When we talk about grading, I think about my cooperating teacher's classroom. For my blog post this week, I want to focus on what I'm observing and how I see it.
My Teacher, S, is very focused on grades. Although she
presents many chances to revise grades and accepts late work from her struggling
students, she still always grades with a number and a letter score. I’m not
sure I would give students letter grades in middle school on everyday
assignments; I can just picture students whose notebooks are covered with C’s
and D’s and F’s feeling those letters. At the same time, I recognize the
naïveté of this idea; they’re going to be graded like this in high school, they
need to be prepared for it. I’m hoping to find that sweet spot between making
students feel like their grades don’t define them and preparing them for the
real world (not really…more like the bubble) of high school. What I really
don’t want is to have students with a fixed mindset of “well, I’m an F student”
in middle school. I plan on giving lots of chances for students to revise and
correct, and making all kinds of exceptions for students who go out of their
way to ask for a second chance. I’m a sucker for second chances. I am learning
from S how to approach those students and offer those second chances if
they’re unwilling or unsure of how to ask for them. S is great at reaching
out to struggling kids; she makes sure they know all the ways they can bring
their grades up. However, she definitely isn’t handing out A’s. I want to keep
watching and learning.
A grading tactic of S’s that I know I will remember is her “correcting” window. She gives students 5 days to correct any wrong answers on quizzes or rewrite low-scoring assignments. When the students turn in the corrected copy, she will give them half points for whatever they made up (ie, they fixed 6 answers, they get 3 points added to their score). While I was originally going to do something very similar to this except awarding full points for corrections, I acknowledge the value in only awarding half- the students still got it wrong the first time, and they can’t change that. However, I’m struggling with this, because I also believe that students should be given second chances that recognize the effort and time they’re putting into the corrections and show that I appreciate that effort and time. I also think that it makes the grading system seem less intimidating, showing my students, hopefully, that grading isn’t some jail sentence or statement on who they are. They can change it.
When I think further about how I want to grade when I become a teacher, I just keep thinking I want to do the opposite of what I experienced in school. Grading was stressful and final, and everyone was obsessed with grades. Your grades were a statement on your intelligence, plain and simple. I want my grading system to be so vastly different from that. I appreciate that, in many ways, it seems like Kirby agrees with me. Kirby points out that grading is too often a weird binary: graded work is stressful and judgmental, and nongraded work isn't worth spending time on. In order to counteract this, I need to be prepared to work with my students progressively away from this system towards something better. It will be a slow process, but important and worth it in the long run, because I can then place more emphasis on content and process, and students will feel more comfortable experimenting within assignments. It all starts, I believe, with using a student-centered holistic approach like Impression Marking, then having students create their own standards, then...I don't know where else!
Here's some other useful ideas from Edutopia, including a great idea for a One in Four Rule
Casey, you bring up some excellent points about the strange position we occupy as teachers who have to assess student work: knowing how detrimental grades can be to fragile young egos, we can forego traditional grading altogether and implement more self-assessment and reflection but then we face the very real risk of students losing motivation when there is no grade attached. At my student teaching placement, even formative assessments are graded, but count less toward the overall final grade. That is, summative assessments are worth 85%, and formative are worth 15%. Aside from the fact that I'm full of anxiety about having to wrap my head around that math, I worry that assessment of this kind furthers students anxiety and dependance upon grades. And yet, the students do seem to put a great deal of effort into work they know will be summative. But in the end, isn't it a mute point when school administration often dictates grading policy? Maybe Rebecca from your Edutopia article had it right, and we should all go buy some colorful stamps! :)
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