Kids and Grades

In this episode, I talk about what it means when kids are totally focused on their grades- where that comes from and what we might do about it.

Let’s start with the core problems with grading systems.  Grading systems can make the teacher/student relationship ugly.  As I have shared before, the teacher/student relationship should be about something important- something to be taught and learned that has value for both the teacher and the student.  Grades are not that.  The more time wrestling with grades is time not spent wrestling with good things worth learning.

Transcript

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Hello everybody, thanks for listening. My math teacher friend asked about students who are too focused on grades. They see what they do in the classroom as a kind of transaction. I do what the teacher asks, and I get the grade I need. Many secondary teachers, especially in high-performing schools, live this kind of interaction with their kids all the time. The teacher may be there to impart knowledge, spark wonder, grow students into amazing adults, while a good number of kids are focused on collecting the grades they need to get into the colleges they want. Grades can make the teacher-student relationship ugly. The human connection that should be there about teaching and learning stuff that matters suffers when students see their classwork as a means to an end, a collection of tokens, rather than something worth their time and interest. Where does this come from? A couple thoughts. The first is subtle. As much as we think schools are about teaching things we think matter, schools also teach stuff that does not look like school learning, stuff that really does matter to kids and the life they want for themselves. Kids learn from their parents, from their peers, from society, and from us, that marks matter. Some take this message wholeheartedly and are willing to push their teachers on every single grade, trying to up their worth. They are not wrong. They know the rules of the game, what it takes to get what you want, what you need to get into that great college. I expect we think that this is a shame. That learning should be its own reward, that learning what matters sets us up to learn ever more worthwhile things that matter. When the end of the class is too often a conference with a student about their grade and how to make it better, then we've lost something. In the last few decades, education in public schools shifted away from a somewhat earnest focus on educating everybody, making it possible for everyone to find a good and livable place in society. A lot of this came about in the 60s when race, class, and gender disparities were first addressed in purposeful ways. What followed was a shift to accountability, to measure those disparities and to measure the effects of different kinds of educational programs on those disparities. After decades of attention, the disparities in many ways have stuck around. So has the focus on accountability. Think about how much of your teaching is quantified these days, measured. I met with a teacher friend last week who had been spending a good portion of their prior weeks preparing for the state exams. He let me know his students would be spending the following two weeks on the exams. The scores on those exams will say something about the worth of his teaching of the program at his school. Plainly, marks are important. Kids are given this message every year as we make those exams important. We might think we are doing right by being transparent about marks, sharing a rubric at the start of some unit of study with kids to be clear and specific about the marks that they can earn. The problem with this is that it is the students' first encounter with what is to be learned, how they will be graded. The other problem is that rubrics too often put what is to be learned in tidy boxes, so that the learning can be graded. The upfrontness of a rubric is also its limitation. There is no allowance for students to do more or to do different. When kids come to us wrapped around the grades they should get, they are discontinuing the conversation about grades that is built into the ongoing talk about grades that pervades their experience of school. It's not something different, it's just a genuine manifestation of what they are told is important in schools. You may believe that their concern for grades is overblown and misses the point of learning for learning's sake, but they have had enough other teachers who made grades a focus that they believe they know the rules of the game and want you to keep playing. So what to do about it? Two thoughts one convenient, one a challenge, but more interesting. The first and maybe a bit easier. You straight up acknowledge that grades matter. You meet students where they are, but then you bend the world a little bit. Consider pushing students to work with you to define the grading scale. How much weight should any assignment have? Should we grade homework or not? What are the allowances for redoos or revisions on assignments or tests? Drop any kind of marking for behavior. These badly bind behaving well to learning what is expected. Deal with behavior outside of the grade book. Move grades from an accounting of work done to opportunities for feedback and further learning. In this shift, you are moving the grading scheme from having you be the Lord and judge of what students do, to you working with students to further their learning, with the grading system as one of the tools you use to do so. The grading conversation moves from the student saying, How can I get a better grade to improve my average? to you saying, based on how you did on this assignment, what can you do to better understand the topic? You are moving the student away from a focus on the mark to be received to the learning to be had. That's important. What's also important is that you involve the whole class in this co-construction of what counts and what marks should do for their learning. Your students have had years of being told how marks work and how much they matter. They bring those expectations around grades into your classroom as a cultural artifact, an understanding of how things are supposed to work in school. You have to change that culture in your classroom. It will be a challenge, but the way you set out a grading system and how you hold on to the principles around grading that matter to you will move students' beliefs about the worth and importance of grading. You will have to do something else as well. To change the students' beliefs about grading, you will need to be explicit with them about how grades matter to your teaching and how you believe they should matter to them and their learning. This should not be left unsaid. They need to know that you care for their learning and need grades to serve their learning. You cannot run away from that. Grades matter to them, so you will have to give honest attention to grades. The second thought is more challenging. Let's start with the core problems with grading systems. Grading systems can make the teacher student relationship ugly. As I have shared before, the teacher student relationship should be about something important, something to be taught and learned that has value for both the teacher and the student. Grades are not that. The more time wrestling with grades is not time spent wrestling with good things worth learning. Let's take apart another problem with grades. Grades attempt to quantify and rate learning. Not all things worth learning can be simply quantified and made into a number. Think about the arts, think about writing. The qualities that make any work exemplary cannot be captured in simple grades. How often are subjects taught in a way so that they can be graded? When teaching that is true to the subject needs some other kind of evaluation, ways to understand the significance of the work. So here is my challenge. How might we approach the evaluation of student work in a more humanistic way, rather than always applying a pseudoscientific quantifying measure with grades? The way we believe that we can apply percents to most anything, letter grades to most anything. Selfishly here, I am going to steal from the arts, as I have done before. In the arts, evaluation is about the quality of something. Evaluation is in dialogue with the work itself and artist who made it. Evaluation is understood as describing what is there, not just a judgment. We can move the focus from a grade to be received to a focus on the quality and character of what has been done. How well does the student's work align with the requirements set out in the assignment? How well does the assignment reflect the important ideas at the heart of what is to be learned? How well does the student's work represent their understanding for others? How is the student challenging themselves in their thinking or in their doing? How does the student's work show change and growth in their understanding? These questions push against traditional grading schemes. These questions push students to do better work. They push us to reconsider not just how we grade, but what we grade. If we center our evaluation scheme to a more humanistic stance, there are other questions for us. How does this assignment set up students to express understandings in more than one dimension? Allow room for individual expression? How does this assignment set up students to wrestle with ideas and problems at the heart of the subject being taught? How does this assignment leverage students' shared knowledge and skills? How does this assignment spur interest in further learning? What I am suggesting in this second take on grading is turning the grading system inside out, remaking what counts in grading by designing assignments worth evaluating, work that invites deeper learning and allows more of students' particular human selves to show through. In other words, make student work that is worth evaluating because it betters their learning and betters their relationship with you about stuff worth learning. Thank you for listening.