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.
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