Grading for Equity: Reflection Questions (Ch 2)

As part of a summer professional reading group, some colleagues and I elected to read Grading for Equity, by Joe Feldman. It's a big topic, so I wanted an excuse to do some reflective writing on it, so I can try to understand it more deeply. Fortunately, Feldman wrote some "Questions to Consider" at the end of each chapter, and so I hope to use those to guide regular reflections.

Chapter 2: A Brief History of Grading

Initial Reactions. It definitely feels like most teachers I run into these days are all pretty understanding of the ways that schools have been slow to change, despite society changing at a breakneck pace. Industrial Revolution, preparing factory workers, and so on. But as society changes, our schools should change to fit what society needs them to be.  Like, yes, they should be a reflection of the wants and needs of the hosting community. But this makes it seems like schools kind of...lag...behind society's demands, responding, but ultimately reactionary.

But I also think there is a ton of opportunity for them to be seen as "laboratories."To a certain extent, schools should be able to exist in a bubble that is at least partly independent of society. A sacred space where people (both children and adults) are invited, encouraged, and supported in really taking big risks, and trying out radical ideas and practices, in the name of fostering innovation, insight, and joy. In this way, schools can be the sector of society partly responsible for leading societal progress, instead of lagging behind.

On Dewey. This chapter really presented two theories of development for why schools in the U.S. developed in the way they did. Of course, there was the Industrial Revolution motivating a factory model of education. But he also talked about the role that John Dewey played in articulating a different vision. I won't say that Dewey was the only person at that time advancing a philosophy of education at the societal level, but he was the only one I know of that the white-supremacist capitalist cisheteropatriarchy would platform at that time.

Dewey's idea that schools were essentially places for young people to learn how to participate in democracy was noble in a way that the factory model wasn't. So people loved it. But creating a school system that reflects those values would not be idea for Industry (read, Capitalism and white supremacy). So Feldman talked about how leaders would present that noble vision superficially, use it to build support, but then still design a school that serviced Industry over all--a classic "bait-and-switch." And they're still doing that today.

Leaders love to say that "kids are the future," but you know what would happen if we actually, honestly, and vigorously supported making schools the true "incubators of democracy" that Dewey was envisioning? With true democracy flourishing, white supremacy, capitalism, the cisheteropatriacrchy, and all the other oppressive backbones of American society would would crumble...because it doesn't take much for the vast majority of people to see and feel that these institutions are terrible.

So in defense of itself, schools are throttled back. Resources are constrained. Visioning is only honored at the "top," where the sociopolitical leadership can ensure that the vision for what schools can be never far exceeds what our oppressors are comfortable with. Grades (and associated statistics), are the "economy" of schools, and by placing top-down pressures on how that economy functions, the leaders of industry and government (at all levels) have us by the throat.

Questions to Consider

1) How do schools in the first half of the twenty-first century--their design, their purpose, their student--compare to schools in the first half of the twentieth century?

• This is a pretty boring question, so I won't say too much? (Sorry, lol.) But the biggest thing I'm thinking of is how we are still weirdly reverent of what "industry" says what young people should be doing in school. While I kind of appreciate the spirit of "21st Century Skills," I think there are more important reasons than "the job market" for young people to learn how to be "problem solvers" and "communicators." I wonder if we surveyed all the *real* community leaders (not just capitalists), the organizers, revolutionaries...what would they say our young people need to learn?

2) How do you see the ideas and beliefs of the early twentieth century manifesting themselves through your school's communications, curriculum, instruction, policies, and grading?

• I am so very grateful that my school is working to be competency-based in their grading. I say "working to be" because it's still a pretty young school, trying to be innovative in a context that makes it tough. Our district has nowhere near enough capacity to give us everything we need to execute this vision of being "competency-based" to the extent that it deserves. And at the end of the year, we still have to submit something that looks like a traditional 0-100 grade, we still have to play the game of "credits" and "graduation requirements," all of which are mechanisms that make it hard for us to be truly radical.
• I'm still new to my school (this will be my 2nd year), so I can't speak too much about the school as a whole. But I can see a lot of ways that my own grading adheres to the oppressive factory model. Much of my grades are largely a function of student "productivity" and "compliance." There are a lot of abstract numerical ratings, and averages. Students put the work and participation they produce into some "black box" that is me, my assessment process, and my school/district's grading system, and out comes their payment in the form of a numerical grade.

Grading for Equity: Reflection Questions (Ch 1)

As part of a summer professional reading group, some colleagues and I elected to read Grading for Equity, by Joe Feldman. It's a big topic, so I wanted an excuse to do some reflective writing on it, so I can try to understand it more deeply. Fortunately, Feldman wrote some "Questions to Consider" at the end of each chapter, and so I hope to use those to guide regular reflections.

Chapter 1: What Makes Grading so Difficult to Talk About?

Initial Reactions. I identified with Feldman's explanation of why grading is difficult to talk about. I've been privileged in my teaching experience, that my teacher training and mentor gave me a lot of important ideas and perspectives on teaching. I'm excited to learn more, for sure.

I currently teach at a school that uses "competency-based grades," though there are certainly caveats. Competency-based grading is still pretty unfamiliar to me, and I'm still trying to get the hang of it, and I think many teachers at my school would agree. Even as a whole school staff, we are still constantly trying to figure out what it even means. Moreover, of course we have to ultimately map our understanding of "grades" to the traditional A-F scale that our district requires of us. Which waters things down a bit.

One fear I have is my own tendency to identify some of what I'm already doing in the book, and then write off the whole book, like, "Oh, I already do that, I got it." This is 100% a combination of my own professional arrogance and insecurity, and something I need to constantly watch out for. (Feldman talks a little about this in the first chapter, which I appreciated.) Also, just because I'm lucky to work in a school that already does competency-based grading (which I assume/believe is generally "more equitable"), that doesn't mean that me and my school are done with the work.

Questions to Consider

1) What are some deep beliefs you have about teenagers? What motivates and demotivates them? Are they more concerned with learning or their grade?

• I believe that all teenagers just want to be successful, respected, and included. Grading connects to all those drives, especially the first. How teachers define grades, and how their family and community empower those definitions, is not a universal thing. So how we define our grades matters.
• I think grades are motivating to the extent that students believe they are actually within their own locus of control. If grades seem random, mysterious, and not correlated with their lived experiences, students may come to understand grades as arbitrary. If grades are arbitrary, why should I bend over backwards trying to change them?
• We have to *teach* people to care about grades. The first time a baby walks, we don't say, "That's A+ work right there!" But I think all people are born with a drive to discover, learn, and consume knowledge. Over the course of our education, do some of us learn to grades over learning? Absolutely. But it is certainly a most unnatural state.

2) What is your vision for grading? What do you wish grading could be fore students, particularly for the most vulnerable populations? What do you wish grading could be for you? In which ways do current grading practices meet those expectations, and in which ways do they not?

• The courses where I have felt the most respected as a learner, we weren't being graded at all, or as an afterthought at most. I had one class I took in the summer before my junior year of college. The whole grade for the course was based on our final paper. And at the end, when I was writing that paper, I didn't try to write it in such a way as to maximize my grade. I just wanted to write a really good paper, because I had done a lot of work that summer, and wanted to crystallize it in a meaningful, good way. I didn't think about grades at any point in that course, except when I got my final grade back at the end.
• I think we have a fixed amount of ourselves to dedicate to a course, and the more of that is filled with "worrying about grades", the less is filled with everything else (namely, learning). And the older I get, the more disrespected I feel by grades. If I walked into a grad class, and they were talking about % weights for exams vs. discussions vs. homework...sorry, but I already don't like that class. But when I was a younger student, I didn't really mind. I didn't mind because I understood that it was non-negotiable. I just figured out whatever I had to do, to do as well as I needed to (or could).
• This is all to say, I'm not totally convinced that grades are necessary, at least in the traditional sense. Heck, I'm not even sure they're necessary in the neo-traditional sense (I'm thinking "standards-based grading" or "competency-based grading"). I know there are communities of K12 educators that have basically done away with "grading." If I was constructing a totally new society, a totally new school, totally from scratch...I don't think I'd include "grades"? So from that perspective, I think my current vision for grading comes from a place of "trying to make the best of an already oppressive practice."
• (more in question 5)

3) What brings you do this book? What are your goals for reading it? How will the way you read it help or hinder you from realizing those goals?

• This book was on a short list of recommended books from my colleagues. A few colleagues and I are reading the book over the summer, and using to to drive a "personal learning community" for some portion of time in the coming school year. I chose this book for part of the reason I chose the school that I work at--I feel like there's something deeply oppressive about the traditional grading system. It feels like it's lurking at every corner, fueling so many of the issues we face in schools. And I feel like I have an understanding and analysis of grading that is far below proportional to the scope of the challenge.
• My goals are to read it, about a chapter at a time, reflecting at the conclusion of each chapter with a blog post like this. I will make annotations in the book surfacing questions, reactions, and ideas I have while reading it (yes, I'm the kind of reader that writes in books, lol).
• I hope first to understand better what I already "feel" about grading. I want to cohere the ways my grading is both values-based and research-based, and develop a better understanding of both. I also hope to bring that analysis back to my math team, in support of our goal of realizing and understanding competency-based grading.

4) It's helpful to have someone with whom you can discuss the ideas in this book. Who would be the right person or group to read this with you? How will you construct meaning from what you read, either alone or with others?

• That's where these blog posts come in. I'm hoping to use these reflection questions to drive my own construction of knowledge by writing about them. I'm also hoping to use my own practice as an immediate application of what I learn here. There is also some room for discussion in my math team (and school, more broadly, in the long-long-long-term).

5) For teachers (me!): Which of your grading practices do you believe best support learning? Why? Which of your grading practices are you most open to reconsidering? Why?

• In that context, what I would hope for is a grading system that helps students to better understand what it is they're learning, and how they're growing. Like, I imagine all the things we learn as developing an increasingly complicated network of understandings and dispositions. And maybe an effective "grading" system helps us to navigate and organize that network.
• I think 50% my current grading practices are mostly in support of learning. My school is largely competency-based, but while we figure out how best to realize that vision in the math department, the math team is largely standards-based. So we have a list of 30-40 "big ideas," and students are rated 5-9 based on their demonstrated understanding of the "big idea." We are trying to capture, in discrete bits, the content of an otherwise largely amorphous course (Algebra I, in my case). And by centering discussions of progress and performance around those "big ideas", we're hoping to create a helpful/simple system to navigate the network of "math knowledge" we're trying to get across in that class.
• The other 50% of my grading, what I call "practice," is much less grounded in...well, anything. I have found myself committing to a lot of "traditional" grading practices with that half. I try to err on the side of "lenient" with that half, curving down (never up), as a "well at least I'm not obviously doing harm" practice. But I also recognize that that's not great.