as a kid helped me to develop a robust love of learning for its own sake before being introduced to the competitive ecosystem of grades and standardized tests. The point is not that we should never have grades or standardized tests. I'm not sure that I'd be where I am today without standardized tests as they provided external validation of skills I learned when I was homeschooled! But we do need to be thoughtful about how we use them and consider the unintended consequences they might be having on students and their learning if we make them too much of the focus.
As I point out at the end of the piece in referencing Goodhart's Law, when a measure becomes an outcome, it no longer remains an effective measure. This happens often with grades. The test is supposed to be an independent measure of learning, but this fails when performing well on the test becomes *the* goal.
My experience growing up and my goal in my own teaching is very different than the situation you are seeing in the schools around you in British Columbia. By deemphasizing grades I give *more* direct and actionable feedback to students than if I were only to give them grades on assignments. Assessment and feedback is critical to learning and we must give our students plenty of it. I just don't think that a letter grade at the end of a course is an effective measure of what students have learned.
If you're curious to learn more about how I'm doing this in my classes, I'd encourage you to check out a few other posts I've written about it.
https://joshbrake.substack.com/p/alternative-grading-cultivates-intrinsically
https://gradingforgrowth.com/p/stop-start-continue-for-alternative
I understand all of what you are saying and my comments stand firm. What you, as a well educated teacher imagine, is a far cry from what the reality is when rolling this out across an entire system. I am boots on the ground, living this nightmare in real time. We got rid of grades over many years, following the same blueprint of „better learning“ which you have outlined here. These ideas are not new, they’ve been around forever, yet when these ideas have been implemented systemwide, they have failed. Every single time. Because when reimagining new and groovy ways to replace time worn effective methods to measure student achievement, all that is accomplished is a watering down of standards.
If you have proof of successful outcomes systemwide of these methods you promote, which illustrate better student achievement, I'd be happy to review it. Meanwhile, the decline in student achievement our kids have experienced in such a short period of time is staggering. https://www.fraserinstitute.org/studies/collapse-of-student-testing-in-bc-high-schools. Most kids require really clear direct explicit instruction with very clear expectations to indicate where improvement is required. Your grown up mind may believe all that you state, but the evidence of what kids need, and want, and how they view objective measures, is a much different reality. Despite all that has been tried, the single best source for that indicator, is letter grades and regular standardized measures. Along with regular assessment. Other measures such as group projects, essays and other misc. subjective measures, pale in comparison. Overwhelming empirical data has demonstrated that of all kids, those that are disadvantaged benefit the most from these measures, and isn’t this what we should be striving for?
Active parental engagement and guidance appears to be a key underlying factor for student success, regardless of the method of assessment. Suggesting that this behaviour is the exclusive preserve of a so-called 'privileged class' is a baffling statement.
Welcome to public school in 2024. This should not be a surprise, given that media headlines today suggest owning a home and having a 2 parent family is a privilege also. Back in the day it was a worthy goal we strived for, and now we are chastised for it. This is also baffling. But back to school. The classroom is the one area where merit, and not class, race, or gender determines how a child succeeds. And part of this depends on the highly successful education system of which letter grades are an integral component. If there is a more equitable system that has been proven to be more successful to measure student achievement, let’s hear about it. But pontificating about its removal based one one‘s singular experience, is foolhardy. And dangerous.
As a student who felt pressured by my family to achieve A’s as the ultimate goal or I’d be viewed as a failure or disappointment I sadly would cheat in subjects I was challenged by because I didn’t want to upset my parents. On the other hand I was also rewarded for every A I got and received praise from them, which I craved, so getting an A was a way to guarantee the affection I was otherwise lacking. I wanted to learn but the environment or method of teaching in these traditional classes weren’t set up for the individual attention I needed if I couldn’t grasp a concept or idea. I do remember the one class I had (which was a trade subject) we received a “grade” based on our efforts. I thrived in that class because I felt free to make mistakes and ask questions, while learning at my own pace. I also felt taking a test wasn’t also a true indication of me knowing a subject well. I could always make an educated guess by ruling out the obvious choices that weren’t correct or just chance it and circle an answer. I was more of a hands on learner and found if I could apply what I learned to a real life scenario successfully I had truly understood the subject. That style of teaching also helped the information stick more in my brain if I could relate it to an experience. So many of my memories in public school felt like the only reason to “learn” was for the sake of performing well on our next test. It was more memorization I suppose than actual learning. Another memory I have of letting the pressure of grades get the best of me was when I signed up to take an upholstery class. it was one subject I had absolutely zero experience in and didn’t know anyone personally who could teach me. I wanted to learn how to sew since it did not come naturally to me but knew it could be a useful skill. Since we couldn’t move on to the next composition until we passed the current task I would have someone in class more skilled sew my projects for me because I was so behind and really struggling. From a grade’s point of view I was definitely failing, I just couldn’t grasp the concept at the pace they were moving. So because I didn’t want my parents to felt like they wasted their money on me I cheated again and missed out on learning to sew. Now as an adult it’s so freeing to learn subjects that are interesting to me, at my own speed and in the manner that helps me best retain the information. Even shadowing someone and asking questions has helped me learn in a much shorter timeframe than I would have in the public school setting because there’s no pressure to get an A. The poor experience I had with grades, along with other reasons, is a big motivation for me to provide a different opportunity for my child, which is why I plan to homeschool one day.
As a part of a team that started a new high school in Philly upon principles of grading less (I agree with you on the fact that some measures are important as determinants of standards) I wholeheartedly agree with the sentiments here. we engaged in, maybe the opposite story where we received students who had been graded all their lives, and we wanted to offer fewer grades and more narratives. Practically speaking, going from a grading mindset to a narrative/feedback mindset was a huge challenge the school is still reconciling.
Thanks Jane. I can imagine that the practical challenges are substantial. Are there any high level takeaways or lessons learned from that process of moving to more narrative evaluations that you might be able to share for folks (like me!) who are interested in charting a similar path?
I wrote about some of the ways we might reconceptualize this idea of grading with an eye to learning and to equity here a few years ago: https://schoolofthought.substack.com/p/gradeless-or-grade-less. The post includes some lessons learned. I would say that my own feeling is that grading less, not going gradeless, feels like the optimal balance. Our evaluations can serve as windows to further engaged, equitable and authentic learning for all, and should not instead be de-motivating, de-energizing, curiosity-killing markings (like they could have been for you) that indicate privilege, resources or mark the “completion” of learning.