An 85

So, if a student "has an 85" in your class, what does that mean?  Well, it depends on how you view grading.  Among the things I have seen in practice from colleagues and friends:

1. Grades are payment for what the student has done in class.  In this scenario, the teachers sees the grade as what the student has earned by being in the class.  Normally, everything from homework to tests to bringing in paper towels to extra credit figure into the grade, so that "an 85" is meaningless.  It almost certainly doesn't mean that the student has learned 85% of the material.  With enough extra credit, homework (done with "help" from others) and paper towels, a student who barely knows any of the material could have an 85.
2. Grades are the average of the test scores, and nothing else.  In this scenario, a series of "snapshots" from the grading period are the only means the teacher deems as valid to  determine whether or not a student has mastered the material.  The student gets test anxiety? Not important.  The student has a learning disability that makes taking a paper-and-pencil or an online test difficult if not impossible?  Irrelevant.  The student has stayed after for extra help, and during those sessions has demonstrated a deep understanding of the material through the explanations they give? Nope. Only the grades on the tests matter.  Does an 85 here mean that the student understands 85% of the material?  Probably not.  In fact, the percentage is probably higher than that, but the grade won't show it.
3. Grades are a means of ranking the students from best to worst. The best kids in the class, whether they have demonstrated it or not, get the A.  The worst kids in the class, whether they deserve it or not, get the F.  The difference between the two? It can be anything from their reputation (other teachers said this is a good/bad student) to their personality to their effort to their ability to "brown-nose" the teacher.  What's missing from this is anything related to the material.  The "85" says nothing about the student's understanding.

There are other scenarios, of course, but you get the point.  For the most part, the perception by someone reading a transcript is that "85" means the student understands (or at least understood) 85% of the material.  Anyone who has ever put a grade on a transcript knows that this isn't the case.  So if "the student has an 85" is meaningless, why do we continue to label kids in this way?

Because there's not an alternative.

Oh really?  Let's look at the report card I received when I was in kindergarten.  There was a column containing a list of skills (things like "knows numbers from 1 to 10" or "can buckle boots"...not kidding), and another column where the teacher would mark if I had the skill mastered, or if I was making progress, or if I hadn't demonstrated the skill at all yet.  On the other page of the report card were the "behavior" skills (takes turns, raises hand, etc.), along with a similar set of marks.  If anyone looked at that report card today, they would know exactly what the expectations of the class were, and what I was able to do (or not do) at the end of the first semester of kindergarten.

So why can't we give a similar report in a high school classroom?

No, seriously: why not?

We could if we actually worked with the kids as they were learning the material.  We could if we actually got in the arena with them and participated in their struggle and gave them every opportunity to demonstrate their understanding of the material.

Lecturing alone can't do this.  Testing alone won't be enough.  It takes real, meaningful discussion with each and every student to achieve this.  And don't tell me it can't be done, because this is what happens in my classroom pretty much every day.

Job Description

As we approach the end of the year, my email begins to fill with summer professional development opportunities that tend to come in a limited number of varieties.

The first type, and overwhelmingly the most common, is something along the lines of “this will help your students do better on tests.”  The PD is training in how to implement their program and use their materials.  Nothing in the advertisements for these opportunities mentions helping the students do anything other than pass tests, be they chapter or unit tests in the classroom or state or national standardized tests.  Testing is everything, and these programs are here to help your students succeed…at taking and passing tests, anyway.

The second type is something along the lines of, “this will help you keep your kids be quiet and well-behaved.”  This classroom-management type of PD focuses on keeping the kids quiet but engaged with the material.  The pictures from these advertisements show kids seated in rows or in front of their own computer, working quietly and independently, and the description of the PD emphasizes that your classroom can look like this…under the assumption that I want my classroom to look like that.

The third type is something along the lines of “this will help you present the material in your class in a better way.”  The emphasis of these is how to improve your method of delivery, how to be more clear in your lectures, how to produce better worksheets, and so on.

Notice that none of these opportunities mentions helping the kids actually learn the material.  Not one sentence in all of the advertisements mentions the kids comprehending anything.  It’s bad enough that people outside the profession think that the job description for a teacher should be dominated by keeping the kids quiet and giving them information.  But for the folks running these PD session - folks who are supposedly inside the profession - to be spewing this nonsense is irritating to say the least.  More disturbing is the idea that teachers are actually signing up for these sessions, which means, at least implicitly, that these teachers also see the job as primarily involving keeping kids quiet and giving them information.  Sorry, folks…that’s not what the job is about, and the job description I would give is essentially antithetical to everything being promoted by these opportunities. 

Teaching is about helping kids learn. Period.  The sooner we can bring everyone to the realization that testing, classroom management and giving information are not the focus of teaching, but instead are only useful if they help the kids learn, the better.

It should be clear by now that my idea of “classroom management” is very different than the one described in the PD advertisements.  It should also be clear that me giving the kids information is, in my opinion (and in the opinion of most current research), not the best way to help them learn.  But what about testing?

I still struggle with the idea that any test on any given day is the best way to measure how well a kid understands the material.  With that, I have really been struggling lately with the idea of putting a letter or number grade on every assignment, be it homework, quiz, test, or whatever, to the point that I’m questioning whether or not grades are good at all.  Let’s be honest: the kids and parents look at the grade first, and any comments or other feedback intended to help the kid do better next time are often, if not entirely, ignored.  Without a grade on which to focus, however, the feedback becomes more important.  And if the feedback is focused on improvement and resubmission of an assignment, then learning becomes the focus of the classroom.  We have implemented a strategy of this kind this semester with the review projects we assigned.  We gave the kids five broad topics from the first semester of the course, and the kids need to create an exercise that covers the topic, get the exercise approved by us, type up their solution, and submit it online for us to review.  The only grades possible are 0 or 15 (full credit).  If the solution as presented is not a “15”, the student receives specific feedback on what is missing, where improvements are needed, etc., and has the opportunity to turn in another draft of the project.  This process continues with each project until it is a “15”.

Admittedly, getting rid of grades entirely would require a massive shift the likes of which on teacher alone can't make.  But giving the kids more than one opportunity to "show what they know" and giving them a variety of ways to do so is making more and more sense the more I think about it.  For the time being, there has to be some sort of "happy medium", but I haven't found it yet.  Hopefully, between now and the beginning of the 2015-2016 school year, I'll find a way to make this happen.  Even better would be for the PD to help teachers find a way to shift the focus from the grades and the testing to the learning.  I guess we'll see...