Going Gradeless Five Years In -- Part 3
Last week I discussed the second most impactful change I’ve made in my five year journey of revising my grading practices, which was when I opened up discussions about grades—the type that normally just happen among teachers—to students too.
Today I want to talk about the most impactful change I’ve ever implemented to help reframe and defang grades in my classroom: Making them malleable.
I used to have a policy that grades were fixed. Once rendered, a score was etched in stone barring extenuating circumstances. At the time I told myself that this policy was to teach responsibility, but looking back now, I think it was more a matter of logistics than pedagogy. Keeping up with student papers a single time was already far too taxing. There simply wasn’t time to add looking at papers again.
As the years went on though, I began to realize that there were some major advantages to allowing students to revise and redo work, including the following:
It lowers the stress because there is always an option to do better if you put in the work.
It acts as a potent de-motivator for many of the negative behaviors that come with grades (plagiarism, lack of creativity, etc.).
Plus if they do more, they learn more, and isn’t that the core goal we all have?
And yet I struggled with how to implement optional revisions without increasing my workload. It wasn’t until I began to have students meaningfully self-assess that I found my answer for how I could allow for revision without piling on extra stacks of papers that I didn’t have time for. My students can now revise anything for a higher grade, but when they do, they must fill out the form below where they document what they did and self-assess.
This form makes regrading a relative breeze because students do all the work. They explain what they did and what grade they think makes sense now. All I have to do is cross-reference their self-assessment with their revision history (they are required to keep it in the same Google Doc.) and my previous understanding of the work, and within a minute or less I can get a new grade—and they can get more learning and less stress.
The other way that my grades are malleable is that at the quarter and the semester my students can now argue for a different grade than the one in the gradebook. This is an idea I got from Point-Less by Sarah Zerwin. The mechanism is similar to the revised grade: They must offer an explanation and a proposal for a new grade in a short conference with me. Or in other words, they must offer a compelling claim, evidence, and reasoning, which is a pretty good measure in itself of how well they've learned the material.
I have found that the discussions of grades that I wrote about last week are a key prerequisite for offering this. It is far easier for students to make reasonable, compelling cases when the they have conversed about what equals success in the class beforehand.
And to get a new grade, a student must make a reasonable, compelling case—one that is strong enough that it can also be made to administrators or parents/guardians/caretakers, if questioned.
In the end, only a handful of students generally take me up on a new quarter/semester grade, but when they do, I find it is often deeply empowering and fairer because there are lots of very legitimate reasons why our quarter/semester grades might not capture the full story. And for the rest of the students who never utilize it, the mere existence of the option to argue for a different grade if something goes terribly wrong can act as a potent mitigator of the stress and damage grades can cause.
This is my final of three posts on grades and assessment, and in my first one, I ended with a call for sharing what you do concerning grades. How do you make grades/assessment more accurate and less (or ideally even not) harmful?
At the time, not a lot jumped at the offer but in hindsight that makes a lot of sense. Not only was it the first week of school for many, but grades are tough to talk about and the discussion around them often grows heated because they are a proxy for a larger conversation about what we value and how we think education should be approached. And while this can make conversations messy, it is also why conversations are so necessary. When it comes to grades, we all carry massive blinders because of how close grades and assessment are to the beating heart of why we became teachers in the first place.
So if you are up for it, I’d love to hear what you have done in your own grading (or ungrading journey) and what you do to make grades more accurate, less harmful, clearer, and ultimately better. As I often say to my students, everyone has something to teach us if we listen closely enough, so, if you have a moment and feel inclined, definitely join the conversation in the comments below.
Either way, thanks for staying with me through this conversation and thanks as always for reading!
Yours in teaching,
Matt
An Important Reminder!
The fall cohort of my Better, Faster Feedback course (and the 50% discount; use the code SUBSCRIBER) closes on September 15th. The core goal of the course is to pay back the investment with significant interest by helping you to reclaim those nights and weekends while also helping you to do better work with the feedback you still provide.
Also, if you are a department, school, or curriculum leader, I have bulk discounts for larger groups that would like to make feedback a focal point. Contact me here to discuss it, and, if you are doing it on your own, look to the post from last week about ways to find the money to get the course paid for.
Hope to see you there!