Have you seen the story about the Florida teacher who was allegedly fired for refusing to comply with her school’s no zero policy? Have you read the dialogue that has been taking place on posts about it?
Honestly this is why I avoid reading the comments most of the time. Sometimes I can’t help it. I know they will get me fired up, but I just can’t help it. I’m honestly shocked by the opinions of people who don’t teach on the subject. Even more shocking is the opinions of fellow educators.
Let’s take a moment and address the purpose of school. Why do we have school? What does a graduate “look like”? The state of Virginia where I teach actually has a “Profile of a Virginia Graduate” which lists a set of skills that students should have in order to gradate. You can find them here.
The next thing I’d like you to do is take a crash course on the purpose of a teacher. A teacher should be the person that is there to guide a student as they work toward MASTERY. That means I should be constantly (informally) assessing my students to see where they have strengths and weaknesses. Once I identify those areas the strengths should be used to support the weaknesses. When I have a student who has not yet mastered a topic it is not a failure on their part, but a failure on OUR part. WE should be working together to achieve mastery. I believe this when I teach my kindergarteners and I believe this even more when I teach adults.
Moving on to a quick overview of homework and classwork. Gone are the days when “busy work” is an acceptable part of a classroom. If you are a teacher who is still giving busy work intentionally then shame on you. No seriously, shame on you! How does that assist the student in mastering the skills needed? When it comes to homework and classwork there is more and more research and push back taking place. Check out work by Boaler (here) , Keeler and Miller ( here and here), Hattie (here), and even Sir Ken Robinson (here). I could do more research, but if you believe all that busy work prepared you for the real world then you should be able to research yourself. If you don’t you probably already think like me (and I’m really hankering for a chocolate mug cake so I’m trying to get to my point already).
Now let’s do a quick look at child development. This particular teacher taught at a K-8 school. The articles I read did not disclose her grade level. To me it doesn’t really matter. Her students were somewhere between 5 and 14. Any work that Is to be completed outside of the walls of the school CANNOT be the SOLE RESPONSIBILITY OF THE CHILD. They cannot advocate fully for themselves at that age. They cannot purchase materials, hire a tutor, etc. on their own. Can some of the older students conduct research or ask a neighbor for help? Sure, but how do you know that those students also don’t have other responsibilities such as caring for siblings? We talk about EQUITY as educators and GRADING homework or projects to be done outside of school is in no way equitable. PERIOD. The younger students may not even be developed enough to remember their assignment, have the metacognitive skills to ask for help, the higher level planning and organization needed to complete things on their own. Equity people.
Back to the idea of giving some points instead of a zero. I was in higher level classes throughout school. You know what we did for fun? We figured out what assignments mattered and didn’t matter based on points. We figured out how many points we needed for various end of course grades and adjusted our efforts accordingly. Why? Because the grade was more important than the learning. Disclaimer- I’m a major nerd and felt that while what they were teaching wasn’t important I continue to learn on my own in the areas that interest me. Interests drive learning. Not scores. If a zero is given to a student who is truly struggling with content you create a mathematical situation where it becomes almost impossible to rebound. Why try if you already know you are going to fail?
So where does that leave us?
MASTERY BASED GRADING (or standards based grading) looks solely at whether or not the student KNOWS the material. My friend Matt Larson often asks what an A means. What does a 90% truly mean? They know 90% of the material? Think about it. Do they know it or not? Assigning a percentage does not tell you what a student knows. Isn’t that what a grade is supposed to be doing, telling us what the student knows?
Providing constant formative feedback with cycles of re-teaching is the most impactful way to bring up student achievement. It tells the student AND the teacher where the gaps in learning are so that they may be supported. What does a 70% on a test tell the student or the teacher? Grades should be a form of communication (which by the way is pivotal in relationships which I believe to be the true foundation of education but that is another ranty post for another day). If you don’t believe me on this grading business check out pretty much anything by Rick Wormeli (here and here). If you are using grades as communication and direction for your instruction to move students to mastery WHY DO YOU NEED TO GIVE A NUMERICAL GRADE?
I opened with an image with a quote by Rear Admiral Grace Hopper- “The most dangerous phrase in the English language is we’ve always done it that way”. Why do we still have traditional grading? Why do we continue to argue against what has been shown to be best practice? I have a few theories.
One is that we do what is comfortable. Some teachers and many members of the community, including parents, want school to be what it was when they went. Why? Because that’s the way we’ve always done it. Research tells us so much more about learning, especially with brain research becoming more accessible. We literally know more about how we learn. Ignorance is not bliss. “Do the best you can until you know better. When you know better, do better” (Angelou). Yet so many want us to not do better with what we know.
There is another theory and that is some teachers are just lazy. They “hit their groove”. If I had a doctor that felt that they no longer needed to learn and research because they “hit their groove” I’d be dead. So would my daughter. I wrote a post about her birth. Check it out. More important than conducting the research is ACTING on the research. STOP BEING LAZY.
There are so many other theories and points I want to make but I really want that chocolate mug cake so it will need to wait until another time.
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