Grading for Equity: Reflection Questions (Ch 9 + Ch 10)

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 9: Practices That Value Knowledge, Not Environment or Behavior and...

Chapter 10: Practices That Value Knowledge, Not Environment or Behavior (continued)

I combined these two chapters b/c Ch 9 was pretty light, and these two chapters were basically the same big idea.

Initial Reactions:

• Judge? Or coach? At one point, Feldman discusses the difference between "feedback" and "grading" as the difference between what a "coach" does, and what a "judge" does. I won't go into it, but I think that's a really meaningful way to think about it. And I'm pretty sure that I'm trying to go the way of "teacher-as-coach." And then I only engage in "teacher-as-judge" to the extent that I'm required to engage in the system of grades by external factors. This feeling is a big part of why I increasingly consider myself a grade-abolitionist, and hope to learn more in the future about "un-grading."
• Healing from grading. I am expecting many of my students to come to me with many of the complexes forced upon them by their 8+ years-long journey through an education system where most teachers (myself included) have been enacting a problematic grading practice. With this book study and my commitment to equitable grading, and my commitment to CBG/SBG, I will be trying to disrupt that pattern of harm. So there will need to be a meaningful degree of time and effort invested in helping them to understand my (hopefully less oppressive) grading system. This process will also need to help students to understand, and heal from, the way that my profession has frequently traumatized students with our unfortunate enactment of problematic grading systems.
• Choice isn't always bad. At one point, Feldman discusses out extra credit provides students with an "out" for some content--they can drop the content, and replace it with extra credit, perhaps also consisting of content related to the course. Feldman disparages this option, is it creates a "Choose-Your-Own-Adventure" structure. I get why Feldman thinks that this is an undesirable outcome. But...
• If I'm teaching a one-year high school course on Number Theory, there are literally SO MANY COOL THINGS that it would be meaningful for students to learn in a year. Who said they all had to learn the same one-year of content? I can put out *years* of content to learn, and if the course design is clever/structured enough, students could theoretically pick the year's-worth of content that's most interesting to them. This was one of the big ideas behind my discovery-based math elective (which I wrote about here).
• I think that extra credit would be a lousy way to manage this. I'm just saying that Feldman seems to assume that this kind of course design is obviously undesirable, and I disagree. But I do get the point that Feldman is trying to make here.
• Well it worked for me... One of the most embarrassing moments for me as a student was in a grad-level seminar I took in college. It was about the history of math curriculum in the U.S., and we were discussing the issues with how math curriculum was presently constructed. I remember saying at one point, "How bad can it be? I mean, it worked for me, right?" The other students were thoughtful, kind, and prompt in their response, essentially saying, "Well yeah, but like...what about *everyone else* who isn't a straight white able-bodied born-in-the-U.S. cis-man on full scholarship at a private university?" They didn't use as many words, but I was so embarrassed that I dropped the course (there were other reasons I dropped the course too, but this was like...40% of the reasons). I've since learned a bunch, and am much more aware of why my comment isn't great, or even accurate.
• I connected this personal story with a point that Feldman made. He pointed out how teachers often use "what worked for them" in order to determine what behaviors and attitudes to reward/validate with grades. But "what worked for us" as teachers, a bunch of years ago, might not actually be that helpful today, for students who *aren't* us. Moreover, what "worked for us" also worked in the context of an educational system that I have come to understand as a fundamentally oppressive system.
• There's something to be said for allowing our personal experiences to inform how we coach students on navigating an oppressive system. But we need to make sure we understand was we are doing as *that,* and not as "It worked for me, so it must be 'good.'"
• Yes, and it's more complicated still. As I read more and more of this book, there's been a growing unease, even as I continue to learn and grow from it. And I can finally put it into words here after chapter 10.
• This book generally adds value, and I have found it helpful. But it feels elementary, and perhaps naive, in its failure to fully position itself in the broader context of the oppressive society in which it exists. I'm not saying that it never does this--it certainly does to a great extent. But it falls short in places.
• Here's the idea in the book that finally pushed me to put this feeling into words. Feldman's second pillar of equitable grading is that our grades should be bias-resistant (great). A driving principle of this pillar is, "Grades should be based on valid evidence of a student's content knowledge, and not based on evidence that is likely to be corrupted by a teacher's implicit bias or that reflects a student's environment." (Makes sense). For example, one way to violate this principle is to "inflate grades" with other things that don't actually have much to do with a student's level of understanding--like extra credit for bringing in supplies, or counting points for participation or effort.
• At one point, Feldman claims that violating this principle "is inequitable and deprives the student of important elements of equity: honesty and dignity." And I get it. But I think that there's more to it, because we aren't just teaching individuals in the context of our solitary school. And the grades we assign are part of a much larger system of oppression. There are schools full of privileged children getting their grades inflated in all these ways we've read not to do. And there is also my classroom, mostly full of students at the intersection of multiple oppressed identities. Who "needs" the privilege boost? Who "deserves" it? Who will ultimately *take* it?
• In the grand scheme of things, I recognize that the privilege of "grade inflation" is ultimately toxic to all who engage in it, specifically our students. And the matrices of oppression impacting my students can not meaningfully be deconstructed by me simply inflating my students' grades. But I am almost certain there is a non-zero degree to which we can leverage our teacher-capital to recapture some of that privilege for our students.
• For example, I can say with absolute certainty that it was harder to *get into* my college than it was to succeed in my college. And that's because there's an incentive to gatekeep colleges for a lot of very shitty reasons I won't go into here. But succeeding in college is an *enormous* access point for privilege. As a high school teacher, I can help my students side-step oppressive gatekeeping mechanisms. In doing so, I can help them access pools of privilege that they would otherwise have access to were it not for the active oppression they face by virtue of their identity and context.
• And honestly, I wouldn't lose a wink of sleep over it. I certainly wouldn't hope my students feel a loss of "dignity" for it. Meritocracy in postsecondary options is basically a myth. My students aren't the people who should be feeling moral decay for their efforts to accumulate enough privilege to *survive.*
• [Insert the counter-analysis that claims that my opinion here supports a race-to-the-bottom.] Yes, *and* the alternative to my strategy is just sitting back, allowing the privileged to continue to play *their* games and accumulate as much privilege as they can. Because let's be clear--they will.
• I can play The Game here to maximize short-term benefits for my students. At the same time, I then need to continually engage in a long-term plan that is working to construct a new, independent education system that is *actually* rooted in justice and equity. One that will slowly expand, and render the present oppressive system obsolete, left to wither, shrink, and ultimately disappear.

Questions to Consider

1) In the professional world, what are some difference consequences when something misses a deadline? Do those consequences exempt the person from ultimately performing the task? (Ch 9)

• At my job, I am typically given grace, and opportunity to get the job done eventually. But in no occasion I remember, have I ever just been disbanded from completing the task.

2) Some consider cheating on an assignment not an act of disobedience, but as a signal that though she is stuffling, she is still engaged and cares about her success. Why is cheating arguable a reflection of greater engagement than if the student simply skipped the assessment? (Ch 9)

• If the student *actually* didn't care...they wouldn't do it! So they care about doing well in the class! Which should really be the only thing a student needs to walk through the door with.

3) Look back at Tangela and Isabel in chapter 4. If summative assessments were the only element in the grade, what grade would each receive? What are the implications? What messages do we send each of them? How might it change how they and their caregivers think about each student's progress? How might it change how each would respond moving forward?

• Tangela (a hard worker, compliant, and dutiful) doesn't actually have that much content knowledge, and so doesn't do well on assessments. She would get a 60%, because she understands about that portion of the content.
• Tangela and her family should be counselled by the teacher on how to help Tangela get more support in learning the content. Her energies and focus could be reallocated from being a "good" student, to actually being able to learn more.
• Isabel (not a "good student", but a quick and thorough understander of the content) would get a 90%.
• It would be important for the teacher to provide a context for Isabel's grades, so that Isabel and her family understand the degree to which her disruptive behaviors impact others, and Isabel's future, even if they don't immediately result in low grades in the short-term. But I think we would also generally expect to have fewer negative behaviors, as Isabel would feel her recognition in the class (as captured by her grade) would match her self-assessment.

4) Ask some middle or high school students about why they copy homework, or what gets in the way of students completing homework. What is more important to you--that students do as much homework (and presumably, learning) as they can themselves, or that they copy it so that they get the points? What would need to change to explicitly communicate this priority?

• No students around right now, but I can share my own experience. I copied a ton of homework in college, specifically in my more advanced math classes I took for my major. I won't go super into it, but I did it because I had to, and I hated it, and it made me hate math and myself. It's taken me a while to recover from that, and it still impacts me in courses I take to this day. I think that I copied as a part of a broader issue of asking too much of myself, volume-wise, during my time in college. I had simply over-burdened myself, and something had to give, and that was it. (And also my back, lol RIP).
• I think that, as teachers, we often feel pressure to "get" students to a certain point in the curriculum, to certain benchmarks. And we do our best, but those benchmarks are set by people who are 1) ignorant of my students and their context, and 2) are seeking to service the broader [insert anti-capitalist, anti-racist rant]. And I think that we sometimes justify this practice, thinking that "at least if they're copying it, they're thinking about it, kinda..." But that's not really that true. And what's even more true, is the detrimental effect it can have on a student's self-perception (which was the biggest negative impact that copying had on me).

5) For Teachers: Look at the grade book for one of your classes. Compare students' test or summative assessment scores with their homework scores. For which students are their summative assessments higher than their homework scores? If a student learned the materials, how much does it matter if the students turned in homework? For which students is it reversed (homework scores are higher than summative assessment scores?) If a student turned in homework but did poorly on assessments, what does it suggest about whether homework served it purpose (or who might have done that student's homework)?

• I didn't do "homework" last year because it was virtual. And I haven't even really done "homework" in general for the last few years. So...

6) For Teachers: Try this simple, risk-free experiment: Print out a copy of the gradebook for one class of students. (Do this in the evening or when you're confident that students will not be accessing their grades.) Change the percentage weights, lowering the weight for homework and participation categories, and raising it for summative assessments. Print out the altered version, and then return the weights to their earlier percentages. Compare the final grades. Under which weighting system do final grades describe students' levels of content mastery more accurately? Which systems final grades describe students' content knowledge less accurately? For which students (or what kinds of students)? Does this change your opinion about how much to weight summative assessments?

• I'm not going to dwell too much on either this or the previous question for a couple of reasons:
• Feldman doesn't really need to convince me of anything--I'm totally down for weighting summative assessments at 100%, and can already see the practical value, which is reasonable, and *still* dwarfed by the philosophical/theoretical value.
• Last year sucked, and I spent so much time sunk into data analysis because I was looking for a way to interpret what happened last year as anything but public education getting totally [insert anti-capitalist, anti-racist rant]. I'm not going to beat myself up over last year in any way.

Plan To Do

• So many of my "plans" here are centered around how "practice tasks" are going to be a part of my grading system. And that's because it's the super mandatory (?) and super weighted part of my gradebook that is least-aligned to the actual principle of competency-based grading (or standards-based grading) that my school and I are working towards. But what if...
• Each standard will have two entries in the gradebook: one for practice, and one for performance. That way students can analyze (and hopefully see a positive correlation between) their performance and practice grades together. Something like this:

• This wouldn't be that tough to do, but it would require two things of me, specifically:
• To be able to tag practice tasks to standards. This is a little messy, but probably fine. I've generally valued the way that sometimes practice can integrate content from multiple standards, even if they're ultimately assessed separately at the end.
• Would I need to be able to disaggregate the parts of each practice task into their respective standards, so that they could get possibly multiple practice grades for a single task? This feels worth it for performance assessments, but *not* for practice tasks.
• Instead, I could tag a task with whatever standards come up meaningfully, and then that grade gets counted in each of the "buckets" of practice grades that get tagged to that assignment. One interesting consequence of this would be that tasks that cover tons of standards would have more impact. This is good, in the sense that it's honest, but bad in the sense that it makes different tasks have different weights, which makes things a little more complicated in general.
• Or, most simply, I could just assign it to the standard that shows up the most. Which is fine, right?
• This would also require me to have a meaningful way of grading practice tasks. On one hand, I don't want to grade based on completion, because that's inaccurate for reasons explained in these chapters. And on the other hand, I don't want to grade them based on correctness, because I don't want to penalize students for not having a full understanding of the content on the work that is literally designed to help them practice and build understanding *before* the assessment.
• If I was able to weight practice with 0% of the grade, the practice grade becomes a matter of simple data presentation, without an actual impact on students' grades. But I don't think this is going to be easy to do because the 50/50 practice/performance weights is a school-wide policy, and even if they let me do something separate, I think students would still interpret the practice grade as impactful, because it's that way for literally all of their other classes.