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.
- 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)
- 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.
- 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).
- 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.
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