from Terry Hayek
Assessment problems are one of the most pressing problems of good teaching.
Evaluation can take an extremely long time. It can also demoralize students, cause them problems at home, or prevent them from getting into a certain college.
It can also demoralize teachers. If half the class is failing, any teacher worth their salt will take a long, hard look at themselves and their craft.
So over the years as a teacher, I created a kind of system that was, most importantly, student-centered. It was student-centred in the sense that it was designed for them to promote understanding, build confidence, take ownership and stand up for themselves when they needed it.
Part of this approach was covered in Why did this student fail? A diagnostic approach to teaching. See below for the system – really, just a few rules I’ve created that, while not perfect, have gone a long way toward eliminating grading problems in my classroom.
Which meant that students weren’t paralyzed with fear when I asked them to do increasingly complex tasks that they worried were beyond their reach. It also meant that parents weren’t breathing down my neck “for that C-” they saw at Infinite Campus, and if both students and parents are happy, the teacher can be happy too.
How I eliminated (almost) all grading problems in my classroom
1. I chose what to rate carefully.
When I first started teaching, I thought in terms of “assignments” and “tests.” The tests were also something.
But eventually I started thinking in terms of “practice” and “measurement” instead. All assessment should be formative and the idea of ’summative assessment’ makes as much sense as ‘one last cleaning’.
The big idea is what I often call an “assessment climate,” where snapshots of student understanding and progress are taken in an organic, seamless, and non-threatening way. Assessment is ubiquitous and always on.
“Measuring” is only one type of assessment, and even the word implies “checking your growth” in the same way you measure a child’s vertical growth (height) by marking the threshold in the kitchen. This type of assessment provides both the student and the teacher with a marker – data, if you insist – of where the student “is” at that moment with the clear understanding that another such measurement will be made soon and dozens and dozens of opportunities to practice between them.
Be very careful about what you grade because it takes time and mental energy—both limited resources that are critical to any teacher’s success. If you don’t have a plan for the data before you give the assessment, don’t give it, and certainly don’t call it a quiz or a test.
2. I designed the work to be “published”
I tried to make student products—writing, graphic organizers, podcasts, videos, projects, and more—at least visible to students’ parents. Ideally, this work will also be published to peers for feedback and collaboration, and then to the general public to provide some authentic function in a community the student cares about.
By making student work public (to the extent that it promotes student learning while protecting any privacy concerns), assessment is largely done by the people for whom the work is intended. It is authentic, which makes feedback faster and more varied than a teacher could ever hope to do.
What this system loses in the expert feedback a teacher can give (although there’s nothing saying it can’t both be public and benefit from teacher feedback), it makes up for by giving students meaningful reasons to to do their best work, adjust and create higher standards of quality than outlined by your rubric.
3. I created a rule: No Fs and no zeros. A, B, C or ‘Incomplete’
First, I created a kind of non-zero policy. Easier said than done depending on who you are and what you teach and what the school “policy” is etc. The idea here, however, is to keep the zeros from mathematically spoiling the student’s “final grade.”
I try to explain to students that the grade should reflect understanding, not their ability to successfully navigate the rules and pieces of gamification crammed into most courses and classrooms. If a student receives a D, it should be because he has demonstrated an almost universal inability to master any content, not because he received A’s and B’s on most assignments of interest, but Cs or lower on the work he didn’t get, and with a handful of zeros thrown in for work they didn’t complete, ended up with a D or F.
Another factor here is marking work with A, B, C or “Incomplete”. In other words, if a student hasn’t achieved at least a C average, which should reflect average understanding of a standard or topic, I’d mark them as Incomplete, give them clear feedback on how they can improve, and then to require them to do so.
4. I often reviewed the missing assignments.
Simple enough. I had a twitter feed for all the ‘measurements’ (work they knew counted towards their grade) so they didn’t have to ask ‘what were they missing’ (although they did anyway). I also wrote it on the board (I had a huge white board that stretched across the front of the classroom).
5. I created alternative assessments.
At the beginning of teaching, I noticed students saying in various ways that they “got it, but didn’t get it all the way through.” Or that they believed they actually “got it” but not in the way the grade required (reminder: English Lit/ELA is a high conceptual content area aside from the literacy skills themselves).
So I would create an alternate estimate to check and see. Did it hinder the assessment – obscure more than it revealed? Why beat my head against the wall explaining the logistics of a task or the intricacies of a question when the task and the question are not important at all? It was just “stuff” that I used the way a carpenter uses tools.
Sometimes it’s easier to just pick up another tool.
I would also ask students to sometimes create their own assessments. Show me you understand. It doesn’t always work the way you’d expect, but I’ve gotten some of the most insightful and creative expressions I’ve ever seen from students using this approach. As with most things, it all depended on the student.
6. I taught through microtasks.
The exit sheets were one of the greatest things that ever happened to my teaching. I rarely used them as “exit tickets” to be able to leave the classroom, but I used them almost every day. why
I was given a constant stream of data about said “grading climate” and it was daily, fresh and disarming to the students because they knew it was fast and if they failed, another one would be coming soon.
It was a “student-centered” practice because it protected them. They had so many options and, mathematically speaking, so many outcomes that unless they failed every day, they wouldn’t “fail” at all. And if they were
I could approach a standard or topic from different angles and complexities and Bloom’s levels, etc., which often showed that the student who “didn’t get it” last week more likely just “didn’t get it” my question.
In other words, they haven’t failed in my estimation; my assessment failed them because it failed to reveal what they really knew.
7. I used diagnostic training
You can read more about diagnostic teaching, but the general idea is that I used a clear sequence that I communicated very clearly to the students and their families. It usually took the first month or two to get everyone comfortable with all of this, but once I did, the grading issues were *almost* completely eliminated. Problems still occurred, but with a system in place it was much easier to identify exactly what went wrong and why, and to communicate it all to the stakeholders involved in helping children.
