The Invisible Problem: Starting the Conversation About Grading

I've been involved in many failed attempts at trying to reform assessment and grading practices. In fact, I've led some of them. Through this, I've realized one very important thing: we almost always start at the wrong spot. 

The biggest barrier to assessment reform isn't that people don't know how. It isn't even, and I really believe this, that people are opposed to the idea of it. 

The biggest barrier to assessment reform is that many people don't understand that there's even a problem. 

In my work around assessment in schools, what I've found is that there are two fronts where this battle must be waged to help people see the issues with many of the current, common practices in schools. 

The Two Starting Points:

The first area is a much larger conversation than most people want to have. We can't move towards making more equitable grading practices until we agree that the purpose of school is to make all students successful. Now, this seems simple, and I don't think anyone would explicitly argue with this. However, a key first step in this process has to be verbally agreeing as a staff that this is the goal. 

Then, refine that goal. What does this mean, be successful? My approach is to always boil things down to its simplest parts, and so here is what this means to me. First, we must open the possibility for the pursuit of mastery, meaning that every student should be able to see the possibility for success and be given multiple opportunities to achieve it. Success shouldn't be dependent on your first attempt at it. If we want students to be able to be successful, we need to create room for them to fail, learn, and more forward with the possibility of meaningful success still ahead of them. 

Second, we must create flexibility. When we talk about student success, we often define it simply as, "This is how you must be successful." We define success as following along, as doing what you're told. When we really get down to it, if we want students to be truly successful, that means allowing them to leverage their strengths and interests to flourish fully. 

So, this first area to tackle is this: Come to an agreement as a team that student success must include equity and individuality if we want it to be meaningful. 

The second front that this battle begins on is in recognizing that our experience with grading and assessment is not everyone's experience. Many teachers (not all, but many) had an overall positive experience in school. We were motivated to have at least decent grades. We maybe had ambitions to go to college, and as such, we saw grades as valuable. Many of us had built up confidence through our years of education to be able to handle a lower grade and bounce back from it. 

So often in schools, it's our own personal and mostly positive experience with grades as a student that determines how grading rears its ugly head in our classrooms.

What we need to start with is in recognizing that our lived experience is not a universal truth, and that using that experience to determine how all students experience grading and assessment can cause harm. 

The Opening Activities:

The question that always arises is this: How do we start having these conversations? 

I will be honest. The first front is so big that no resource I have will be helpful. That conversation must be had repeatedly in contexts where trust has been built. That conversation digs at the core of what the school believes to be meaningful. If you are a leader, this is the conversation you need to be having often. What is the purpose of school? What are we doing here? Only when those conversations have become a daily practice will you be able to begin moving into the actions that put those into practice. 

However, I do have helpful tips for getting started on the second front. First, gather the experiences of students in your building. I have a survey with three questions: (1) Do grades help you learn? (2) How do grades make you feel? (3) Why do teachers give grades? I've now given this survey in multiple schools to kick off some of my work with the staff around assessment, and it never fails to illuminate absolutely crucial points and experiences that begin to highlight the need for change. 

So, that's step one: gather the stories and experiences of students. 

Step two, then, is to help teachers make the connection between these experiences and our practices. As you do this, nobody wants to start by being openly vulnerable, putting their grade book on display, and letting everyone critique it. To help with this, use scenarios. Create grade books with fictional students and scenarios, and then ask teacher to examine these scenarios with this question in mind: What message is being sent to specific students?

Here's my slide deck of scenarios that you are welcome to use.

The goal is to help teachers make the connection that what may seem like harmless decisions about how we grade students can send incredibly harmful, demotivating messages with long-term consequences to students about the value of growth, what truly matters, and sometimes even how each student's worth is seen by the teacher. 

It's when this link starts to be made that I see the lightbulb turn on for a lot of teachers. Now, this is just the starting point. There is an incredible amount of heavy lifting to happen after this opens the door, but this is the step that I so often see skipped in assessment reform work in schools. 

This isn't just an approach I made up, but it's centered around the results pyramid. If you've ever heard me talk or follow me on Twitter, you've probably seen this. I don't know where I first ran across this, but it has impacted virtually everything I do when I'm trying to encourage people to change or grow. Here it is.

So often I see people try to jump to the actions, but that can never be the starting point. It has to start with examining experiences and beliefs first. That's the only way to create a meaningful change that grows from within. Any other approach ends up being forced, misunderstood. 

Once the door has been opened, then the hard work begins of defining the purpose of a grade and examining how the manifests itself in a classroom. 

That's another post for another time. 

If you or your school would like support around assessment and grading, please don't hesitate to reach out on Twitter (@Mr_Rablin) or via email. My packages include after-school virtual cohorts or workshops, weekend bootcamps, or facilitated asynchronous cohorts.

There are also a few upcoming opportunities to work with me through Shifting Schools. Check their website to learn more.