On Gradelessness: The Knives of Self-Reflection

Curious!

Today my students completed a survey consisting of 20 "I am..." "I do..." or "I have..." statements about course objectives. (e.g. "I practiced my presentation alone, with a peer, or in front of a camera and improved my confidence and smoothness of delivery," or "I always organize my writing by planning ahead, dividing my ideas into logical paragraphs, and using transitional phrases to link ideas.")

They had to rate each statement on a scale from 1 to 10, where 10 meant that they felt they had done a stellar job at it. Add up those numbers, divide by 2, and you have a number between 10 and 100--which kind of not coincidentally looks like a grade in the course. It isn't a grade, I reminded them--it's just a number. But it's hard to see numbers between 10 and 100 in school without seeing them as grades. Even I had to be very careful and consciously re-culture my use of language while explaining this activity.

The final question on the survey asked them to write a paragraph giving specific evidence of their progress to support the mark they thought they had earned so far.

I'll be honest, I was expecting many of my less-than-motivated 4C students to give themselves inflated marks. This does not reflect kindly on me, but there you have it. News flash: jaded teacher makes unwarranted assumptions about reluctant learners. I have much to unlearn. So do we all.

I am intrigued to report that without exception, each student has advocated for a lower mark than the math suggests. Yep: none of them think they deserve the (non) mark that they just gave themselves.

This, as I said, is curious.

I'm not sure how to tease out the factors at play here:

• Maybe the very specific nature of the reflection questions has made them suddenly aware of their own shortcomings and gaps.
• Maybe years and years of being told that they are "bad" English students has made it hard for them to see themselves in the mirror and find themselves worthy of "good" marks. 
• Maybe they're just modest.
• Maybe they figure I'm just going to give them a bad mark anyhow, like every other teacher has so far in 12 years of school, so they're just beating me to the punch.

There are probably as many possible explanations as there are students in the class. I anticipate some interesting conferences at mid-term, and hopefully some happy students who come away from this process with the sense that they're better than they think they are, and are actually learning even if they don't yet stack up to some externally-imposed set of benchmarks of standardized achievement.

A good day in the gradeless classroom, indeed.

On Gradelessness: The Buy-In

Conceptually, I really like the idea of gradelessness. In practical terms, though, it's a bit of a mixed bag--and the difference seems to be entirely one of buy-in: students that are already invested in the broader goals of education are cheerfully engaged with the new directions and activities of the gradeless classroom. Students that were not particularly invested are sometimes floundering.

I am in a pretty ideal position for doing field observation on this dichotomy. I currently teach a highly-motivated and mostly university-bound 3U English class, a significantly less-motivated and mostly trades and college bound 4C English class, and--to complete the split--a stacked 4U/C Writers' Craft class: a little bit of everything.

The 3U class mostly loves this. They are embracing the opportunities to revise, to teach themselves and each other, to choose texts and topics that are of personal interest. And they are learning. We have done less "work," but we have done it more intensively and more focused on particular individual needs, and it is already paying off. My 3U class, like most 3U classes I've ever taught, was generally a productive and engaged roomful of people helping each other get better at the task at hand.

The 4C class, on the other hand, is for the most part languishing. They're nice people, don't get me wrong, but there is not a strong built-in culture of self-improvement in this room--at least, not as regards English skills. Around a third of the class has directly told me that they just "want a 51% and to get the hell out of high school," and they are playing this class the same way they have played every other boring high school course they've ever taken--look for the quickest, easiest way to meet the minimum requirements, then stop.

Trouble is, this class is different, and the expectations are different, and what they're doing is not likely to result in a passing evaluation at midterm. The change has been too dramatic for some of them, and others simply do not take me seriously--the only part of the talk about what a gradeless classroom looks like that has sunk in is the half-misunderstood notion that they "get to give themselves their own grade."

All my efforts to impress on them that "the bare minimum" is no longer sufficient for a pass are currently falling on deaf ears. When I give them checklists asking them if they've done the process work, they blithely check every box, even if there's no evidence to support it. When I remind them that one of the important considerations is how they use class time, they nod sagely and then surreptitiously return to playing games on their phones. "Don't worry, sir," they reassure me; "it'll get done"--as if "getting it done" was all that was required.

Gradeless classrooms shouldn't be reserved for academically-inclined students. But much more work needs to be done both to explain and to sell the concept to my disinclined students; much more work needs to be done (probably much earlier in their academic careers, mostly not even within the walls of the classroom) to create a cultural expectation that we do not go to school with intent merely to demonstrate minimal proficiency, but with intent to set personal goals, work hard, and show progress.

Of course, that should be--and for the most part is--the aspiration of every teacher for every student in every course; and yet we find ourselves, time and time again, facing a wall of resigned apathy from disenfranchised senior students like some cold war detente: "Don't make me work too hard," they seem to say, "and I won't make your life difficult."

Ah, well. End rant. Back to the task of not just teaching English, but of trying to shift the cultural needle in the room. More specific and productive ideas in my next post.

On Gradelessness: No Carrot, No Stick

Marks, my students tell me, are a carrot on a stick.

"Do this and I will give you marks" is the basic motivator in the traditional high school classroom. "Don't do this, and I will withhold marks." Dangle the prize forever just out of reach and the donkeys will move forward, if grudgingly.

In a school system like this, everything is transactional: the end always justifies the means.

Trouble is, learning is not a series of ends. It is not an outcome. It is a process. What we should be trying to do in schools is create not people who have learned, but people who are learners: people who understand and value the process of learning, and can use the process in their own lives without a teacher dangling a carrot or waving a stick.

So I did away with marks. No carrot, no stick. This is where the panic creeps in at the edges: after 15 years of developing resources, strategies, and techniques for a marks-based classroom, what does that leave me with? How will I motivate them? How will I make them DO anything?

Pause. Think about that. Those three questions above are all about me and my own fears--fears of letting go, fears of losing authority, fears that the children of today won't bother learning anything at all without some Shea-shaped éminence grise lurking in the shadows, driving them onward to adulthood.

This is ridiculous, of course. There are already a host of motivators, both intrinsic and extrinsic, driving these young adults. They may be the most thoroughly driven people in our society today. What they might not be motivated to do is to master the skills and concepts required by the Ontario English Curriculum. What they might not be driven to do is to appreciate some of the finer points of literature that I, an English teacher, might want them to appreciate.

So I have two ways forward:

1. Set clear goals and expectations: whatever it is you are reading, whatever it is you are working on, you must accomplish outcomes X, Y, and Z, as outlined in the curriculum. Explain why these are important outcomes. Trust students to understand. Give them checklists so they can track their own progress, set their own directions, move at their own various paces.

2. Be a coach, role model, and cheering section: whatever it is I ask them to do, whatever it is they decide to do without me asking, help them understand not just the what, but the why; work alongside them to show them the process and the value of these activities; whatever it is they are doing, support them and help them to do it better.

There is no room in a gradeless classroom for a joyless teacher. There is no room in a gradeless classroom for a teacher who does not, on a personal level, value doing the work that students are doing. And there is no room in the gradeless classroom for a teacher who projects their own insecurities onto the classroom by seeking to control student behaviour.

No carrot, no stick.

the geometry of everything

i trace the geometry of everything:
these words
this discount pen
the angle of the lamplight on the page
my face--or is it yours?--
seeking congruences:
points of balance, absence,
overlap.
          spirits haunt the compost heap
where all my clipped ambitions sleep
and dream themselves to dirt.
there is a map of how we grow
and twist and burst inside each wall
of each wooden cell. there is a map
the size of the world
laid out beneath our feet.

admit it: you know as well as i
that there is no accident
to tonight's transparent sky
no mystery to the moon:
we name it,
you and i: we are doing it right now. it lives and dies
and lives again, this smoke ring
this solid shifting thing
because we twist our lips
and breathe and trace
with the mind's hands
the contours of what would otherwise go
unfelt.
          we snip the world with scissor words
until we each see our own face.

we who have senses to sense
and names to name,
we make this place.

Diving into the Nothing

It is easy, and refreshing, and kind of liberating, to say "I will not be assigning grades for individual work this semester."

Turns out, though, that it is kind of a little bit terrifying to actually do it.

But like I always say, if you're not a little bit scared of your new project, it's not worth doing. So forward we go, knees shaking but still walking.

The students seem on board. We read Alfie Kohn today and discussed his ideas. They mostly echoed his sentiments, and mostly expressed enthusiasm about the idea of going gradeless. They had hard questions about how this was going to work, questions that I was not entirely prepared to answer. Humility is a gift here: I think a lot of teachers are not programmed to say "I don't know, lets work together and figure this out" when students ask very basic questions about one's practice. And yet I said it today, over and over again. It got to the point where we all started believing I meant it.

The big problem, we all agreed, was motivation. School has traditionally been predicated on an exchange system--you do a think (often an onerous or useless thing) for me, I will trade you for some marks that you can then use to purchase admission to the post-secondary program of your choice. Traditional marking strategies essentially buy work from students--and the better the work, the more I am willing to pay. But we only buy the product. We can nickle and dime and try to buy some process, too--show me a rough draft; no reading notes = no essay--but a lot of that can be faked.

Once the marks are gone, the exchange system breaks down. What is left to get students to WANT to do English class things?

Well, there's still an exchange--it only happens at mid-term and at term's end. So there's that: instead of buying an essay or a poster-board, I'm buying a semester of reading, writing, reporting. But we're trying to decentralize that. Putting all the eggs in one nebulous and arguable basket doesn't make the eggs taste any different.

We need intrinsic motivators. We need students to care about the subject, about the topic, about the products that they are supposedly engaged in making. Which means we need to decentralize the classroom as much as possible: let students choose texts; let them choose topics; let them choose forms of presentation. There are still limits, of course--they have to choose challenging texts; they have to choose relevant topics; they have to present their work in a way that showcases their English skills according to the strands outlined in the curriculum that I am still obliged to follow--but within those broad guidelines, I need to get myself as much out of the way as possible and enable students to bring their passions to the room and to the tasks.

It is hard to disappear. It's hard to get out of the way in my own classroom.

But it's easier for students to see through a window than through a wall.

Student quote of the day:

" I remember learning about something in class and being interested by it and wanting to learn more, but not being able to because it wasn't part of the format/curriculum or not having time to do so because we had already finished the project from that part of the curriculum. I think grades, and just learning things for the grade, oppress students interests and diminish their motivation, much like Kohn thought. ...students should want to learn things in class for the sake of knowing something or being interested in it, not just learning something for the sake of passing a class."

On Gradelessness

You would think something like the decision to transition to a gradeless classroom (a decision I made at the start of this school year) would be a difficult one. You might be surprised to learn that I first considered going gradeless only five days ago, and didn't even discuss it with my school's administration until this morning--15 minutes after the first bell had signalled the start of another year.

And yet that's what I did. It almost felt like a whim--but it was a whim borne of years of observation, years of frustration, years of quiet discontent.

I have spent my teaching career writing volume upon volume of feedback on student work, only to have students flip past it all in search for that two digit number at the back of the essay--and then watching those same students approach me and without a hint of irony or sarcasm ask me why they got that (invariably too-low) grade and what they can fix to get a better one. The comments were invisible. They were useless. I was trying to initiate a conversation about what quality work looks like and how students might grow as readers, thinkers, and writers, but that insidious number was undoing all my efforts. There were exceptions, sure, but most students didn't seem to want to be better writers; they just wanted better marks, as expeditiously as possible.

I watched fear of low marks hamstring student after student in my creative writing classes. "I want to do something really interesting," they would tell me, "but I'm afraid I won't be able to do it well and then I'll get a bad mark." "Just tell me what will get a good mark and I will make one of those for you," they would say. (Seriously--more than one student has uttered that very sentence to me.) The hunt for the high mark stood between them and their own creativity. It stood between them and their own brilliance. It stood between them and their willingness to take risks.

I watched actual low marks create sullenness and despair for the struggling learners in my classroom. Even when I sat down with them to tell them in no uncertain terms what I liked about their work and how they could make it better, that grade spoke even louder, and told them they were no good, that there was no point in them practicing their incipient skills. A "bad" mark became a sign that they were a "bad" student, unable to learn, unable to progress, not suited for my discipline.

Grading seems to be at the backbone of our current system. Without grades, we instinctively wonder, how will we know how well we did? How will universities know if I am ready to swim upstream? How will I compare myself to my classmates? Surely any attempt to decentralize the importance of grades would involve a complete subversion of the entire classroom structure, maybe even the subversion of the academic enterprise in its entirety?

Well, no.

Grades, at best, offer us a strange and deeply flawed mirror in which our students may see their faces. They serve to continually remind weak students that they are worthless, while telling high achievers that they need not strive for further improvement. Grades shift the focus of courses from learning to earning, from exploring and growing to completing and accumulating. Grades actually work rather against what we teachers like to think we are trying to do: foster life-long learners with independent inquiry and self-improvement skills.

So when I learned about the growing stop grading movement, the light switch in my head was already well-primed for flipping. And flip it did.

I'm still working out the bugs--and there are a lot of bugs. As pieces become clear in my mind, I will post my thoughts, my processes, and my resources here.

Stay tuned--big things are underway in room 2062.

peripheral

just off the edge of every map--

peripheral--

like the body beyond the nervous system

the flesh and bones and circulating blood

that are not you, but surround the shock

you are, give your lightning form--

is where you linger. sidelong

to my vision

a lost country 

broke enough to be exploited

by the sleepwalk kings

in slow procession down the

intersecting aisles that run

adjacent to / conjunct with

the unsteady window of my eye.

i see you (not see you)

there (not there)

in the light that does not shine

upon the hundred faces 

you have never had.

i keep writing you poems

because i can't write you poems.

if i could, i would stop

as one does

when there's nothing left to say.

i suppose you can feel flattered

that these words exist at all.

maybe my great failing

has been to keep you always there--

peripheral--

a rock i refused to shake from my shoe

a sliver untugged from my hand

the itch i could scratch but didn't

on the phantom limb i don't have

and maybe my great flaw

has been a wholeness

false and solid

a sense that i contain all i need

a quilt of cherished gaps

a map

(just off the edge of every map)

to lead me back

to where i've never been

to find you there

with all your other selves

peripheral

and perfect.

don't move.

not one of you.

don't change a thing.

departure lounge

to fly is the thing

to spread out your wings

and depart--

that is the art

so here we are at the gate

a few awkward minutes left

waiting to wait   

before you leave me here

on the scraped grey edge

of the sky

i don’t know why

i said i’d see you off

or even why you asked

i guess you needed

a witness

i guess i needed

one last glimpse of your ass

as you walked

up the ramp

and checked in

to the hollow museum

of my past

i don’t kid myself

that you’ll call

so don’t kid yourself

that i’ll answer to you.

after so long kidding each other

it’s a relief to be through

a gift to be simple and true

i’ll miss you

like i miss the radio’s hum

that itch in my ear

where a sound used to scratch me

to sleep, all white noise and numb

to leave is the thing--

who cares about landing

when flight

is the point?

so here we are

at the departure gate

and you’re shedding feathers

i’m as far from the horizon

as i’ve ever been,

still home

but home free.

i don’t know why

i said i’d see you off

but i’m glad i thought

to check my phone

the moment you looked back.

i’m glad when i looked up

you were gone.

how to kill a bird

dan takes the twine
ties the ankles tight because
we've heard the bird will run
even
after the head is gone
     then, not knowing
what comes next, we two fool kids
throw the line over a limb
cowboy-style we guess because
all we know of death
we've learned from film.
     only
          now
my childhood business farming eggs
is flipping fictions for
real-life execution.

once a chicken's old
it ain't no use, the crusty neighbor says.
once you stop paying your way
we slay, toss your feathers away
forget you had a name--
ashes to ashes, clay to clay.

     pause.

     consider the stump:
axe-scarred and waiting
for a neck thumb-stretched
and shaking
weak hand covering that yellow
eye that won't stop blinking
don't dare to wonder
what a chicken might be thinking.

the first swing

is a miss. hatchet swish and thunk
a chunk of wood. you flinched.
infirm of purpose.

didn't think you could, dan says,
tugs the rope. gulp down hope
and try to cope. once more
heft handle in hand review
the plan: neat swing clean cut
string it up to bleed out
the true red cost of food on table.
i'm ready, able
to swing. no tremble
this time. we are but young
in deed.
     dan yanks the bird away
head still under my hand
up and out the leg-trussed body arcs
spasm and sputter-vein frenzy
swift death to the myth of dying easy
i freeze in my
murderer's pose
unbelieving.

like any pendulum
splendid dependable
weight on a string
the corpse swings back
     trembling
over my penitent head
and i am baptized in blood
dissolved by the rain of what i have done
and reformed into something
     a little taller
          a little older
               a little callused
where the hand
held the axe.

Had a Band

i knew them back in high school

just because they went to my school

but it’s not like we were friends,

i mean, i knew they had a band

but they were stoners, they were skids

and we were only kids

so we laughed at them because they didn’t

know how to play

Free Bird.

I had a guitar that i

would play out in the yard;

i was starting to get good

and they were only two-bit hoods

but they were making up their own riffs,

a bit like old Black Sabbath

only faster, and we all knew

they had stolen all their gear; and

somehow

that was cool.

At the talent show that spring

we did the “Battle of the Bands” thing

my band went on first

so they would have to eat our dust.

We played U2 and R.E.M.--

we covered all the latest bands

we had a drummer from the army

and a teen tour jazz guitarist;

i played bass

because somebody has to, right?

We were cool; the crowd was dancing

we were not quite like the real thing

but we’d learned it note for note

and we were trying to emote

someone else’s emotions--

we were calculated fictions

and everyone believed us; we got a reasonable facsimile of a

standing ovation

when we stopped.

They were up next.

The crowd held it’s breath.

We looked at them, they looked at us

And they laughed as they took to the stage.

They started with a bang--

a song 38 seconds long

entitled “Ms. Kelly, the Librarian,

is a Servant of Satan.”

A fight broke out somewhere,

the vice-principal appeared

and flicked at the house lights--

which, of course, started more fights--

while the band ground our ears down

with exquisite mountains

of menacing sound.

Well, the cops did what cops do

and the ambulances ambled through;

three kids and a teacher

were hurt when the bleachers collapsed.

The band was expelled;

word is, they were sued

by Ms. Kelly, the librarian,

who suffered a breakdown

next Sunday at church.

I never saw those four guys again,

but later that week i wrote my first song

and it sucked,

but at least it was mine.