Grade Statements
Grades tend to reduce students’ interest in the learning itself.
Grades tend to reduce students’ preference for challenging tasks.
Grades tend to reduce the quality of students’ thinking.
Grades waste a lot of time that could be spent on learning.
Grades encourage cheating.
-Alfie Kohn
“From Degrading to De-grading”
My 2021-22 Non-Traditional “Gradeless” Classroom
PROCESS
There are 12 standards to be learned each semester. Rubrics will be available for each of the 12 standards.
Teacher will assign work like normal, but emphasis will be on feedback instead of grades.
The “Gradebook” will be more like a spreadsheet and will be binary with a 1 meaning student completed assignment and a 0 meaning non-completion. This will allow the teacher to see some degree of progress. No grades will be given for any of this work though. Again, feedback is the focus.
As a student identifies a piece of their own writing/work that they feel meets or exceeds a standard, they will place it into their digital portfolio. This can also just be a piece of work they are proud of and the portfolio will be added to all year.
At the quarter and semester, the teacher and student will conference, go through the standards and rubrics together, and find examples of student accomplishment in their digital portfolio. Together, they will determine what the student’s grade should be. The next point goes into this deeper.
Directly prior to the semester end, students will write a reflection examining what they think their grade should be, based on standards met or exceeded, with specific examples from their work to support what they say. This is a very important piece of writing.
They decide if they met each standard (B), exceeded it (A), approached it (C), or if their semester has been incomplete (I) and that will be reflected on the report card.
That semester-end self-reflection will guide the conference and the conference is where all parties will determine the student’s final grade.
NOTES
Teacher will use comments for progress reports instead of letter grades.
Students will have the opportunity to set goals for themselves which can later be implemented into the evaluation conferences. Student choice is also important.
Student self assessment and self-reflection will be used throughout each semester.
For parents, a drawback could be that they are unable to check their child’s current grades online. They can check to see how many assignments have been completed or not turned in however. For an accurate accounting, the parent will have to chat with the child. Parents will have access to the standards and the rubrics so they can ask their child to show them their work, which will be accessible online. They can then match up the work with the standards and rubrics to get a rough idea of how their child is doing. Also, parents are welcome to participate in the end-of-semester collaborative evaluation process. More info on this coming throughout the year.
I love this. This is very close to the process I am attempting this year, only better planned and thought out. Most of our dept. read Ungrading edited by Susan Blum over the summer, and goal setting, and reflection are our two pillars of grading this year. What I need to do is add in standards in a more clear and transparent way. We only have students for 12 weeks though and much of the school staff is still beholden to very traditional grading practices. I am so hoping ditching traditional grading can improve motivation and learning among students.
Thanks for this model. I just had a conversation with several teachers at our school yesterday about how to set up grading in Skyward to align better with what we think matters (evidence of learning aligned to standards) v. what doesn't stacks of assignment pages with subjective numbers attached. I used the binary 1=attempted/0=not attempted last year for daily classwork and it worked pretty well. In the first 2 weeks I put all of my energy into lesson planning and delivery by creating engaging lessons with both content and class community at the center and now have a bunch of folders full of work to evaluate in some way. I have been reading, but not marking, what we have done together so far in World History. I think I could use a similar set-up with projects aligned to the standards being the category with all of the weight. Thanks for posting this. I appreciate the care and attention to detail. Let's keep making things better and more authentic for kids and for us.