The Shock of Public Scrutiny
Early in my teaching career in New York City Public Schools, I knew that my students weren’t getting grades that reflected their proficiency. Not only did I know this, but EVERYONE knew it.
You see, one year the City’s Department of Education experimented with publishing the names of teachers whose students had the lowest standardized test scores. There was no warning about it, no town hall (from what I can recall)–you just woke up one morning, and your name was on a website. By “your name,” of course, I mean my name. It was me. My name was blasted on a website–along with several other unwitting teachers–as the teachers with the lowest standardized test scores. I didn’t get it. My students had solid report card grades that fell along the bell curve theory I had learned in education school: some struggling grades, a lot of middle to average grades, and a handful of strong grades. From looking at my gradebook, it didn’t appear that any student was on the verge of tanking the state test. I was surprised, my students were surprised, my colleagues were surprised, and families were surprised. One parent even called the school to demand their child be removed from my class. Suffice it to say, it was not a fun time.
Transformational Revelations
From this event, though, came two revelations that changed my teaching and compelled me to reexamine how I assessed kids.
Revelation #1: I had a bias toward “pleasant” and “delightful” students. I began looking over the report card grades for all my students and comparing grades to test scores. At first, I didn’t notice anything pronounced or especially off–or, at least, I didn’t know how to detect that something was off. I kind of shrugged and set this examination aside. A week or so later, I was given a list of students who would be coming two mornings per week for reading support. I looked at the list and thought, “Oh, I love these kids! They’re the sweetest!” But then I went back to my assessment comparison data: These same kids scored lowest of all my students on the state test, but had C-range grades in my class. How could this be that the students who read least proficiently and scored lowest on a standardized test would somehow be “middle of the pack” students on their report cards? My own voice echoed back to me, Oh, I love these kids! They’re the sweetest! I realized that I did a combination of things to boost the grades of these students and others whom I liked (and by liked, I mean students who did what they were told, stayed quiet, and were friendly). I upgraded their participation score even if they didn’t necessarily participate. I rounded up when they were teetering between two grades. I didn’t dig in or push them the way I should have when they turned in practice work that was entirely incorrect. Because they fit my idea of what a “good” student was, I dismissed their lack of learning while also making small tweaks to pad their grades.
So, what did I do? Thankfully, I realized pretty quickly that I was doing a disservice to these students by giving them a false sense of their competency. I also began to wonder, “How many students have I possibly downgraded for their funky or less agreeable attitudes or ways of showing up in class that I don’t like even though they might be entirely proficient in the skills and content we are learning?” To address these issues, I changed nebulous categories like participation to as low a percentage as my school would allow (5%). Next, I decided to use report card comments and email correspondence to report things like arriving late, falling asleep in class, or working poorly with peers , but I stopped adjusting grades based on these behaviors. Finally, I weighed summative outcomes like individual projects and tests more heavily than I had previously done in order to reflect the totality of student mastery.
Revelation #2: I didn’t know how to grade. I was never taught how to do it, never required to take a grading methodologies course in graduate school (I’m not even sure it was offered!), never taught about categories or weights. I just did what I could remember my teachers doing when I was a high schooler. My students’ grades were mostly composed of homework, which was graded for mere completion every day, with no feedback on proficiency. At the end of the quarter, grades consisted of roughly 30 homework assignments, one test, one group project, and maybe three quizzes–none of which, by the way, were designed with a learning target in mind. Rather, I would look through whatever I had taught and then design an assignment based on my slide presentations. Basically, all report card grades were inaccurate representations of my students’ competencies.
So, what did I do? I realized that homework needed to play a smaller, if any, role in student grades, so my first step was reducing the weight of homework assignments (from 30% to 10%). Next, I began providing constructive feedback on homework instead of simply marking “done” if something was on the page. Finally, I recognized I needed to develop systems for giving quality feedback on meaningful assignments that were directly tied to assessments with clear learning objectives, so I became selective about assigning practice work that was tied to larger goals and gave functional feedback in a timely manner (within a week).
Embracing Equitable Grading Practices
While I am not proud of my early lack of knowledge about grading, I can’t blame myself for it: I was never given access to any research outside of my own experiences. And if this was true for me, it had to–has to–be true for so many other teachers. This emerges in Joe Feldman’s recent whitepaper “Can We Trust the Transcript”, which found that the majority of students’ grades don’t match what they know. I am happy to still be in the education world–especially at a time when teachers are looking at their grading and simply saying, “Something ain’t right!”
Unlearning old ways and coming to new understandings in grading is a tough process. As we shift and change, here are some questions related to the more equitable practices mentioned above that I found helpful:
Increasing the Weight of Summative Work
- What would be a reasonable timeline to gradually reduce the summative work and increase the formative weights?
- How will you communicate this to your students?
- What other practices (for example, redos or retakes) will be needed since more weight is placed on summative assessments?
- Do you assess anonymously (without seeing student names), and how might anonymous assessment impact this grading practice?
Excluding Participation from the Grade
- What are strategies you can use to measure/assess soft skills without your own biases “infecting” your grading?
- How will you explain non-graded expectations to students? Will there be a rubric?
- How can observational data about soft skills be communicated to students and their families? How can it be communicated in progress reports, report card comments, or other ways (e.g., emails, phone calls, notes) instead of impacting the grade calculation?
- What are specific ways you can explicitly teach students to develop soft skills that will improve their own individual ways of learning?
- What are ways to praise students or respond with correction and support for soft skills progress that would not be incorporated into the grade calculation?
