I'm a numbers girl. I take comfort in data (provided it's been collected properly) and am constantly on the lookout for trends that hard data can provide.
I shared this with my math class last week - I love what the numbers can tell us! |
As a teacher, for the longest time I was of the view that if I wanted to know exactly how much of the material my students had mastered, a hard and fast grade would be the way to find out. You got three questions right and two questions wrong. You completed three of the four steps needed to solve this problem. You didn't properly communicate your answer: -2 marks.
This was also something that was easy to show a parent or the student themselves if they wanted to know "why their mark was the way it was." It was (in my mind) reliable, calculatable, and foolproof.
The Shift Begins
The past few years, though, I've moved toward assigning levels rather than grades, as outlined in Growing Success, and was surprised to see that I actually liked it. I liked being able to assign a qualifier ("The student predicts a result with considerable logic") rather than a quantifier (75%).After a decade of teaching, I found I had more trust in my professional judgement... a trust I didn't have when I was a new teacher. I didn't have to rely on a hard and fast number to report on the success of the student - I became more comfortable using a spectrum to identify strengths and next steps.
With a writing workshop on rich task assessment last year where we broke down the rubric-writing process, I also became much more comfortable creating good rubrics - ones with solid spectra for assessing specific success criteria.
Now, most of my gradebook is levels, with unit tests being the only numerical evaluation I record. I've seen how feedback can have a greater impact on success than grades. But I'm starting to wonder about taking things one step further...
Going Gradeless?
Last week, I tried something new - I returned a worksheet to my grade 12 math class with no grade, and no level written at the top. There was lots of feedback though - from checkmarks and happy faces to encouragement to try again or ideas of how to rethink their approach to problem solving. I recorded a level for myself, but wrote nothing at the top of the page for the students.Would the students notice? Many of them are very concerned over their grades... would the students demand a mark? It turns out very few of them did. A couple of them asked "what they got" on the assignment, which then turned into a conversation about how they did based on the feedback embedded in the worksheet. It was actually a nice way to place the emphasis back on the feedback.
I'm feeling good about starting to go gradeless. But can I give up grades & levels completely?
I've been talking with Jonathan So (@MrSoclassroom) on how he ditched grades, meets curriculum expectations with his students, and how his students self-grade. I think it's fascinating how well he works with his students to develop not only success criteria, but also their ability to assess themselves. If his students can do all this in grade 6, surely mine can do the same in grade 9 or grade 12, right?
Along the same lines, at OAME this year, I heard about about one school that gives entire classes "I" ("insufficient") on the midterm report card, so as to not give false hope (some students stopped working figuring they could coast to the end of the year) or to dash hopes (by having students feel that there is no use in continuing to try). They are essentially providing a gradeless report card. Could I do that?
Jonathan suggested that I check out Starr Sackstein's book: Hacking Assessment. She was able to go gradeless with an AP class - I'm looking forward to reading about how she did it, and continuing my own exploration on feedback over grades.