Grading for Equity Blog

EQUITABLE GRADING = STRESS REDUCTION

Ahh, May! Mental Health Awareness Month. I always have mixed feelings about this month.

I believe the more knowledge and awareness we have, the more completely we can see the world and the more fully we can understand each other. To this, I shout a resounding “YES!”

But I’ve never loved how the burden of mental wellness seems to constantly be placed upon the very people who struggle with it. Not everyone has the ability to manage their mental health–for any number of reasons. Plus, many mental health disorders don’t originate in people but in the systems that we are swimming in, systems that constantly demand our time, attention, energy, and effort. It’s no surprise that very little remains in our wellsprings to take care of ourselves. And yet, when we are depleted, we are the ones who are tasked with our healing. This dynamic is especially glaring in the education profession. We give so much of ourselves to help students navigate dysfunctional and oppressive systems, and yet, we are on our own to improve our own mental health within the dysfunctions of the teaching profession. How many underpaid teachers are left with minimal pedagogical resources in understaffed buildings without enough professional learning support year after year?

Focusing on What I Can Control

It’s easy to get caught in a downward spiral feeling powerless against all that we face. Often when I was in the classroom, I inadvertently gave up my power because I spent so much time focusing on those larger institutional problems I could not affect: unhoused students; poor English language learning services; carceral pipelines; adultification of children; wages that don’t increase as living costs skyrocket; and classrooms where 50-minute periods make it nearly impossible to give students individualized attention.

In these moments, it is helpful for me to focus on what I can control. Sometimes, my best option was–and still is–to zero in on what I can directly impact. What can I change? What is within my purview? Which bus do I actually drive? Over the years I worked across multiple schools and school systems that I knew were either born out of or anchored in historically unjust structures, but I knew the one thing I could control was my grading.

A Surprise Benefit of Equitable Grading

When I began to implement equitable grading practices, I did so to deepen my students’ learning and to report grades more accurately. As I used the improved grading strategies, I appreciated that everything–grades, student learning, my teaching–became more academic-focused and less behaviors-based. My students also engaged in meaningful practice by relearning content to become eligible for redos. I was satisfied with this.

But something sneaky was happening with equitable grading that didn’t reveal itself until several months into using the practices: With equitable grading, I was doing less work. And I’ve heard other teachers who implement equitable grading over a stretch of time (say, two school years) mention the same thing: Suddenly, you look up and your time has come back to you. Ultimately, this meant my own cognitive load as a teacher (and as a human) was reduced, and my stress levels were diminishing.

How Did Equitable Grading Mean Less Work and Less Stress for Me??

I made homework optional. I used to assign homework just so I could put something in the gradebook, grading for completion instead of correctness. Students could have written down any old thing, and I gave it 100% credit as I glanced down for two seconds at their paper, before moving on to the next of 160 papers. Sure, homework was actually helpful for some students, but it honestly wasn’t necessary for all of them to build their skills. When I implemented equitable grading practices, I still assigned homework, but it was optional. If students wanted to see if they “got” the concepts taught, they turned in the homework, and I provided feedback. After the assessment was given and grades returned, we reflected on whether the choice to complete (or skip) homework was a good one and if they would try something different going forward. This not only built their sense of self-efficacy and their trust in their decision-making, but it also prevented me from wasting time on unhelpful assignments.

To be clear: Classwork was not optional. That was required, reviewed in class, and given feedback. Students reported that live feedback was often more helpful and memorable than delayed feedback or feedback that was only based on completion. Providing live feedback on classwork meant that I used in-class time rather than out-of-class time, a shift that significantly reduced my after-school load. This practice also meant I had to choose new ways to review work and give feedback more quickly and effectively. Here are a few tools that helped:

Google Docs: Allowed me to write in-text comments quickly and thoroughly in ways that students could clearly read.
Pear Deck: Allowed me to give live quizzes and see student responses. I would project the anonymous responses on the board, and as a class we would talk through which responses were on target, needed some work, or needed lots of support. Pear Deck also allows the teacher to see individual responses with students’ names attached while presenting those same responses anonymously on the screen–the best of both worlds!
JamBoard (R.I.P. as it no longer exists): This allowed students to share work or add ideas in a collective digital bulletin board. They could also comment on each other’s work as well as “like,” “agree,” or “disagree” in either anonymous or identifiable ways. In my current classrooms, I’ve replaced JamBoard with Padlet, which achieves the same goals.

I recorded student performance on practice (formative) work but did not calculate it in the grade. This helped me keep track of who did and did not complete the classwork and the optional homework. I would enter a score–0 if the work wasn’t done, or 1-4 if it was completed–to show students where they were in their practice and help them see the path of their learning over time. It also helped their families as well as other support teams in school to see what the path of practice work had been leading up to a particular grade outcome. Because I had my virtual gradebook toggled to “Do Not Calculate,” the information was tracked and visible but not battering them every time they did not complete practice work.

I made my gradebook 100% summative. Students’ grades were composed solely of the common summative assessments we gave as a 9th-grade English team. I had heavy grading periods during assessments–but I would’ve had those anyway. The difference was that I could assess my students more effectively and meaningfully because my energy hadn’t been drained from grading non-stop every day of the week for weeks on end beforehand.

I offered redos and retakes. This was necessary because I only included summative work in the grade, making any summative assessments high-stakes. Sometimes, the first assessment was like the first round of feedback. Some students liked that: They would see where they were and decide either, “I’m good with this outcome” or “I want to try for a better outcome.” If they chose the latter, they had to either a) meet with me 1:1 to talk about their feedback and mistakes before submitting the redo, or b) submit the redo with a written section that addressed their earlier mistakes and their new learning.

I kept redos manageable. Giving retakes scared me at first; I worried that I’d drown under a deluge of summative assessments. But I kept my re-grading pile under control by implementing two major strategies: First, I only allowed one retake per assessment, and on some assessments, I only allowed a redo of specific sections. Second, as a class we would talk about students’ desired work load: “Do you want to get the grade you want the first time, or do you want to do nothing, get a grade you don’t want, and then have to scramble and do a retake, all while we as a class are moving onto new content?” Students were able to make the decisions that made sense to them and learn from their mistakes when their decisions led to lower-than-desired grades. This helped my re-grading pile to stay low and manageable.

Equitable Grading Changed My Classroom–And Me

All of these changes required time and effort to set up: adjusting the pacing of my courses; redesigning my practice work so it was reflected in the summative assessment; outlining my syllabus in new ways; setting up my Canvas site; communicating all this to students and families multiple times in multiple ways (as well as in Spanish); teaching myself new technology; and sometimes asking for help. And still! For the vast majority of my school year, I had an unexpected amount of time back to myself. Ultimately, my own stress levels decreased and so did the students’, which made for a more freeing classroom. Did this cure every ill of the U.S. education system? No. But in my little corner of the world, where I struggled between wanting to be a good teacher and burning out from trying to be a good teacher, this was a step in a more balanced direction for my existence as a human.

For more on how we can help shift your grading structures to reduce teacher (and student!) stress, drop us a note here using our contact form. We would love to support you!

TO OUR AMAZING TEACHERS: A HEARTFELT THANKS (AND A GIFT!)

I come from a family of many teachers, and I did the legwork to get (hopefully) most of it right:

2 Preschool Teachers
3 Elementary Teachers
3 English Teachers
1 Science Teacher
1 Physical Education Teacher & Coach
1 Business Teacher
1 Art Teacher
5 teachers (Subject and Division Areas Unknown)
1 Librarian with 1 Assistant Principal Husband
1 Elementary Teacher with 1 Principal Husband
1 Principal-Turned-Superintendent
And 1 great-grandmother who was a teacher in a one-room schoolhouse

Phew! That was an intense data dive.

But I wanted to get into the nuts and bolts because it feels important: first, to show the sheer number of teachers around us at any given time; and second, to make the often invisible work of teaching visible.

Do you know how amazing you teachers are? Here’s just a glimpse of your greatness: paying for classroom supplies; staying up all hours of the night perfecting lesson plans; taking on extra responsibilities–euphemistically referred to as “wearing many hats”–that are not necessarily reflected in salaries; buying and keeping snacks in your desk for students who are hungry; giving focused content or skills support to kids who need the extra help; fundraising; coaching; cheering; dressing up for Spirit Week; allowing students to escape into your classroom during lunchtime; presenting to the school board or at a community meeting, whether in opposition to or support of an issue; learning another language to better communicate with families; calming students down; exciting students about learning; supporting social-emotional growth… and who can forget the grading?! Grading “in the wee small hours of the morning” before school starts. Grading during your planning period (if you don’t get asked to cover a class, an event, or a field trip). Grading on the train, or on the bus, or as you stand waiting for either one.

I could go on and on about the countless things–many of them invisible–that teachers do. Instead, I’m laser-focusing my praise and lifting up the teachers who–in addition to the incomplete list above–lean into the challenge of reshaping their grading practices. The task is neither a light one nor one that should be taken lightly. It requires a willingness to unlearn years of learning, to allow ourselves to believe new information, to reflect on practice, and, sometimes, to confront the daunting reality that maybe we didn’t get something right (perhaps because no one prepared us).

And despite this, teachers still embrace the opportunity to improve how they grade!

We want to take a moment to shout out, to big up, and to celebrate the teachers we have worked with this year, last year, and anytime before. Whether we were together for 45 minutes, two hours, a day, two days, all school year, or multiple school years, we salute you!

Thank you for looking at your current grading practices under a microscope.
Thank you for putting your time, energy, and thinking into whatever presentations you attended with us.
Thank you for learning about action research in your context.
Thank you for designing action research plans even if it was your first time trying them.
Thank you for scheduling coaching sessions, many of which happened during your planning periods.
Thank you for considering implementing redos and retakes, even though it might have meant additional time grading and huge shifts in your teaching, reteaching, and assessing.
Thank you for analyzing (and maybe even constructing) new rubrics.
Thank you for designing qualitative data collection tools, then using the data you gathered to inform your practice, your grading, or your day-to-day interactions with students.
Thank you for being willing to understand proficiency scales more deeply.
Thank you for reimagining scales that are more mathematically proportionate than the typical 0-100 scale.
Thank you for looking at graphs of Maria and Ellis multiple times (#IYKYK).
Thank you for being vulnerable by opening up to your colleagues about your work and results of new grading practices, even when they weren’t perfect.
Thank you for collaborating with our grading coaches, many of whom are current classroom teachers just like you. (And thank you to our grading coaches for making this work so much more accessible, approachable, and manageable for the teachers in our care while never losing sight of your own progress.)
Thank you for your time, your precious time! You could have done so many other things with the brief windows of time that are yours alone, and instead you chose to spend that time planning and honing your equitable grading practices.
Thank you for sitting in the discomfort of questioning some aspect of education as you knew it, which can be scary.
Thank you for working to make your corner of the world a little more just.

As a tangible thank-you, we are offering a discount code for all teachers who sign up for the following Crescendo Education Group online courses:

Grading for a Growth Mindset: Implementing Redos and Retakes
Grading for Equity Foundations

Sign up for either of these courses during Teacher Appreciation Week (May 5-11, 2025) and receive 20% of the original price. Follow this link for more information!

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, and ways to help teachers implement those practices successfully, please take a moment to fill out our contact form here!

4 POWERFUL REASONS TO RETHINK REDOS & RETAKES

I had always known that the concept of redos and retakes existed, theoretically. I only actually employed them in my classroom, though, in exceptional cases –those exceptional cases being large-scale failures or lack of proficiency, signaling to me that I needed to reteach and re-assess. But as a regular practice that was open to all students? Not at all! Can you imagine what my paper stack would have looked like?!

One summer, I went to a session on equitable grading featuring Joe Feldman as the keynote speaker. Lo and behold: he talked about offering redos and retakes to students as a method of being a more accurate, bias-resistant, and motivational grader. I was riveted and thought that I would immediately try implementing redos and retakes that fall at school.

Lemme tell ya: there was no greater learning experience–for better or for worse–than researching this on my own in real time with my students right in front of me. Did students’ grades go up? Yes and no. Was my grading pile high? Yes and no. Here are the top 5 things lessons learned during my time implementing redos and retakes:

#1: Redos and retakes work in concert with other equitable grading practices.

I not only wanted to use redos but I actually needed to use redos. The inclusion of redos allowed the first assessment to serve as a means of granular feedback about where students were in their proficiency. If needed, the redo opportunity was there for them to relearn and to be reassessed. This also allowed me to start implementing 100% summative grading; it took out unnecessary practice work (much of which wasn’t meaningful, honestly) and also reduced ambiguity about who completed any homework I assigned – many of my students had tutors or other support services outside of school time. As a result, every assessment weighed more heavily, but because the redo process was in place, students had the ability to take time and relearn content.

#2: Retakes allow students to actually grow in their learning.

In my context, I made any original scores that were below a 75 (on a 100-point scale) mandated to be retaken while any original scores that were above a 75 were optional for a retake. No matter how students scored on their original assessments, retakes offered the opportunity for them to gain proficiency, enhance their skills, and develop deeper content knowledge. It was absolutely never a waste and never unnecessary. I knew of some teachers who didn’t let students who got above a certain grade threshold take retakes, or they put a cap on how high the grade could become. To that I asked, “Why?” If the students are relearning–meaning they are meeting with me one-on-one to review the original missed content–they are still learning more, no matter where their original knowledge was. If they have a 90 and want to redo it to get something above a 95, maybe they had a personal goal set to get at least a 95 on their assessments that quarter. Or maybe they know that English (my discipline) was an easier subject for them, and they wanted to push themselves to show greater understanding. Allowing students to reassess wherever they might be helps students strengthen their muscle of intrinsic motivation by developing their self-efficacy.

#3: Redos resulted in less grading than expected.

Rather than grade every single word of every single essay when it was re-submitted, I figured out some strategies to efficiently score redos and not extend my grading pile by too much:
I graded the redo side by side next to the original assessment and only graded the areas where they missed the learning. I sometimes also only made the highest value sections of an assessment eligible for redoing, not every single thing, which also helped to reduce the time I needed to spend grading the retake.
I only allowed a limited amount of retakes. I allowed 9th graders two redos, and I allowed my 12th graders one redo. That helped give weight to the initial assessments while still offering the redo as a parachute in case they had a bad assessment.
I only allowed redos within a set timeline of two weeks. During this time, students had to review notes, then meet with me to discuss their new understanding, and finally take the assessment again. They had two weeks to do all of this. This prevented my grading from endlessly extending.

#4: Redos and retakes gave me better (and regular) feedback about my teaching.

Many of us had annual reviews where an observer would(?) watch a structured lesson and give us feedback about what they saw. That’s helpful, but it doesn’t get at so many parts of my regular practice. Offering redos and retakes allowed me to see whether my teaching was effective in a way that did not feel threatening. It just felt like science: trying something; looking at my data; reflecting on the results; and making changes. If a student didn’t improve on a retake, it led me to question other elements of my instruction that I might not have otherwise paid attention to.
For example, a student’s grades going down might mean I needed to reflect on something I did something: was it how I taught the original content, my pedagogical moves? Was it the assessment itself that was a barrier to accurately ascertaining what was in a student’s head? Did the practice work that I assigned sufficiently support their development of the skills we were working on? Did my relationship or interactions with the student impact their learning? I was able to enter into those questions based on the data I got back from the redo results.

What about you: have you ever tried retakes? What have your results been? If you are a person who is curious about redos, what is challenging you? What are you worried about regarding possible implementation? Hearing those questions from so many teachers is why Crescendo Education Group created its new online course, “Grading for a Growth Mindset: Implementing Redos and Retakes.” The course will provide you with strategies to make your implementation of redos effective and efficient.

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!

STUDENT MADNESS BEYOND MARCH

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.

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