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.
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