Grading for Equity: Reflection Questions (Ch 12 + Ch 13)

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 12: Practices That Lift the Veil and...

Chapter 13: Practices That Build "Soft Skills" Without Including Them in the Grade

Initial Reactions:

• Time maximization. Time maximization is a soft skill that Feldman mentions. When I hear "time maximization," I think of the times in my life where I was the most exhausted, most depleted, most exploited, and least "whole." Which isn't good. I connect it to what I have come to understand as an element of White supremacy culture, the "omnipresent sense of urgency." I have also come to conceptually group it with toxic features of capitalism like "time = money," glorifying profit maximization, grind culture. And [insert anti-capitalist rant].
• All of that said, I do think there are meaningful, important, humanizing applications of "time maximization." I also recognize that deconstructing capitalism has to be more complicated than just ignoring the reality of its toxic presence. As such, I think I generally need to do some learning around this topic, to understand how better to work with this idea, which is concurrently toxic and valuable.
• Peer assessment. I haven't done a lot of peer assessment. At my currently level of understanding, I do recognize it's value for building student understanding of the assessment process in general, facilitating student-student discourse, and building a culture of feedback.
• But it also runs counter to a value I have that student work is deeply private. Over time, I have slowly become more aware of the way that I have that value based on a general feeling of insecurity in my own work as a student. And that insecurity is itself rooted in an unhealthy relationship with competition in identity and the learning process that I have cultivated as a result of my own context, identity, and educational journey. I think I also have a lot to learn and reflect on here.
• Concerning this topic, there was a passage from Mcfarlane-Dick (2006), where it identifies one of the values of peer evaluation: "...by commenting on the work of peers, students develop detachment of judgement (about work in relation to standards) which is transferred to the assessment of their own work (e.g., 'I didn't do that either')." I had a really hard time making sense of this point, and how it connects to peer assessment.
• Adults as exclusive prophesizers of "the real world". Feldman talks a bunch about the negative impact of teachers citing "the real world" in defense of oppressive grading practices. And it's a *great* section--very relevant, and very insightful. There is another important point that he didn't make, or at least not in the way that I would have made it. I think that many adults often cite "the real world" as justification for their practices because it feels like a "trump card," because as children, students supposedly can't argue against it, because they're children who are almost by definition inexperienced in "the real world." In this way, it becomes a tool of ageism, used by adults to oppress children.

Questions to Consider

Note: I'm going to start to paraphrase questions, because as we get further and further into the book, Feldman seems to make the questions longer, more loaded, and kind of embed the "suggested answers" into the follow up questions. So for each of these there's more to the question in the book, but this is the big idea.

1) Think about your professional career. How have your supervisors made the evaluation of your work transparent, or opaque?  (Ch 12)

• At it's best, the evaluation process in my so-far-short career was based on a strong mentoring-grounded relationship between my evaluator and me. Very early on, my evaluator and I discussed the unfortunate reality of most teacher evaluation models. We both agreed that the process recommended by our district was primarily combination of bureaucracy and liability protection. But discussing this openly, we came to develop a partnership that was grounded in us bringing in actual lived experiences as they arose, processing them together, and problem solving from there. Importantly, the pace and content of my evaluation was largely set by me, with additions from my evaluator as they sought fit.
• By allowing me to set the pace and content of my evaluation and mentorship, my evaluator placed upon me the responsibility and opportunity of making sense of my evaluation. If I'm the one dictating it, I must fundamentally have a clearer understanding of where it's going, and why.
• It is very possible that my evaluator took a much more active, if subtle role in directing my professional growth. They often provided direction for my development by suggesting additional projects, or external opportunities I could take advantage of. In this way, they were able to direct my development by nudging me towards a series what were essentially "project-based learning" opportunities.
• At its worst, the evaluation is a process of my evaluator and I going through what is essentially a "checklist" of "important things to do." This list (usually some version of the Danielson Framework) isn't necessarily wrong--I think most teachers look at it and think, "Yeah, these are all good things you should be doing." So in that sense, it does provide a mediumly useful tasklist, I suppose. However, the process is devoid of any sense of me establishing a "vision" for my development and instruction, and assessing myself with respect to that vision.
• And that's something I think is generally missing from evaluation and growth--visioning. I think there is little value in practicing a deeply contextual practice (goal-setting) devoid of the actual context (a context-rich understanding of what we want our future to be).

2) For Teachers: Draft a rubric for an upcoming assessment or select one you've already created and assess it against the "rubric for rubrics" at www.gradingforequity.org. What are ways that your rubric could be more transparent and equitable? (Ch 12)

• I'm going to spend some more time later this summer developing a rubric for my Discrete Math elective this year. I will be sure to share them, and link them here once I have.
• I think that developing rubrics is something I have done very very little of in the past. I very much have gone by the "I know it when I see it" assessment of student understanding. Feldman does a good job of outlining why this is inadequate, and is one of the places where I appreciate the way it feels like this book was written by someone who is pretty intimately aware of the lived teacher experience.
• One issue/question I have about rubrics is that they tend to place "skills" and "knowledge" in a hierarchy, with largely discrete and distinct "threads". But from an epistemological perspective, that reveals an assumption we have about how knowledge is constructed, and what it means to know something. I think that knowledge, skills, and dispositions (in math, and in general) are far more nebulous, interconnected, and often unobservant of our efforts to apply overly-simplistic hierarchical models. I've recently become interested in the difference between thinking of knowledge as rhizomatic or arborescent. But this feels like one of those situations where "all models are wrong, but some are useful" (credit to Dan Meyer for that saying). So I need to reflect more on how rubrics can/should (not) observe those different definitions of the structures of "knowledge."

3) For Teachers: This chapter has suggested that teachers need to be the creator of rubrics, but could students create them?  (Ch 12)

• This is actually super cool, and Feldman describes an introductory "constructivist" approach. Start by identifying the objective, and work with students to backwards-engineer a rubric against which to measure our performance. I think this can be valuable because:
• It builds student understanding of rubrics more broadly, which is good for "lifting the veil" on how they're being assessed, which is a move in the direction of equity
• It gives students an intimate understanding of whichever rubric they developed
• It allows me to calibrate my own understanding of what I have messaged is "important." If I have been teaching kids about how to graph a line from a linear equation, and all they do is talk about the components of a procedure to do the task, that's a sign that I must have emphasized that procedure in my instruction.
• It also deepens student content knowledge of whatever we're making a rubric about. They have to be able to verbalize knowledge, organize it, and negotiate the relative value of different parts of it.
• Building on that last point, it also provides students an opportunity to wrestle with the very big question of "How do you know that you know something?" It positions "knowing" as a fundamentally subjective, negotiable, and non-fixed thing, which is a healthier relationship to have with "knowing" than the assumption that some authority figure (teacher, politician, boss, etc.) has the authority (and even ability) to define truths and meaning objectively.

4) Do you believe each soft skill has an equal impact on a student's academic performance, or do some soft skills have more impact than others? (Ch 13)

• Different skills certainly must have different values and weights. And those things certainly vary depending on the context of the student, the teacher, and the assignment. Some deadlines matter, some don't. Sometimes it's important that you're "polite," others, it doesn't (and sometimes it's important to be actively not "polite").

5) How student-specific is the connection between any given soft skill and an academic performance? What are the implications of this? (Ch 13)

• I think generally, one value of not attaching abstract grades to performance on "soft skills" is that our valuation is allowed to expand or contract in context. For some students, it really *doesn't matter* if they do the homework. Some students are able to "get the job done" with or without the extra practice. But if I directly grade-penalize all students who don't turn in the homework, I'm telling the student, "Hey, that observable part of your human-ness that allows you to perform with less practice than average? I don't care about it, it's not valuable, and I wish you would be more like what *I* expect you to be like." Not a good look.

6) For Teachers: How might you pilot "student-led grade conferences" in your classroom for a specific project or performance? (Ch 13)

• I think that my school tries to emphasize the degree to which conferences are student-led, at least at times. I do love it when students come to teacher-family grade conferences. I like opening by asking students to start the meeting with how they things things are going. I like it because it increases the degree to which students need to reflect, and understand on their own how they're doing. I also like providing students with the chance to demonstrate their own self-understanding and capability. They also have a ton of perspective that I don't have, because they're the subject themselves. But students don't always come to their own conferences, and I understand that there are lots of reasons why, and a lot of them are legit.
• But I rarely do more than say, "It's good if you come to your own conference, because that allows you to have a bigger role in directing the narrative that's built around you." But just unpaching that statement is non-trivial. And understanding how to "control the narrative" is also a non-trivial set of skills and understandings.
• In order to support students in the leading of their own conferences, in the class before teacher-family grade conferences, I could lead students in doing some like preparation for the conferences. I could help them go over their grades, overall performance, and recent and long-term changes in it.
• One of the most impactful "soft skills" I've learned in my profession is, "The person who best prepares for the meeting, wins the meeting." Or in less problematic, conflict-oriented language, "If you prepare for the meeting properly, you're more likely to get your agenda met." And that is certainly a "soft skill" worth surfacing for students, as it can empower them long-term.

Plan To Do

• My school does use "Next Gen Standards" as a way of standardizing, and attaching a grade value, to soft skills. I haven't used or analyzed them yet. For reasons outlined in the book, I don't actually want to attach those standards to students' official grades, and would ideally track them as "practice standards" which are tracked, but with 0% grade weight.
• I'd like to at least start with the Next Gen standards, and go from there, since they already exist, other teachers and students are already familiar with them, and this is a pretty unfamiliar landscape for me. Starting with those, I need to generally reflect on the "soft skills" I care about, and think through how I want to surface them in the class. Lots of work to do here. Once I know what, and why, I can then start to ask, "How will I assess these?"