I gave my students a (grading) love letter this year:
Know what I love about our class? Lots of things. Here are some of them that come to mind:
I love talking together about important and difficult subjects. Collaboratively pushing past the known and the obvious to make new discoveries and connections together.
I love exploring texts together. Finding out how they work. Discovering what they mean.
I love reading your writing. I love learning about what you think, why you think it, and, even more interestingly, how you think. I love examining the other kinds of work you produce: your artwork and acting and filmmaking reveal in multi-faceted ways how you understand texts and ideas.
I love working with you through that working process. I love writing to you about your writing. This part is very demanding and even sometimes taxing, I’ll admit; but I love pushing and provoking you: helping you to articulate more clearly and powerfully; helping you to compose your thoughts more cogently; helping you to look closer, rethink, synthesize, theorize. I love helping you to notice amazing features of your own work that you might have taken for granted. I love seeing you tackle intellectual challenges with increasing confidence, skill, and sophistication. I love admiring what you accomplish and learning from you.
I do not love grading your work. A grade tells you next to nothing about the ways you’ve succeeded or fallen short. It does not provide information that helps you improve. It doesn’t contribute to the process I’ve described above.
What a grade does do is to become the unworthy focus of attention. It’s a distraction.
It’s not your fault if you find yourself taken in by grades. We all know that grades are the currency of the academic economy. They matter – not in any real, absolute way, but in an abstract, “they matter because people think they matter” sort of way. They affect your life. No wonder everyone seems to fixate on them.
And so, when the helpful thing would be to talk about your work – the structure of your argument or your use of evidence or your bold new ideas, let’s say – we sometimes find ourselves instead talking about what your grade was or will be for the assignment. Ironically, the conversation shifts to the one thing that doesn’t actually contribute to learning.
In the meantime, some bad stuff can happen. Instead of the two of us teaming up to take your work to the next level, we can start to slide onto opposite teams. You’re doing work, and I’m judging it. You’re trying to amass points, and I’m finding cause to deduct points. We don’t want our teacher-student relationship to be that way, but when it comes to grades, it can feel like this.
And now, what was real – the dialog about the structure of your argument, your use of evidence, your bold new ideas – can start to feel like a game played for points. Part of the game might become trying to figure out what kinds of ideas and writing I, the judge, “like,” and to fashion your work to fit those perceived preferences. So much for bold new ideas. So much for taking risks in your writing. So much for authenticity.
The most helpful approach I can imagine would be to provide thoughtful, rich, detailed, specific, constructive feedback on your work, and no grades.
Problem: students and parents like to have a real-time information feed about what you’re working on and how you’re doing in the class by logging onto our school’s online grade book system. How can I provide that information feed without playing the grading game?
[In my letter, I went on to explain how we’ll establish a grade for the quarter without grading individual assignments at all, yet still provide that “information feed” expected by students and parents. I’ll talk about that system in my next entry.]
The New Christian School 