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 4: Traditional Grading Demotivates and Disempowers
Performance goals vs. Mastery goals. Performance goals are goals that you have to perform at a certain level w/ respect to others. For example, a performance goal could be to be in the top 10% of your class. A mastery goal is a goal that you have to be able to do a specific task, which is defined by the task itself. For example, a mastery goal could be to be able to find the roots of any quadratic equation, given in any algebraic form. I think that this is a mostly-useful characterization, and it's not surprising that performance goals lead to much more problematic outcomes than mastery goals. But...
Teacher sensitivity, and the fallibility of self-assessment. One thing that I keep thinking about while reading this book is how really difficult teacher reflection and self-assessment is. Because we're professionals, right? Teachers typically have higher degrees, and some have been doing this work for decades and decades. And I think the classic issue with long-term professionals, in any field, is that they start to crystallize, and they are less and less inclined to make really radical changes, which looks like some combination of "stability" and "stagnation."
But I don't think it's for the "old dog, new tricks" reason that comes up so often. I think it's because we have actually convinced ourselves that we're doing the right things. We keep exhibiting the same practices and beliefs because we thought really hard about it, and came to a conclusion that what we are doing is the *right* thing to do. So for teachers to make major shifts in their practice, like modifying grading practices, there needs to be enough reflection, and enough self-analysis, for teachers to really identify and unseat understandings they've had from before.
For example, last year, I was adamant that I was doing the right thing in my classes, by grading every assignment I asked a student to do. I figured every minute of student engagement was so "expensive," I'd be loathe to waste an opportunity to give a student credit for demonstrating their understanding of the objective. Moreover, I figured that school-from-home in and of itself was such a demanding task that if I was making a kid do an assignment, they should be getting credit for it. I kind of understand better now why that's not a great policy in general (though again, I'm not beating myself up over anything that happened in remote teaching last year).
But I have the distinct memory of being SO CERTAIN that I was doing the best thing I could at the time. And this wasn't even the first time I've felt that kind of conviction with what I was doing. I feel this inside of myself ALL THE TIME. And I think it was even worse this past year because there was so little discourse with my colleagues. We were fully remote for basically the whole year. It was my 1st year in the district. It was my 1st year in the school. My school had not allowed time for content team meetings, and grade-level meetings were filled to the brim with discussing students and the constantly changing landscape.
In isolation, I think we retreat further and further into our own heads, both personally and professionally. At least I do. And so I think fostering rich and frequent teacher-to-teacher discourse time is critical. It's the key to keeping teachers open, flexible, curious, and self-critical to a healthy extent. And if that resource, teacher-teacher time, is both abundant and taken seriously, it's like fertilizer for professional growth. And I know this sounds like an obvious thing, but I just need to say it out loud here, because not all teachers have that. In fact, I'm willing to bet a decisive majority of teachers don't have that. And [insert anti-capitalist rant].
Questions to Consider
1) Interview some students. Are they motivates to achieve success or to avoid failure? What specific actions, policies, or words by teachers cause students to experience one type of motivation instead of the other?
- No students around this summer. RIP.
- Let me say both, and why. When I'm clear on the goal, that's when I experience it as a mastery goal. But when I'm not clear on what the goal is, what the path forward is, or how I'm doing, that's when it becomes about performance.
- For example, from the end of my junior year in high school, I just wanted to be a great high school math teacher. And every question, doubt, path went through this lens. Is this going to help me be the great teacher my future students deserve? And when it was time to pick colleges, majors, and activities, that laser-focus made it clear, and it really didn't matter what other people were doing, and how I was doing with respect to them.
- But towards the end of college, and at various times throughout my first 4 years of teaching, what it means to "be a good teacher" is so much larger and amorphous than I initially understood. So I fell to looking at my professional growth as a "performance goal." It's simpler, I'll give it that. I'd look around at other people, seeing what they were doing, and thinking, "I just need to do better than them, right?" Which is awful. And still is awful, and is something I need to continually confront and mitigate in my practice. It fills me with self-doubt, anxiety, negative perspectives on others, and a generalized sense of insecurity.
- I appreciate that my school doesn't do any awards based on relative performance (except for valedictorian/salutatorian). They're usually benchmark awards, like "these students are passing all their classes", "or these students have 95% attendance or better," and then I would say the majority of "award/honor capital" is attributed directly by teachers shouting out students. Which is cool. I think many of the teachers recognize the importance of picking students to "shout out" by more humanizing metrics than "the highest performing students." Which, again, is cool.
- But any time teachers compare students, like, "Be more like student X," you're creating a hierarchy of perceived status and achievement. There are tons of ways that teachers support class status hierarchies through patterns in how they call on people, intervene in discussions, interrupt students, provide certain kinds of feedback, and publish grades that are easy to compare.
- I think that the culture that administration projects towards teachers will basically always get reflected down to students. Sometimes directly through policies, and sometimes maybe it's just through vibes. But let me ask you: say there was one teacher on your team who only gave out A's and B's, year after year. Wouldn't their colleagues get suspicious? Wouldn't students get suspicious? Wouldn't administration be suspicious? If enough teachers at the school did it, wouldn't district administration get suspicious?
- If they're suspicious, it's because there is an expectation that student performance should kind of adhere to a general distribution, where there is a non-zero amount of students performing at a "below average" level. Moreover, that suggests that there is some expected "center" in the B to C range, and at least a small number of students should be getting below that center. And I would expect that teacher to feel some pressure to "curve" their class so that it matches the expected distribution. This is a very powerful, if quietly said, culture that *many* schools and districts subscribe to, and it is very an expression of regressive models of human intelligence (see: IQ tests, and eugenics).
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