The Rider’s Revelation
The alarm buzzes at 5:15 a.m. Stephanie growls to herself and thinks, “But I just got to sleep!” At least that’s what it feels like. She brushes her teeth and gets ready for the day so she can be out of the bathroom in time for her brother and sister to use it. She makes sure they are awake enough to get ready on their own while she goes into the kitchen and makes them breakfast–toast and cereal.
She grabs their backpacks, throws on her own bag, and walks them to school. She stays outside the school fence to make sure they walk through the front doors and disappear before she starts the walk to the bus stop.
Thankfully, the bus is on time, and she is able to get a seat so she doesn’t have to stand. She takes out her chemistry homework to finish for the first block. This is why she was up late. She was trying to complete all ten problems, but she got stuck on three of them and, after putting her siblings to bed, spent most of the night looking through the class portal notes and YouTube to figure them out to no avail. She’s going to give it another try during her morning ride. As she’s completing an equation, it dawns on her: She completely forgot to do her math homework. And math is her favorite class! She doesn’t want the teacher–whom she likes a lot–to think she doesn’t care about doing the work, but it truly left her mind. She doesn’t have time to complete it on her own, but maybe she can copy the assignment from her friend once she gets to school.
Equitable Grading Take-Away: Grading shouldn’t include homework performance or completion because it creates significant pressure on students, which can be exacerbated when students have more responsibilities at home. It can also induce unhealthy or undesired behaviors like cheating because students might feel that they have no other immediate recourse. When homework isn’t included in the grade, we reduce the negative incentives and impact, make our grading more accurate and fair, and build students’ intrinsic motivation by helping them understand that, like in sports as well as the professional world, homework is vitally important practice that is necessary to achieve a better performance.
The Speaker’s Saga
Samuel’s first language is not English, so he sometimes needs help understanding things that the teacher says. Sometimes, he asks questions in class about phrases he’s just never heard before or words that he didn’t know existed in English, and the teacher helps him understand. He likes the help and also likes the participation points he gets for talking. But other times, there are so many unfamiliar or confusing words that the teacher couldn’t possibly stop to translate all of them. Instead, he makes lists of words that he needs to look up later in a little notebook that he keeps in his pocket. Sometimes, the words are complex-sounding but easy to understand like “sporadically” or “insightful.” Other times, the words are simpler but confusing, like “they’re” which means “they are,” “there” which is a place, and “their” which means something that belongs to a group of people, but all three versions sound exactly the same when said aloud.
One day, Samuel asks a question aloud in class, and the teacher helps him as happens often. But on this day, a student records a video of Samuel asking his question. Then, the student edits the video to repeat his question multiple times and stitches a popular song in the background that repeats the words, “I was wrong” multiple times. And posts it to Snapchat.
By that afternoon, the Snapchat video has made its way to Samuel. He is mortified. All he had been trying to do was understand. What was so ridiculous about that? Why was it all so funny?
He figures it out: Intelligence is not something to be honored or to aspire to or to work for. If actively learning means having his feelings constantly mocked for every student in school to see, he is not interested.
So, now he sits in class without saying much. When he is confused, he no longer asks questions, no longer gets participation points. When he is stuck, he doesn’t take out his notebook. Instead, he works on his learning at home as best he can where no one else speaks English and where no one else can hurt him.
Equitable Grading Take-Away:Grading shouldn’t depend on students advocating for themselves or participating in required Q&A, even to ask questions about what they don’t understand; these practices support learning for some students but not for every student. Additionally, including participation in the grade calculation can unwittingly invite bias and has the potential to limit–rather than expand–the ways that we expect students to show up in the classroom.
The Musician’s Misgivings
Jason has always loved learning. Ever since memorizing the sound of Ladysmith Black Mambazo singing the alphabet song on Sesame Street, he has taken to listening to and absorbing anything he can put to his ears. He has always had a remarkable ability to hear a story once and recall all the details days later. He could hear a conversation that he was not necessarily part of and yet quote exactly what someone said. Even with music, he could hear a song and then, moments later, play most of that same song on a piano. A chorus teacher once told him that he had perfect pitch.
Now, it’s eighth grade, and Jason has joined the school band, picking up the trumpet. Playing it brings him so much joy that he races through his homework at night just so that he can hurry up and get to practicing his scales.
What is tough about band class, though, are the quizzes and tests that the band director gives. For the first time in his musical life, Jason feels like he’s missing something, not getting it, or is just… stupid. He does the practice work, usually defining musical terminology and responding to short-answer questions, but then he tanks the quizzes, which are multiple choice. Then, they have some days where they practice what they’ve learned with Kahoot games. Jason loves those days! Kahoot is fun, plus he gets to work with his friends in teams. At the end of a Kahoot class, he also feels like he’s learned something. But then he takes the test a couple of days later, and it’s multiple choice again. He knows that he knows the words on the page and the questions he’s being asked, but he can’t seem to express his learning.
The band instructor has even pulled Jason aside and said, “I know that you know this stuff. Multiple-choice tests are just the way we grade in our department.”
Jason walks away wishing there were different kinds of tests other than multiple choice. He would even be okay with the multiple-choice tests if they at least practiced some of those before the real test. But his final thought ends up being, “Maybe I’m just bad at tests… or maybe I just shouldn’t be a musician.”
Equitable Grading Take-Away: Assessments should not rely on a singular format; instead, they should utilize diverse formats and designs to offer a more accurate description of student understanding. Plus, an assessment is a more fair and accurate reflection of student understanding when the practice work leading up to it reflects the same content and format as the assessment itself.
So, what can we do?
These students are not unique. We can find Stephanies, Samuels, and Jasons in every school building across the country. They all come with stories that we, as their teachers, mentors, or coaches, may never know and that they are under no obligation to share with us. When reading about them or when thinking of the real students we know who are them, we might feel limited in what we can do. We must remind ourselves of the opportunities we have to transform our grading practices to support each student, particularly those who struggle in school. We can consider not including practice or homework performance in the grade so that students like Stephanie have a shot at doing well when life circumstances are tough and outside their control. We can think about how to design classroom instruction so that we don’t penalize students like Samuel, who don’t advocate or speak up for themselves even though we might not know “the why.” We can think about expanding the ways we assess students and give students a chance to practice content in the same format as the summative assessment so we can truly know, and report accurately and fairly, what our students like Jason have learned.
We have more power–and more possibility–than we sometimes realize.
If you are a classroom teacher, school leader, or education administrator who is looking for more information about how equitable grading practices can transform teaching, learning, and school culture, please take a moment to fill out our contact form here.
