Grading For Equity: Reflection Questions (Ch 11)

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 11: Practices That Support Hope and a Growth Mindset

Initial Reactions:

• Public Reflection vs. Virtue Signalling or Unsolicited Peer Advice. This is less a reflection on this particular chapter. It's more of a meta-reflection on this book study reflection series, and general reflections made public by blogging or tweeting.
• There have been so many moments where I have had to stop myself from taking a point in the book that I already agree with and understand, and expounding upon it here. I believe that that instinct I have in that moment is more about me trying to virtue signal, or provide unsolicited advice to other teachers, neither of which are particularly helpful for anyone, myself included. 
• Like, if I'm not so clear on the topic, or need to figure out how to clearly articulate my thinking, sure, writing and reflecting on it can help me to clarify things for myself. But if I'm already pretty clear on my thinking, or my position, that particular thought process can remain internal!
• Max vs. Most Recent vs. Most Accurate. Given multiple performance assessments on a single standard, I need to find a way to deduce a single, accurate, number to represent the student's level of understanding. We've talked about why measures of "center" aren't great. In general, Feldman seems to advocate for a "most recent" metric. Though Feldman does mention how "most recent" isn't necessarily the "most accurate." That being the case, teachers might have to determine the "most accurate" score, while adding the caveat that any hard-fast rule will always result in some inequity for some students. I'll admit, it always feels like he gets a little..."hand-wavey" in this parts. This certainly doesn't feel bias-resistant. I wish Feldman discussed this issue more (hopefully it comes up in one of the later chapters).
• In general, even though Feldman doesn't bring it up, I think I want to stick with a "max score" metric, if only because it very much reduces performance anxiety, which is huge for me, and for many of my students for sure. I think I'm willing to complicate it a little bit, which I'll discuss below, but I *do* believe that the Max metric is best. That's also generally how my school handles the competency-based grading in all the other classes anyways, so there's value in being aligned in that respect as well.
• "Exceeding Standards." Feldman advocates for a 0-4 scale, that roughly looks like this:
• Exceeding Standards = 4 (roughly translates to an A)
• Meeting Standards = 3 (~B)
• Approaching Standards = 2 (~C)
• Not Yet Met Standards = 1 (~D)
• Insufficient Evidence = / (formerly an F)
• Getting rid of the letters (A-F) is helpful in the day-to-day because it's an attempt to divorce assessment from the world of problematic expectations that students may have about what certain grades imply. To take it one step even further, he advocates for replacing the numbers (0-4) with descriptors (Exceeding, Meeting, Approaching, Not Yet, Insufficient), which are actually more indicative of the level of student understanding. The numbers and letters then only exist for the purpose of allowing us to patch our data into the traditional grading system we will likely have to observe when reporting grades to the district at the end of each marking period. This is mostly great, because my school is generally down to get rid of the A-F denominations, and/but has fully committed to the numerical scale, for other reasons that also make sense.
• The thing that I'm not sure I totally agree with is the distinction between "meeting standards" and "exceeding standards." What does it *actually* mean to "exceed" the standard? Because here's how my school and I have come to understand my version of the 0-4 scale:

• Isn't the big goal to "meet the standard"? Or in other words, we should "set the bar" at "they can do the thing"? We can debate the definition of "proficiency" or "mastery" for sure. But I think that "proficient" = "meeting standards," and both of those mean that the student can definitely demonstrate a thorough understanding of the objective.
• The biggest caveat here is that I also generally agree that "total proficiency," something I've called "mastery" in the past, can't be sufficiently assessed in a single moment. We want to require multiple independent assessments, so that we can make sure that the student understood the objective more broadly, and didn't just "luckily" understand that one instance of the objective. We may also only want to say a student is "proficient" if they have demonstrated a "time-durable" understanding, which would also require at least a second assessment at a later date.
• In the past I've said that 4 = "proficiency" and 4.3 = "mastery", and the only way to get a 4.3 was to get a 4 on at least two separate occasions. I think that requiring two 4's before they can get a 5 is a slightly bigger jump than I'm willing to give. Because if our scale is a linear model, then that would imply that one 5 equals two 4's, which is 25% better than one 4. And I'm *not* sure that I agree with that? Also, the greater the grade impact of one 4 vs. two 4's, the more important it is that I provide at least like...4 separate meaningful assessment opportunities for each standard. And I usually only end up averaging ~3 in-class assessment opportunities, and even that is tough sometimes.
• This past year, we tried to do this by saying that a student's grade on that standard was the average of their top two grades for it. That way we didn't have to give anything higher than a 4, but students were still numerically incentivized to perform on multiple occasions. And if we're expecting students to hit an assessment 3, 4, 5+ times, students can definitely need a mathematical incentive to keep trying.
• An interesting implication of this metric is that your grade can *almost* never go down upon reassessment. It *can* go down if a student does worse on the 2nd assessment than the 1st. Once there are two entries in the gradebook, only then does a grade become non-decreasing.
• That said, this book has gone into pretty thorough analysis against this position, saying that just such a mechanism complicates/veils the grading system (which is bad) and relies on leveraging grades as commodity/incentive for behavior (which is bad). And I'm inclined to agree? IDK. At "my peak", I stuck with the 4 + 4 = 4.3 thing, and never had a student complain about an assessment, or skip it, because they already had a 4. Students just get used to taking whatever assessment is put in front of them, and doing as well on it as they can. Which I think is the best situation?
• I *do* think there's a difference between
• A: "we need multiple, independent demonstrations of proficiency before we give you the highest possible demarcation"
• B: "we need to give students a reason to keep trying on assessments, and preparing for them, and so we need to leverage grades to create an incentive to do so"
• The differences are more philosophical than anything, but that impacts how we talk to students about it, and how they experience it. Because if students receive the messaging of option (A), I can foresee students experiencing it like "we're moving the goalposts in order to keep you busy." Which does sound pretty disrespectful, I think.

Questions to Consider

1) When in your professional life have you been given a "redo"? Who offered it to you, and why do you think you got that second chance? What did it feel like to receive it? What happened before and during your second chance? How did it benefit you? Was there a time when you were asked to demonstrate competence and weren't given a second chance? Why weren't you given that chance? Did you ask for it, or believe that you could?

• I'm all for retakes, no problem. I generally have the policy of "no more than one retake of one standard on any day" (not including regularly scheduled in-class retakes). But this is more of a constraint I put in place in order to prevent students from trying to knock out a million retakes on the last day of the quarter.
• I also don't have a "retake procedure" in order to ensure that students go through some re-learning process before re-taking. But I think that limiting retakes pushes students to be a little more careful in their retaking, and put a little more thought into preparing, as opposed to just blasting through retake after retake, hoping to get lucky.

2) For Teacher: How much of a motivator is hope? How much do you notice a change in students behavior and motivation, particularly among lower-performing students, before the first assessment of the term compared to after they have received the scores of that first assessment? At the beginning of the term versus after the first progress report or report card (when they receive their first formal low grade)? How could offering redemption via retakes, weighing more recent performance, minimum grading, or 0-4 scales throughout the term affect motivation?

• A major motivator! I feel pretty good about what I think this question is trying to get across, so I'm gonna skip this one?

3) For Teachers: How would the commitment to mandatory retakes align or conflict with your school's vision? What would have to change for your classroom or your school to commit to mandatory retakes? What would make it difficult? What could your school do to make it easier to make retakes mandatory?

• My school is big on re-assessment. They generally encourage spiraling back on older content, re-teaching, and providing multiple assessments on the same standard over the course of the year. And that's fundamentally mandatory retakes for all students (including those who already demonstrated "full" understanding).
• I think that anything's fair game, except it does get dicey when it comes to requiring students to spend time with me outside of regular school hours. I [insert anti-capitalist rant] so I don't like placing expectations for students time spent on my class, outside of my class.
• A fun one I've done in the past is a "quiz bonanza" where students go through and figure out which standards they need to retake the most, they spend some time studying for it, perhaps together, and then we end the class with everyone doing their retake. I don't do it that often, but the more I think about it, the more I want to do it more often.

Plan To Do

• Grading "practice"? I will probably write about this in every single post, because it's super unresolved in general, and I don't think the book will ultimately resolve it. But...if up to 50% of my students' grades are going to be "practice" assignments, how can/should I grade them? This came up again in this chapter, but from the perspective of hope/motivation.
• I technically don't want to grade on anything but demonstrated understanding of the objective (i.e., accuracy). But I honestly don't even want to grade on that, because these are *practice* assignments, and I don't want students to feel *any* grade risk from making mistakes in the normal course of learning.
• First quiz as a practice run. The first time I do a quiz this fall, I want to make the first one like a "practice quiz." This is because I want to remain sensitive to the fact that not many students may not taken an in-building quiz in literally over a year. Also, the way assessment and performance tasks in my class and building are likely pretty different from their previous schools.
• So after the first few weeks, when it's time to give the first quiz, I'm going to make it like a practice quiz. It'll look like a regular quiz, and maybe I'll "grade" it like a regular quiz. But it won't count as an actual performance assessment. That way they can get familiar with the quiz format, both as a task, but as a routine.
• In an effort to minimize how triggering it might be, I will make sure that in the lead up to the practice quiz, I am very clear that it is just a practice quiz. I usually only dedicate 25-30 minutes for a quiz, but am expecting to dedicate a full 75 mins on this first practice quiz.
• Part 0: in the week/days leading up to the quiz, tell them what it's going to be like.
• Part 1: As a intro to class on the day of the quiz, students talk about their experiences with quizzes, maybe writing individually first, and then sharing after.
• Part 2: I talk them through what the quiz is going to look like, and how it's going to go.
• Part 3: They take the quiz individually, with like...10-15 minutes on their own.
• Part 4: I "open it up" and they can collaborate on the quiz with other people at their table, sharing answers, strategies, sharing what they did that was helpful/right. I'll make sure to note that this is just a one-time thing, and not how quizzes will usually go.
• Part 5: I grab a couple quizzes where someone did something interesting or useful, and I throw it under the document camera, and surface it for the whole class. Things I could surface include:
• Annotations, writing questions to themselves, providing partial answers when the full answer eludes them...what else?
• I could also use this opportunity to talk about important parts of the quiz that really only make sense after trying it out. Things like the way I title quizzes (there is a system that is useful to understand, though I've never explicitly taught it to students).
• Part 6 (maybe?): They swap quizzes, and we kind of grade it together. In doing so, I show them how I think about grading quizzes, and how I assign grades.
• I think it's important that students had the chance to collaborate before swapping work. That way if a student was lost in the individual phase, they've got a chance to recover during the collaborative phase. We're going to be projecting non-anonymized student work on a performance task, which I usually keep as a pretty private thing.
• Part 7: the next day/week, we do the real quiz for real.
• I can actually combine this with the "Quiz Bonanza" I mentioned earlier, as a way to similarly model what a good retake process could look like. I would definitely want to do one early in the year, so students can experience how productive a thoughtful retake can be. But also do it a few times throughout the year, in order to minimize the extent to which students would need to come in outside of class time.