by Robert Rue —
Most of us went through this when we were students: We got a test or maybe a paper back from a teacher, and we received a bad grade. Why? Well, we saw from the red marks on the paper that we’d done some things wrong. But how could we make them right? If doing things right was a matter of memorizing material, and if we didn’t suffer from some unconquered learning disability, maybe the problem could be fixed in a fairly simple way: just study harder.
But if the task—say analyzing a passage of literature or solving a problem that had no definitive answer—required something more than regurgitation, the bad grades might continue.
As an educator, you know what’s next: Let the crisis responses begin!
In the worst-case scenario, the student begins to give up. Maybe he becomes hostile and blames the teacher. Maybe she amiably “accepts” that she is “dumb” and retreats into silence and repeated failure. In what sometimes seems like the best-case scenario, a series of endless requests for help begins, but no matter how many times teacher and student convene, the problems continue. The student, often prompted by a parent, asks the teacher repeatedly, with less and less hope each time, “What can I do to get a better grade?”
Some educators have decided that grades are to blame for the sad scenarios described above. Grades force a universal standard on students, implying that all young people at all stages in their development ought to be capable of the same things as their peers. Grades invite a competition that rewards the few and punishes the many. They separate the “normal” from the “intellectually malformed.” Grades require students to detect and placate the mere preferences of teachers. When this happens, education quickly becomes a soulless process not of learning but of hoop-jumping that, if successfully endured, ends with the only thing that mattered all along: a credential.
Other educators look at the same phenomena and conclude that these consequences of grading are a sobering but nonetheless appropriate preparation for life. Life isn’t fair. Everyone is not equal, and besides, the people who can improve themselves will only do so if they stop making excuses and get to work. Grades reflect the values of a meritocracy: some people will fail and others will rise to the top. This might be regrettable, but it is real, and schools must acknowledge what is real.
Yes. Sobering.
But what if the problem were not with grades but rather with how we’re using them? What if grades could be viewed by students and teachers alike not as rewards or punishments but as clarifiers of what—and how much—needs to be done? What if they could actually help to inspire rather than stifle learning?
I would argue that in classes with a reasonable student-teacher ratio all of the above is possible. But only if educators are grading the right things.
I should pause here to clarify the goal I’m actually aiming toward. The goal is not to make sure that all students receive A’s or that all students feel good about themselves at all times. (I wouldn’t be against those outcomes; I just wouldn’t measure the success of my school with these criteria.) And the goal is not to disingenuously pretend that all students should have the same abilities, or that the best practice would be to grade students only on what they are already good at.
For me, the goal in whatever we’re teaching is for each student to get as close to the appropriately determined standard of excellence as possible. (More on that standard later.) Furthermore, the goal is to identify, cultivate and praise habits of mind that are likely to lead to further learning.
I don’t think the traditional use of grades is adequately achieving either of these goals. But I think the right use of grades can.
In American educational culture at large, grades are often used only to measure the quality of the products (tests, papers, quizzes, projects, etc.) a student completes during a course. Once a grade is given on an assignment, there’s nothing a student can do about it, and therefore the grade has little to do with learning. It is simply the stamp of approval or disapproval that gets placed on a product—a result that may or may not reflect what a student has learned.
Don’t believe that last assertion? You say a bad grade, barring a teacher’s incompetence, is a reflection of bad learning?
Okay. Let’s take an example that for most of us hits less close to home. Imagine that you’re learning chess. You learn how all the pieces move; you come to understand something about attacking and protecting space on the board; you digest some interesting opening strategies used by masters. You’re enjoying this. Your brain is humming with satisfaction and anticipation. When a new day starts, you’re eager to get back at it.
But when it’s time to play your first match—your test—you get crushed in short order by an experienced player.
Your teacher now gives you your first grade—an F, or maybe a “generous” D. You got crushed, after all. You made objective errors on multiple moves. What could you have possibly learned?
Well, what if what you learned was how to be curious about chess? The value of confronting a confusing strategy and digging more deeply into what it means. What if you learned that it’s not enough to just accept that an opening set of moves is effective but that one must figure out why? What if you learned in sparring with your teacher that making a risky move was something that could lead to greater understanding of chess, even if in the moment it led to defeat? What if you learned the value of adjustments after failing, even if your adjustments were not yet good enough to win?
Do you agree that, despite the failure on the test (losing), all of these things would be the hallmarks of a person who is likely to improve at chess, maybe even become excellent at it? Would you also agree that none of these things would have been valued in the failing grade the student received on the match/test?
Isn’t this exactly what we do to students when we only grade their products and when their final grade in a course is nothing more than an average of these product-grades with a vague dollop of “class participation” thrown in?
Throughout a school year, in addition to the usual product grades—yes, we should keep giving those—teachers should be grading students on the following process-oriented criteria:
- How actively and curiously does the student participate in the process of learning?
- How consistently does the student work, both in and outside of class time?
- How successfully does the student create and meet deadlines in the process of learning?
- To what extent does the student make a reasonable work plan and then make appropriate adjustments when the plan isn’t working as well as it should?
- To what extent does the student seek to genuinely understand the concepts that are relevant to learning in the course, as opposed to simply seeking the expedient answer?
- To what extent does the student take risks in order to learn something, even if those risks might make the work more complicated or temporarily worse?
- To what extent does the student embrace the process of critique and revision rather than trying to justify each one of his/her initial decisions?
- Does the student know how to formulate questions and self-critiques, the exploration of which lead to better learning?
Again, grades in these categories should not replace grades on products. But these grades should be equally important to their product counterparts.
Why?
Because traditional product-grading tells students only the extent to which they performed well. Even a thoughtful comment on a paper that often accompanies a product-grade—a comment that engages with the student’s flawed logic and points the student toward a more nuanced thesis—tells the student nothing about how to arrive at such sophistication.
Only scholarly habits of mind—named and evaluated in process-oriented grades—will lead to that result.
We can’t be silent about process. Our courses need to be about these habits of mind.
But most of us will need to change the way we teach in order to do this. Rather than leaving process to the students and thinking of it as solely a homework task, we will need to intervene in process. We will need to make students’ enactments of it visible so that it can be discussed and evaluated.
This means that we need to give students some class time to write their papers and complete their projects instead of asking them to do it all for homework. While they are working in class, we need to check in with them, observe them and ask questions about how they are proceeding. In many cases, we will need to model process by breaking assignments down into steps and then commenting on each one. The more facility students gain with process, the more we can free them to create their own.
But hold on, you might say. If I’m using class time for students to work on “homework,” this will mean that there’s less time for class discussion and for the delivering of information. This will mean that each assignment will take longer to complete. That means I’ll cover less material.
Yes.
To be blunt, do you want to have more discussions, assign more assignments and cover more material, or do you want students to get better?
Or maybe you say, fine, I should evaluate process along with product, but why do I need grades to do either?
Because there’s too much room for confusion when one only comments on student work. When commenting on process or product without attaching a grade, it is more difficult to convey the to-what-extent? part of the evaluation. Some things may take teachers more sentences to explain than others, and students may mistake the volume of the teacher’s words on a topic for its relative importance. But a grade, teamed up with those comments, can quickly and efficiently sort out the potential confusion.
And of course it’s true that any use of a grade implies that there is a standard that is worth aiming for. And I think that’s the way for both teachers and students to think about it—not a standard that will make you normal, but a standard that is worth aiming for. If you don’t get all the way to the A-standard, you don’t need to be dubbed “stupid,” but you do deserve to know how far you are from that standard, whether or not you are developmentally ready to achieve it.
So where should the standard come from?
The judgment of good teachers in conference with other good teachers.
The “conference” part of that sentence prevents any one teacher from going rogue with wildly idiosyncratic expectations. And the A+ standard—modeled for all—should be just beyond what your best students are capable of. Why? Because learning only happens when one is striving for something. The best students deserve a target as much as the weakest ones do. And with appropriately benchmarked standards all the way down the scale, everyone can have an immediate goal right above the grade-level they just achieved.
And that brings me to what I like most about process grades: they are powerfully, accurately optimistic. Unlike product-only grades, process grades implicitly reject the notion that one’s current performance is indicative of one’s capacity, that one’s brain never changes. Process grades—that is, the growth mindset they value and represent—scream out to the student, “This is what you do to get better!”
Does all of this make grading a science? Of course not.
But imagine if, throughout our school lives, we’d all had such a voice in our ears.
