Sorry I'm running a bit late this week. The baby is working on erupting two or three top incisors, the wild swings in temperature/pressure are wreaking havoc with my migraines and I keep breaking out in eczema patches. Plus, it's January so the wonderful break I had for nearly of month of no doctor's visits for the baby is over.
I've been upfront about the fact that I am a traditionally schooled pre K - 12 graduate who jumped into a traditional college and then went back to the trenches of 9-12 education as a teacher. From that perspective, I'm going to lay out why parent-teachers need to figure out a way to give coherent and comprehensive grades to their students by the end of elementary school at the latest.
I'm going to expound on two reasons that home-schooling parents opt-out of grading their kids for conscious or unconscious reasons. Grading is a tricky task that requires a lot of practice. Teachers have to create grading criteria - and that's not as simple as it seems. The easiest set-up I can think of would be a text-book based system like the Maxwell Family uses. Even there, the parent-teacher has to make some choices. Do the classwork assignments count toward the final grade? How about quizzes? Are different categories of assignments weighted differently? Grading independent study or project-based learning courses is even harder. What does an "A" assignment look like in creative writing or paleontology or mandolin lessons compared to a "B" or a "C"?
The first issue can be overcome when parent-teachers learn how to pre-determine what each grade category looks like for each course. I don't have a good solution for the second issue because grading your own child accurately is so much harder than grading a random student. When I taught, I felt bad when a student failed my class - but I also had at least 80 other students who had passed that exact same class so student failures didn't feel like a personal reflection on my teaching. By comparison, when my son has a slight delay in his gross motor, fine motor or speech skills, I feel like I've failed somehow as a parent. The feeling passes quickly - but the feeling alone is an intense enough experience that I know that Jack's better off having an unrelated professional determine his "Ages and Stages" skill level. Even with my teaching experience, I would be tempted to justify passing him in skills - mainly by giving him points for other skills - to avoid feeling bad.
Why do we grade students? Grading students describes their performance against an age-appropriate standard, helps students learn how much procrastination they can get away with, and gives students practice with managing emotional responses to negative outcomes.
In a traditional school, students are surrounded by peers within a few years of age of them. Students generally get a feel for how they compare to their peers within each subject simply by comparing how much effort it takes and by seeing what grades other students get. When a student transferred into our school from another district, students were pretty accurate in their personal assessment of their skills in language arts, science, math and social studies. Students who transferred in from home schooling were a more mixed bag. Some students were very aware of which areas they had received little or no instruction in; other students believed that they were above average in a subject - but after testing and placement in a class it became clear that the student was working at markedly below grade level. Why is this important? Throughout life, people need to be able to assess their strengths and weaknesses compared to other people in their lives. As a teacher, I was middling-to-average at dealing with chronically angry students while above average in working with severely anxious students. When I had a chronically angry student, I would get support and tips from the teacher across the hall who was great with that student group - and I'd give her support and tips when dealing with anxious students.
Grading helps students learn time-management skills. For traditionally schooled students, the number of subjects they take in a day increases markedly from early elementary through junior high. As the number of classes scale upward, the students learn how to deal with conflicts like a project due the day after a math exam. Students learn the benefits of planning ahead and working at a pace that works for them. On the flip side, students learn about the drawbacks of finishing a paper at 2AM and being exhausted the next day. Chronic procrastination makes it much more difficult for students to earn "A" grades; few students can complete a high-school level project at the level of required difficulty if they don't start the project until the night before.
Finally, grading helps students learn how to manage the disappointment that comes from a poor grade - which I'll define as any grade lower than the one they wanted to get. That feeling of disappointment is intense and students learn how to release that emotion and continue moving towards a goal. After all, the vast majority of jobs involve periodic reviews by supervisors and some reviews include times where the supervisor gives the person a lower review than the person thought they were going to get. That sucks - but knowing how to manage negative feelings helps the person to move away from the feelings and into planning on how to improve their performance.
I love this blog, but your arguments against grading go against everything we know about what motivates people and the effects of competition. I invite you to read this article:
ReplyDeletehttp://www.alfiekohn.org/article/case-grades/
Grading done properly isn't about competition between people but comparison to a pre-determined standard that is clearly explained to the students. Dr./Mr. Kohn and I agree that inter-student competition is a terrible idea; I fostered a mentality of "we're all in this together" in my classroom because, well, that's how I look at life in general.
DeleteI hate to say this because I really like Alfie Kohn's ability to break through random practices - but his discussion of intrinsic and extrinsic motivation as well as "what motivates" students is poor and overlooks most of the research completed in the 1990-2010's. Motivation in students is most strongly correlated to student perception of their autonomy, competence, and relatedness. I appreciate trying to make learning enjoyable for students - and strongly encourage project-based or real-life learning at all ages along with option for group work - but for every student who feels trapped by a rubric, there is a student who appreciates the scaffolding support that a rubric brings in a project. It's a bit counter-intuitive, but teaching students to honestly assess their project against an outside standard brings about the broadest increases in student competency as measured by student perception.
I will concede that for students who are highly motivated by autonomy and more weakly motivated by feelings of competence a grading rubric can be counterproductive. For those kids - especially in a home schooling situation where the parent-teacher has the time to act as a true mentor in the sense more often associated with upper division college research - traditional grading can be swapped out by rigorous self-assessment of progress. My concern, though, is that students who are perfectionists (and I was amazed to realize just how many students end up in alternative education programs because they struggle with perfectionism) end up paralyzed by minor issues - or end up massively devaluing their own work.
Interestingly, I never saw a trend towards students picking the easiest topic/assignment/project when they were given multiple options for a graded test/project. I did have a single student who pick two options that were very easy for him the first two units - and he self-corrected that to two more challenging projects on the next unit. Doing the easiest work also means doing the least challenging (and most boring) work possible. After watching his classmates working harder - but also completing much more interesting and compelling projects - he decided he wanted to do something more engaging for him. The other 50 or so students taking that class picked projects that were challenging enough for their academic progress.
Some fair points. Thank you for answering!
ReplyDelete