Grading for Equity Blog

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.

WHAT STUDENTS LOVE ABOUT THEIR TEACHERS’ GRADING

If you’ve read this blog before, it might seem like all we do is focus on the challenges in education–so many aspects that need transformation! So many different kinds of students and families to support! So much to do with finite time! Well, folks, this entry will be a little different.

Including Students in the Grading Conversation

Often, when adults discuss grading, they exclude students from the conversation, even though students are the people impacted most by grades. So, in our partnerships with schools and school districts, we prioritize hearing directly from students to gain a deeper and more authentic understanding of how grading lands for them. Gathering feedback from students can help us to change our grading–and other parts of our pedagogy–to be more accurate reflections of what students know and can do, more resistant to both implicit and institutional biases that affect our students, and more helpful in strengthening students’ intrinsic motivation and growth mindset.

Below, you will find some quotations from students about things that their teachers do in their grading and/or pedagogy that students actually love or that help them to learn the content and strengthen their skills. Teachers are doing some truly wonderful things!

As you read, think: What trends am I noticing in these quotations? Are there patterns that I see emerging? What might this mean for my own practice?

Two things to note:

All identifiers of students, teachers, and courses are anonymous.
We honor the exact voices of students and do not edit them unless it is to improve understanding of what they say; in that instance, you will notice brackets.
What Students Appreciate in Grading and Teaching

TRANSPARENT EXPECTATIONS

I feel a little bit of stress about my grades and that increases on tests, but it helps when teachers give study guides that look like what the test is going to look like, so I can feel like I’m prepared.

I actually like rubric grading because it helps you see the improvement that you’re making because it helps you figure out what pieces that you’re struggling in and what you could do to improve them. Because we can carry on that part to college.

FEEDBACK

My teacher always gives us practice questions during the lesson and also gives us the standards to study, which is good. And also if we do bad on a check, if we get a 2.5 or if we get a 2, the teacher writes down little notes that could help us on the test. They write down this was supposed to be this, this and that, this and that, which is helpful.

Not discouraging students in feedback, but telling them how they can build off what they already have is really helpful and I’m really appreciative for their grading style last year [and] their feedback.

When I get my grade back and it’s not a 100%, if there’s a comment on Canvas or in the Google Doc that I had my assignment turned in on, if there’s comments about where the points I missed came from, then I feel like that allows me to learn better because I get to reflect on my own mistakes and then try to fix it in future things. If it’s just, “You got a C on this,” and there’s no explanation, I often times don’t try to figure it out, I just accept it and move on. But if they provide an explanation, then I do try to learn from the mistakes I made in it.

I would go into the teacher, we would talk about the feedback and then, what’s been happening this year in my [subject] class that is very helpful is, the teacher would sit down with me and they would be like, “Okay, what are two goals that you can set for your next work that you’re going to write?[”] This is the first year that that’s ever happened. But that’s really nice.

RETAKES

Even if we do get a bad grade, if a majority of the class gets something wrong, which is usually what happens, the teacher will actually go over it the next day to show us all how to do it. And a lot of the standards show up again. And so if we did poorly on a test before, we are able to redo that standard and make that grade better.

One thing that my teacher does that makes learning a lot better, at least in my opinion, is when she grades something then gives it back to [me] with everything that I did wrong and gives us a chance to try it again. And that really helps, at least in my opinion.

Inviting Student Voices: How to Gather Meaningful Feedback

After reading this, you might be thinking, “I wonder whether my students would say something different,” or, “What exactly would my students say if I were to interview them?” Fantastic! And you’re right! We have no idea what our students would say about grading unless we ask them, unless we engage them in conversation, unless we offer inclusive pathways to hear their feedback. Here are some options for designing student feedback (and you might also know of more ways!) to get started:

1. Decide your goals

Identify what you want to discover from your students
Ask about specific grading and assessment practices––their opinions and feelings, their prior experiences, what has and hasn’t worked for them in previous classes and with other teachers, what they want (not just what they don’t want), what they would be open to trying, etc.

2. Design how you will get this information

An anonymous survey…
- Might be a good format if you know your students share their knowledge most readily in writing or generally have a hard time expressing themselves in discussion.
- Can include questions that are quantitative (for example, using Likert Scale models) as well as qualitative (leaving opportunity for students to explain their responses).
- Can take less time, and you can get everyone’s opinions simultaneously.
- May limit the responses (and what you learn) because of its more restrictive format.

A class discussion…
- Might be a good format if you know your students share their knowledge most readily through conversation.
- Can be open-ended questions, and you can adapt the questions based on their responses in the moment.
- May take more time and be difficult to keep focused on your goals.

A combination of the two…
- Might be a good option if you know that some students share their knowledge most readily through conversation, whereas other students may not feel comfortable sharing their opinion in class, particularly if it is different from their peers’ opinions.
- Allows students to choose which format they would like to complete. While the students who prefer the survey are completing it, the students who prefer discussion could be participating in that.
- May take more of your time to design and review both formats.

3. Implement your design

Prepare students. Share your goals and let them know that you are looking at their responses to improve your practices.
Devote enough time during class so that students can respond thoughtfully and completely.
Analyze the results. Look for trends, outliers, and any patterns in the responses (e.g., Did high-achieving students answer differently than students who struggle? Did boys answer differently than girls? Did shy students answer differently than outgoing students?)
Share the results with your students. Explain (visually and/or verbally) the data trends and your next steps.

Strengthening Student-Teacher Relationships Through Listening

Ultimately, this can be a wonderful way to show our students love: by listening to their voices and their experiences, and dignifying them with changes to our teaching. St. Valentine would be so proud.

Interested in learning more about us or working with us? Please take a moment to fill out our contact form here!

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