Grading and Remote Learning: It Can Work

We are currently watching the collapse of a house of cards that has been built around carrots and sticks that are turning out to be smoke and mirrors. 

The house of cards? Our education system. 

The smoke and mirrors? Our outdated, system-driven (as opposed to student-driven) method of distributing grades as if they were compensation for work as a method of superficially motivating students. 

Don't get me wrong. There is some element of extrinsic motivation that all humans crave, and I'm not saying that's entirely wrong. 

What I'm saying is that when it drives thirteen years of a student's life, with the sole goal of proving their worth through some artificial representation of their "intelligence," then we've created a system that might be (I only say "might be" instead of "definitely is" to avoid scaring people off in the intro) actually doing more harm than good. 

So, here's the deal. None of this is working right now in terms of grades and assessment. 

Here's the scarier deal: if we continue basing our grades in a compliance model of education, we'll be stuck in "do no harm" land for a really long time. Let's face it. We're almost certainly not going back into our buildings in the fall in the ways we're used to, and that means we're still going to be facing the equity issues around assessment that we're finally noticing this year, which is the reason we've ended up just not being able to give out grades at all. 

Sound like a good plan for next year? Really excited to hand out 1's for nothing at all and 2's for someone typing their name on a page? 

Me neither. 

So here are our options: continue down the compliance-grading model that got us into this mess or finally recognize that there is a better way to record student learning in a way that makes learning more meaningful for the student, that facilitates better conversations about learning, and motivates students by tapping into our human drive for mastery and autonomy. 

If you chose the first option, um, bye. Have a nice day. 

If you chose option two, we've got some heavy lifting ahead of us. Making an assessment system that works for kids isn't easy and it's messy, but it is so incredibly worth it. 

Here’s the part that excites me. Never before have we been handed a clearer time to rethink the entire way we assess students. Every single year, our desire to change butts up again the desires of the traditional school model, but that has been obliterated. Now, this is our chance. We can’t let it go to waste and try to return to business as normal when we get back. 

I won't pretend to have the silver bullet that solves all of this, but here are three steps that will move us in the right direction.  

1. Establish a clear purpose for grades. 

This has been the biggest issue in transitioning to remote learning. The reason a "do no harm" policy for grading had to be implemented was because the majority of the education system views the purpose of grading as a measure of compliance. Now, no one is really going to say that, but I'll present you with a scenario to make my case. 

Student A has turned in all of the ten assignments you had them do covering one standard throughout the year. Student B has turned in only three of them. However, in their work, both students have demonstrated the exact same level of understanding of that standard. What would your grade book show? Because here's the issue: If Student A receives a higher grade than Student B, then your grade book is a measure of compliance. If the two students receive the same grade, then your grade book is a measure of learning. 

Now, I know people are going to be up in arms about getting students ready for the real world and holding them accountable and teaching them responsibility and blah blah blah. I'll address that in a second, I promise, because that truly does matter. Maybe not in the way we try to "teach" it through our grade book penalties, but it does matter. 

Here's what matters more: if you say the purpose of grading is to communicate a students' current level of learning and mastery of the content and skills, then THAT'S WHAT YOUR GRADE BOOK SHOULD SHOW. It has to start at clearly identifying a purposeful reason for why we grade students. 

Now, here's where I'll address the whole "soft" skills (which, can we stop calling them soft skills and start addressing the fact that these are the most important things we can teach our students if we truly want them to be successful?). Again, I present you with another scenario. 

Student A completes their assignment on time and demonstrates proficiency in the standard, equalling 75% in your grade book. Student B completes their assignment two days late but demonstrates mastery in the standard, earning 100% in your grade book. However, you have a late policy that penalizes a student by subtracting 25% of their score from the grade book. As such, both students end up with a 75% for the assignment in the grade book. Which students' grade is an accurate representation of their learning? The obvious answer is Student A because Student B's grade incorporates multiple factors. Now, here's what I'm suggesting: instead of clumping multiple factors together, why not separate them out? It’s not that difficult. In fact, it’s easier that our method of clumping behavioral factors into one assignment. Look, here’s what it could look like in its simplest form.

Using that previous scenario, let me give you two options, and you can tell me which one most clearly communicates what Student B needs to work on. Option 1 is to enter one grade into the assignment of 75%, representing the combination of the student's performance and behavior. Option two is to record two scores, 100% for the learning and a 50% for the behavior. Which one most clearly communicates BOTH the academic performance and the behavior, clearly identifying what needs to be focused on for the student moving forward? 

Now, I won't tell you how to weight things, but I will remind you that if the purpose of a grade is to communicate currently levels of learning, and you are weighting the behavioral components of the performance (be it embedded in the grade or separated out), you aren't truly adhering to the purpose of grading. 

The piece that blows my mind is that so often our elementary reports cards do this. They separate out the content from the behavior, but somewhere between 5th grade and 9th grade, there’s this switch where we say, “Okay, enough with the learning and behavior growth. Let’s just get you credits,” and then we switch everything to “What’s your GPA and which credits are you earning?” and that becomes the sole point of our report cards. 

Understanding our purpose for grading HAS to be the foundation of any assessment that will result in meaningful learning, not just during a remote learning scenario, but also in ANY learning scenario. 

So, let's start there. The purpose of a grade is to accurately communicate current levels of performance. 

2. Understand what mastery-based learning is and why it matters.

Sal Khan paints this great picture of why mastery-based learning matters in his 2015 TED Talk. To summarize, he equates school to building a house. If someone got a score of 70% on their foundation, a 70% on their first floor, and then while they're working on their second floor, the entire thing collapses. Is that the fault of the builder, or is it the fault of the process which allowed the builder to move on despite not successfully completing 30% of each step? 

Our grading system is essentially the faulty system that allows students to move forward with significant gaps, which turn into disastrous holes as those gaps compound to the point where we have students who can't complete basic skills at the high school level. Is that the students fault that they learned 60% of the content by the end of the year and then moved on, or is it the system's fault that they pushed that student onto new content knowing full well that they were missing a significant chunk of the learning?

Can I just emphasize that for the first time in what feels like the history of education the entire system is currently set up to facilitate mastery-based learning? What's the biggest hold-up for mastery-based learning in a traditional classroom? Managing kids in one room who are all in different spots. Well, guess what? We aren't all in the same room, and virtually all of our content is now being delivered asynchronously, which means that it is easier than ever for students to move at different paces. 

Here's what mastery-based learning could look like (brace yourselves for this mind-blowing possibility): students are learning what they need to be learning for the amount of time that they need to be learning it. 

I don't mean to be facetious here. This idea could be the revolution of the educational system, and we are set up better than ever to do this right now. 

Let me prove it and how easy it could be in remote learning.

Week 1 is on photosynthesis. At the end of week 1, 13 of 24 students are ready to move on. You tell those students, "Move onto week 2." For the other 9 students, you say, "Keep working on week 1." 

Then, because we aren't tied to a schedule where we have all the same kids in the same room every single day, we schedule a time to meet with all of the kids working on the standard for week 1, and then a different time to work with the kids on the standard for week 2. Then, we even still have time to get everyone together to cross-pollinate or do some community building. 

It honestly is simpler than ever before. If there was ever a time to make the switch, now is the time. 

However, this isn't even the important thing about mastery right now. The important thing about mastery is that it will make the student's education meaningful right now and ensure that we aren't doing students a disservice by simply passing them along with a minimum grade requirement. 

I have heard it from so many teachers that they are concerned that there are going to be significant gaps in learning when students return, and how will we know what we're supposed to be teaching kids? Well, what if each kid came in with a clear profile of the skills they know and the skills they don't? Because if that's the case, it's really easy for me to figure out what to teach. 

That's what a mastery-based system would do. It allows us to create a meaningful record of which skills a student has learned and which they haven't so that we can know exactly what we need to teach that student. 

Here's the question that's coming up right now: But how in the world do we manage that?

3. Leverage the portfolio assessment. 

What is a portfolio assessment? It's exactly what it sounds like. It's a collection of the student's best work that they then use to demonstrate mastery of skills and content. There's nothing revolutionary about that. What can be revolutionary is how this can be paired with a mastery-based system to create a truly meaningful approach to assessment. 

Here's what it might look like in the classroom. For your first three assignments, students engage in similar learning experiences, though the product might look different for each student. Those students collect those in their portfolio. When students enter their pieces into their portfolio, they engage in self-reflection to identify the strengths and weaknesses of their products in relation to the learning objectives. After they've entered a few of their assignments into their portfolio, they engage in a portfolio review with their peers. Traditionally in a classroom, this is easy. Students sit down at a table and talk through how they demonstrated the learning objectives in the different products. The goal of this is for the peers to help the student identify which skills they should continue focusing on. 

At the end of the peer review, ideally the student and teacher would get a chance to meet to talk about the next steps and develop their next project, though, after the first time or two of doing this, the student will likely be able to determine this on their own (depending on the student's age, of course). 

Once you've gotten past the first round or two of the portfolio reviews, the goal is that the students are constantly engaged in a process where they are reviewing their mastery of the standards and skills, planning how they are going to attempt to learn and demonstrate those skills again, and receiving feedback in a true feedback loop. 

Think about what that would be like for the student. This would take assessment from something that's done to them and turn it into something that they use and control. In addition, they would be able to choose how they demonstrate their learning, empowering them to engage in their passions and interests as a medium for the standards and skills. 

I know right now some of you are thinking, "So you just throw them into the wind and watch where they go?" No, not at all. With a mastery system in place and a clear process for the portfolios, students have the structure they need to be able to know where they are headed, and in that is where they can find their choice. 

Final Thoughts:

Now, here's the key to all of this. We have to let go of the idea that our curriculum drives our assessments and recognize that powerful learning exists only in the opposite order. Assessment should drive the curriculum, not the other way around. I know I say that as if it’s easy, but in reality, I’m asking you to question the entire educational experience you had as a child and then reimagine that process completely. I promise that some day I will unpack this more in another post, but today’s not that day (because this is already long enough that you deserve a medal just for getting to this sentence). 

This only happens when we do the hard work of training students to be independent learners. That doesn't just happen automatically. It takes explicit instruction in things like identifying reliable resources, learning what an independent learning process looks like, and how to engage in meaningful self-assessment. This doesn't happen overnight, and it doesn't happen without intentionality on our part as teachers. 

However, picture what this could be like. Instead of spending our time developing curriculum and lesson planning for the following day, we get to spend more of it in meaningful conversations with students around their learning, not assignments and completion, and we get to watch students develop independence, problem-solving skills, their passions, etc. 

Where do we start? 

This is the hardest part. 

We have to let go of the idea that the only way for a classroom to function is for the teacher to drive everything. We have to let go of the idea that we are distributers of content and that our job is to check that all students learned the content in a pretty, orderly fashion according to our timeline. Instead, we have to embrace the fact that each student is on their own timeline for learning, and either we are going to let that timeline happen or force them out of it with our own idea of the pace at which they should learn. 

We have to let go of the idea that school is a game we teach students to play where they follow the rules and do as they're told because that's the only way to learn. 

We can pretend we believe those things, but until our assessment system lays the foundation needed for this to actually happen, it's just something we tell ourselves to make us feel better. 

It takes work. It takes mistakes. It takes messiness. 

But, it can create students who are passionate, independent, and confident learners. 

Is there anything more important than that?