My Stages of Grieving for Grades
I’m getting ready to give a talk about grades. You never really know where people are at on the continuum that is assessment reform, and it makes me think back about my whirlwind tour of the assessment world during my first four years of teaching.
So, if you will, the first five steps of assessment grieving:
1. Oh Sh!t, My Quizzes Don’t Mean Anything.
We all have this moment. The formative work we do to help kids “get ready for the test” doesn’t do that at all. Wrestling with this realization is the first step towards changing the culture of your classroom away from adversarial grading to formative assessment and feedback-based assessment.
In what may be the only slide I’ve ever made that matters, which is frustrating because it breaks every rule of presentation design. Sorry:
Click to embiggen.
These five questions should be enough to start any teacher, administrator, or educator down the road to assessment reform. It made me hold my face in my hands, itelluwhat.
2. Retention vs. Cramming
We then get down to the nitty-grtitty. Instead of just making it through the material by quizzing and testing it once (ding, done! wrong.) Reassessment starts to creep up on your mind. You fight it. You feel like there’s a demon called “retake” that you’re beginning to bring burnt offerings in secret after school. I knew that this had to happen, but how could I do it without having students stay addicted to the points?
Czernobog, the Slavic god of retakes for points. Pure Evil
3. Reassessment Runs Rampant
So I started letting assessment happen whenever. This felt like the wild west. Seriously. I felt like it was the Gunslinger walking with Clint just hoping that the law will get laid down. Kids showed up at all levels of development. Some had studied and the system recorded their learning. Some were just hoping to get an easier problem and walk away with the points to get their parents of their backs. I had to corral this.
It felt like the experiment was failing, but, as the ineffable Matt Townsley would say, if you’re thinking about assessment and learning at a meta level, you’re doing a better job already.
4. Pointslessness
So, things get wacky. I got to give a TEDx talk right in the middle of my genesis of these ideas. I had to come up with something that would be coherent in 17 minutes. I came up with BlueHarvest.
Let’s get rid of the points and just keep track of what the students do. BlueHarvest is not about me making money, it’s about providing all of us a way to keep track of feedback so that we don’t have to pretend that points and grades are doing that for us. They don’t, and we all know it.
I’m now at the tail end of this experiment.
5. The Efficiency Game
Now that I’ve spent an entire semester teaching high schoolers, undergraduates, and graduate students without using and numbers at all, I feel like I owe all of you some sort of Results & Discussion.
First of all, it takes a long time to give this much feedback, especially if it’s the only data you’re keeping to justify the inevitable final grade (barf). I’m still pissed about this, but I can’t just start my own hippy commune, not yet anyway (I had a student ask me if he could go to my BlueHarvest school a few days ago, that was heartening)
I’ve seen the forest for the trees. Psychologically, students only care about feedback. We want to pretend that they won’t do anything unless it’s for points, but I’ve lived it. I’ve taught well over 100 students without using a single number, and it looks a lot like people who just care about getting it.
However, efficiency must be considered. Are numbers truly evil, or is it just the way we use them? I’m going to roll out a hybrid system next semester. The students are going to be responsible for putting evidence into BlueHarvest, and I’m going to use numbers and words to communicate to that student my assessment of that work. Parents still love to be able to look at a letter grade, and I know they’re busy, so I owe them a quick-look.
BlueHarvest still emails the parents whenever a piece of feedback or evidence is uploaded. The parents love it, and they feel like they’re a part of how that kid is learning, not just forcing them to learn once things go wrong.
Can you tell I just had some parent-teacher conferences fly by?
I miss you all.
Gannets! So, One of my Students is a Pilot
[...] the challenges of reporting out standards-based grades (as I discussed here) is unescapable. Even my grading rebel hero who did away with points all together in favor of pure feedback is returning to a hybrid [...]
[...] Think Thank Thunk is grieving for grades after teaching without grading for an entire semester. [...]
I’m also torn a little by the “quick look” that parents want. But most of me feels like the quick look takes away the conversations that need to happen between parents and students and parents and me. I guess I’m sorry that education has been bastardized by points and letters but that doesn’t mean that I have to participate in it.
I am also with you on efficiency. Instead of going the route of a hybrid system, I wonder how much feedback and on how many items is necessary to get the desired result. I feel like I want to find that tipping point between enough and not enough and hope that the amount of work to get there isn’t overwhelming.
Shawn,
Can’t wait to see the new hybrid BlueHarvest!!!! Sounds like exactly what I need.
On that note, what are students posting as evidence? Problems that you created and gave to them or problems they found on their own?
Thanks for the inspiration!
Is there a place on this spectrum for getting rid of grades? Or at a bare minimum handing that over to the person who knows what was learned best of all?
I was shocked the other day when an assessment expert shared that the word assess comes from the Latin: to side beside. How did I spend 20 years in education and not know that when assessing I am suposed to sit beside? How many of us were taught to sit beside our students when assessing? Why are we left to figure this out on our own?
Shawn,
I attended an assessment session on Thursday, and I drove the speaker to the airport after the session. He and I agreed that assessment sessions are the hardest ones to deliver, for exactly the reason you state above.
When I do sessions on assessment, there is invariably a huge spread in the room in terms of where people are on their journeys. There are people like you, who are so far ahead of me that I must look like an idiot. There are people who are still lamenting the loss of the strap for controlling kids, and they think taking away their zeros is even worse. You really have to be on your toes when you are fielding questions from both ends of that spectrum. Good luck with the session. You’re the right guy to be delivering it.
John
1. How are you currently promoting retention? Are you insisting on multiple reassessments even for students who do well on the first assessment?
2. I’ve never had the situation that a student does well on quizzes but not on tests. I use quizzes as retrieval practice, and also to motivate students to do homework. As long as I am willing to put in all the time and energy quizzes take, they work beautifully for both purposes.
3. I like pointlessness, though I can’t use it, because I teach IB which is heavily point-based. What I don’t believe in is combining feedback with points, because both my own experience and research (can’t find it now, but will if you against all odds don’t know what classic studies I’m talking about) says that in hybrid systems students tend to completely disregard feedback and focus on the points, with all the negative effects that means. I mean, research blesearch, your own experience will show whether or not it works for YOU. I’m just saying don’t launch into hybrid for the sake of making it easier on the parents. After all, their main objective should be that their children learn a lot and enjoy doing so, and if that’s not their main objective then they aren’t on your (or the students’) side anyways.
Shawn,
It’s been enjoyable observing your assessment and grading theory and implementation framework evolve over the past several years. I succinctly remember the “reassessments gone rampant” phase like it was yesterday. This post eloquently sums up my observations from literally next door and across town. I’m excited to see where the “efficiency game” leads you. I think it goes without saying that we will all be the beneficiaries!
Shawn, I want to hear more about how the college course worked.
Thanks for this post. All I’ve changed so far about my grading is allowing retests (with new versions of the test, of course). You’ve said that’s terrible, but I’ve seen my students take much more responsibility for their learning. I think I can (eventually) do more, but I’m not sure what.
Sue, I think so much depends on the messages that we as teachers and that the school as a whole send to students about the purpose(s) of assessment. My current school feels very different from where I was last year in terms of points grubbing. I think a lot of it is due to my 8th graders feeling pressured to get good grades for their high school applications. A message that I have no control over, and one I’ve never had to deal with before. One of the joys of teaching at an independent school…
But back to my main point: if you are framing your reassessments to improve learning instead of to increase points you’re already moving forward in Shawn’s continuum.
They’re still just looking to improve their grade. But I think the improved learning is coming in through the side door. I just now posted about my testing style. (Thanks, Shawn, for motivating me to write. I haven’t blogged much this semester.)