by Terry Heick
Grading problems are one of the most pressing issues in good teaching.
Grading can take an extraordinary amount of time. It can also demoralize students, cause them problems at home, or prevent them from getting into a particular college.
It can also demoralize teachers. If half the class is failing, any teacher worth his salt will take a long, hard look at himself and his job.
Over the years, as a teacher, I cobbled together a system that was, above all, student-centered. It was student-centered in the sense that it was designed to foster understanding, build confidence, take charge of the situation, and protect themselves when they needed to.
Part of this approach was addressed in Why did that student fail? A diagnostic approach to teachingSee below for the system – it’s really just a few rules I created that, while not perfect, have gone a long way toward eliminating grading issues in my classroom.
This meant that students weren’t paralyzed by fear as I asked them to complete increasingly complex tasks that they worried were out of their reach. It also meant that parents weren’t pressuring me for that C- grade they saw on Infinite Campus, and if both students and parents are happy, the teacher can be, too.
How I eliminated (almost) all grading problems in my classroom
1. I carefully chose what I was going to grade.
When I first started teaching, I thought in terms of “homework” and “tests.” There were tests, too.
But over time I started thinking in terms of “practice” and “measurement.” All assessment should be formative, and the idea of “summative assessment” makes about as much sense as “a final teeth cleaning.”
The core idea is what I like to call an “assessment climate,” where snapshots of students’ understanding and progress are taken in an organic, fluid, and nonthreatening way. Assessment is omnipresent and ongoing.
A “measurement” is just one type of assessment, and even the word implies “monitoring growth” in the same way that a child’s vertical growth (height) is measured 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 upon dozens of opportunities to practice in the meantime.
Be very careful about what you grade, because it requires time and mental energy, two finite resources that are crucial 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 test or exam.
2. I designed a work to be “published”
I tried to make student products (writings, graphic organizers, podcasts, videos, projects, and more) at least visible to the students’ parents. Ideally, this work would also be posted for peer feedback and collaboration, and then made available to the general public so that it would serve an authentic function in a community that the student cares about.
By making student work public (to the extent that student learning is promoted and privacy concerns are protected), assessment is largely done by the people for whom the work is intended. It is authentic, making the feedback loop faster and more diverse than a teacher might expect.
What this system loses in expert feedback that the teacher could give (although nothing says you can’t make it public and benefit from the teacher’s feedback), it makes up for in giving students substantial reasons to do their best work, correct themselves, and create higher standards of quality than those outlined in their rubric.
3. I made a rule: No F or zeros. A, B, C or “Incomplete”
First, I created a zero policy of sorts. This is easier said than done, depending on who you are, what you teach, and what the school’s “policy” is, etc. The idea, however, is to prevent zeros from mathematically ruining a student’s “final grade.”
I try to explain to students that a grade should reflect understanding, not their ability to successfully navigate the rules and gamification elements found in most courses and classrooms. If a student receives a grade of D, it should be because they have demonstrated a near-universal inability to master any content, not because they got A’s and B’s on most of the papers they were interested in, but C’s or lower on the papers they weren’t interested in, and with a handful of zeros on the papers they didn’t complete, they ended up with a D or an F.
Another factor here is grading the work as an A, B, C, or “Incomplete.” In other words, if the student did not achieve at least the average grade of C, which should reflect an average understanding of a given standard or topic, I would grade it as “Incomplete,” give clear feedback on how it could be improved, and then require the student to do so.
4. I frequently reviewed pending tasks.
Pretty simple. I had a Twitter account with all the “measurements” (work they knew counted toward their grade), so they didn’t have to ask “what they were missing” (although they did anyway). I also wrote it on the board (I had a huge board that stretched across the front of the classroom).
5. I created alternative assessments.
Early in my teaching career, I noticed students saying, in various ways, that they “got it but not quite” or that they thought they did, in fact, get it but not in the way the assessment required (reminder: English literature and language arts are highly conceptual content areas, in addition to literacy skills themselves).
So I would create an alternative assessment to check and see. Was the assessment getting in the way, hiding more than it revealed? Why beat my head against a wall explaining the logistics of a task or the intricacies of a question when the task and question weren’t the most important thing? These were simply “things” I used the same way a carpenter uses tools.
Sometimes it’s easier to just grab a different tool.
I would also ask students to create their own assessments on occasion. Show me that you understandIt didn’t always work out the way I hoped, but I got some of the most insightful and creative expressions I’ve seen from students who used this approach. As with most things, it depended on the student.
6. I taught through microtasks.
Exit passes were one of the best things that ever happened to me in my life as a teacher. I rarely used them as ‘exit tickets’ to leave the classroom, but I did use them almost daily. Why?
I was given a constant stream of data on this “assessment climate,” and it was daily, fresh, and disarming to students because they knew it was quick and if they failed, another would soon come along.
It was a “student-centered” practice because it protected them. They had so many opportunities and, when it came to math, so many grades that unless they failed everything every day, they wouldn’t “fail” at all. And if they did,
I could approach a single standard or topic from a variety of angles and complexities and Bloom’s levels, etc., often proving that the student who “didn’t get it” last week probably just “didn’t get” my question.
In other words, they had not failed my assessment; my assessment had failed them because it had failed to discover what they, in fact, knew.
7. I used diagnostic teaching.
You can read more about diagnostic teaching, but the general idea is that I had a clear sequence that I used and that I communicated very clearly to students and their families. It usually took the first month or two for everyone to get comfortable with everything, but once I did, grading issues were *almost* completely eliminated. Problems still came up, but with a system in place, it was much easier to pinpoint exactly what went wrong and why, and communicate it all to the stakeholders involved in helping to support the kids.
