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.