Upgrade your Gradebook

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"Simplify, simplify"

- Henry David Thoreau

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In keeping with the grading theme from my last post, I'd like to delve a little further into the structures I use to keep my assessment as objective as possible and eliminate, the personal, emotional connection that students often perceive between their grades and their identity. I've spent many, many hours discussing this topic with my coaches and supervisors and trying to discover new and better ways to grade, and I think that's because, quite simply, grading is hard. As is usually the case, I've found that the best solution to the challenging problem of grading isn't to work harder, but rather to adopt an entirely different approach - to change the underlying structure of my gradebook and my grading scheme. Before diving into the solution (which is to use binary, mastered/not mastered grades on single tasks arranged in a sequence; a process strongly influenced by the Modern Classrooms Project, of which I am a fellow), let's explore what makes grading such a difficult process.

When you grade something, your task is to examine a piece of student work and, from it, determine objectively how much the student has learned of the topic at hand. There's a lot to unpack in this seemingly simple task: we must find a way to quantify learning in a way that applies to all our students, but each individual student brings so much to bear on each task that it's nearly impossible to come up with an objective heuristic, rubric, or measuring stick of knowledge and learning that can be calibrated to produce a true and fair grade in every individual case. Furthermore, if teachers haven't thoroughly considered and designed a system for objective grading, they may not be able to assess work without unconsciously surfacing other considerations. In my first few years, when I was presented with a piece of student work, I would consider the student's personality and how they may react to the grade I gave; I would consider the student's previous performance and whether this submission was an improvement or a decline; I brought to bear unexamined biases and even prejudices (that, frighteningly, may have been borne out in the patterns I saw in my gradebook demographically). While none of these things are on the rubric, they would pass through my mind as I graded, and I felt that to be "objective," I needed to learn to just ignore them, which would create a sort of cognitive dissonance that made grading a difficult and stressful series of decisions I had to make while factoring in some considerations and discarding others.

Now, there are tools and techniques for dealing with this by objectively describing whether and how the piece of work conforms to certain standards (rubrics are one of the best); but even so, there is always ambiguity in assessing the quality of a product if there are multiple levels that we have to choose between (especially if some aspects of the work conform to one level, but other aspects conform to another level, lower or higher). Grading this way is mentally exhausting and time consuming - I teach between 160-200 students whom I see every two days, so daily grading means putting myself through this intellectual and emotional wringer 90 times a day, which was not something I could conceive of as a young teacher (it was one of those "ok, but how on Earth do you actually do that" questions). And I was right - without careful planning and an intentional approach, daily (or even weekly) grading is not sustainable; neither the world's greatest rubric, nor any amount of hard work, planning, or time management could have made this possible without burning me out. There is a better way, and, unsurprisingly, the solution is not to grind harder, nor is it to learn to ignore the conflicting thoughts and feelings that swirl around as we seek to land on a perfectly objective grade; rather, we need lean our ladder against an entirely different wall to approach formative assessment in an unambiguous way. The solution is progress tracking.

Through the self-pacing structures of the Modern Classrooms Project, I've learned that the best way to address to this problem (and the key to in-class grading) is to limit my formatives to a simple task that requires mastery of one single skill or piece of knowledge. Importantly, the task must be so simple as to negate the need for a grade at all. Rather, a simple "mastered" or "not mastered" must suffice to determine whether the student can move on to the next lesson or assignment, and there is no ambiguity as to the quality of the product - either it's done or it's not, and no rubric is involved because the task can only be successfully completed if the student has mastered the content.

My upgraded gradebook, therefore, is an ordered sequence of binary switches, of 0's and 1's, and when a student submits an assignment, it takes only a few unambiguous and stress-free moments to glance at it and see which they get (i.e., whether they mastered the lesson and can move on or should go back and revise). Each assignment is a single step toward completing the project; for example, in my current unit students are making a remix and the initial sequence is: 1) Choose a song (which is very easy for me to tell if the student did or didn't), 2) Set the tempo and key in our DAW (again, easy to tell at a glance), 3) Import the song into the DAW (easy to tell - you get the idea), 4) Line up the song with the DAW grid, and 5) Add new loops and sounds from the DAW loop library. These steps may seem inane and overly simple, but that's actually the point - chunking the lessons into incredibly small steps makes them both achievable for students and very easy for me to "grade." The ease with which I can evaluate these tasks also allows me to transform my role from grader of quality into gatekeeper of content - if you haven't mastered this task, you can't move on to the next one until you do. This means students who are moving along have demonstrably learned something, and the progress data quantify that learning rather than me having to try to figure out how "smart" a student is from what they've produced (in other words, achievement is measured objectively by progress, rather than subjectively, by quality, and a student who is struggling is behind, not dumb which is a huge distinction in terms of developing a growth mindset).

My upgraded gradebook - a progress tracker!

But the benefits don't stop there. My gradebook is more of a progress tracker than a record of each student's performance, and as such it serves more roles than just record-keeping (although it serves a record-keeping function as well - a student who has completed 4 of the 5 steps has learned 4/5ths of the content in an objective way). A student who is behind stands out on my tracker; without having to delve into their work and try to determine how much they know through interpolation and divination, I can very easily narrow my focus on those students who need help to catch up. Extrapolated across the entire class, the progress tracker provides actionable data on how the entire group is performing (traditional grades don't provide this data, because if there is any more wiggle room in assessing a piece of work than yes/no, the aggregate data of how every individual kid does on that particular piece is ambiguous; every kid in the class might get a 4/5 on the same assignment, but the missing point may be different for each of them, indicating a different misunderstanding in each student! I would separate those 5 points into 5 separate, tiny assignments). Furthermore, having this aggregate data on where every student in the class is at in the unit allows me to strategically group them together and find effective student helpers (since I can see who's ahead).

It's important to note that a gradebook set up as a progress tracker has implications for the very structure of your curriculum, and requires careful planning to establish a sequence of tasks, each with a clearly demonstrable and binary (mastered/not mastered) response, that leads students to the final outcome of possessing the knowledge and skills required to pass a unit. In my music class, every lesson represents a single step in the process of creating a song, and their learning is represented quantitatively by how far into the sequence they progress: if they complete all the lessons, they will have a song that meets all the requirements (and therefore demonstrates full mastery) of the unit, whereas if they fall short of completing the sequence, the song will be missing some components from later in the unit. More practically, every aspect of my class is structured to guide students linearly through the sequence, which is canonized in my gradebook - the first "grade" (i.e., 0 or 1) is Lesson 1, the second is Lesson 2, etc., and everything about my class (my gradebook, my LMS, and my actual teaching) is purpose-built to ensure my students can follow this path and to make it easy for me (and them, and also their parents) to tell how far along the path they are.

Of course, at the end of each unit I do grade the final product as a summative assessment, using a rubric, and by that time I have a very good sense of where each student is in their learning process; the quality my students' songs tends to hew closely to how far into the sequence they've advanced. More importantly, however, the overall quality of my students' songs has improved since I implemented this structure because the data in my gradebook give me the opportunity to intervene more frequently before we get to the end of the unit. As a young teacher, so much of what I did felt reactive, like I was constantly putting out fires that had already engulfed my classroom (and my students' learning, and my relationships with students, and their parents), and the transition to a gradebook that provides unambiguous data as to where my students actually are (not data based on a hunch or a vague sense of learning that I came up with myself) has allowed me to support my students proactively, which is one of those things young teachers are told they should do but rarely told how (if you're relying on your own observation to come up with the data, it's very easy to miss kids who are slipping through the cracks until it's too late). There are ways to improve our classes, but sometimes they look different from what we're accustomed to - certainly the idea of a progress tracking checklist feels different from the traditional conception of what a gradebook is - but if we open ourselves to change and adopt new practices (like upgrading our gradebooks and using progress rather than quality to measure achievement), we learn to teach, and we can do a better job of supporting our students.

What Grades Actually Mean, and How to Interpret Them

One of the most difficult things about being a new teacher was that I often didn't know how to respond to a student who leveled criticism against me - kids can be ruthless, and I remember countless nights that I actually literally tossed and turned in bed replaying conversations and wishing I had come up with better retorts to my 13-year-old students who were rude to me! One of the things more experienced teachers (and I now consider myself to be on the cusp of becoming one) understand is that there is no perfect heuristic or logical flow chart of interaction that will provide the best response in every situation; rather, as one increasingly clarifies their understanding of what matters and becomes more confident, it becomes easier to find an appropriate response in the moment. This is the substance of learning to teach, and to that end this post is a deep dive into my own learning, in particular the understanding and perspective I've developed in discussing grades.

Some of your students will inevitably receive bad grades, and some of them (and even some of their parents) will be very vocal about it (follow my meaning - they're not going to be nice to you), so report card season can be emotionally charged. My school sends home quarterly report cards, but we only report final grades at the end of the two semesters, which means that the 1st and 3rd quarter grades are more like a progress report, or a check-in to see how students are doing so they can course correct if necessary. I find, however, that this distinction is difficult to tease out with families. In the 18 parent-teacher-student conferences I gave last Friday (what was that about teacher workload?), this topic came up quite frequently, and having these discussions over and over again, I had to clarify for parents and for myself just what the progress report does represent.

In a mastery-based grading system (which, in my opinion, is the gold standard all educators should aspire to), a grade represents what you know, period. In a completely idealized and objective interpretation, mastery-based grades are like inches on a measuring stick: in the same way I can report how tall you are in feet (or meters), I can report how much you've mastered using a grade in letters or numbers. I brought up this analogy in my conferences, and it helped parents to disentangle their emotional reaction from their understanding of what grades meant - if you measure how tall someone is, he probably won't become upset or take the measurement personally because there is not a normalized emotional association with such a measurement. Grades, on the other hand, are interpreted as deeply personal, and bad grades in particular tend to feel like an appraisal of character and intelligence (especially for students who get low grades in most of their classes and consider themselves "dumb" - easily one of the most pernicious and anti-productive manifestations of the emotional importance we associate with grades, and one that works at cross-purposes with students seeing themselves as learners, which is what really matters).

The measuring stick analogy was particularly useful in looking at cases in which students received low grades from teachers whom the student (and family) felt had failed to teach the content effectively. While for the most part families respectfully reserve judgement and use kind language when describing situations like these, the underlying implication is that such a grade is not fair. The notion of fairness suggests that the student was somehow entitled to a higher grade (or at least should not have been subjected to a low one), in part due to the fact that it wasn't her "fault" that the grade was low. Tumbling further and further down this logical rabbit hole, the absurdity of this emotional attachment to grades is (hopefully) becoming clearer - the fact of the matter is that if the student didn't learn something for whatever reason, she doesn't know it. If her math teacher did a poor job of teaching her how to divide by fractions, she may be absolved of some of the responsibility of having learned it, and feel vindicated defending herself that way, but that responsibility isn't what the grades are measuring.

Looking at grades this way has implications for students and teachers. The hypothetical student described above may make a fuss about her teacher not having taught her well, but the grades don't evaluate who was responsible for her learning, or even how hard she worked to learn, but rather the knowledge she acquired (or didn't), so complaining about it isn't a productive use of her time or mental energy. Instead, she should look carefully at her lowest grades and focus her attention there in the coming weeks until she masters that content. Now, it's quite difficult for a 6th grader to look at low grades without an emotional reaction: if they feel the content wasn't taught well, the reflexive "but it wasn't my fault!" defensiveness is quite natural for young kids (and even some adults!); alternatively, if the student knows that he himself was responsible for the low grades (perhaps he was slacking off or forgot to submit an assignment or two), coming to terms with one's own failure in an objective and unemotional way is staggeringly difficult, and it's our job as teachers to help students recognize that emotional reaction (and indeed still feel it), but separate it from the more useful lens of viewing failure objectively as an opportunity for growth.

But there's more to the teacher's role in the measuring stick analogy - in particular, we (the teachers) need to ensure that our measuring sticks (our grading schema and our rubrics) are being applied consistently and, yes, fairly. Imagine telling a person how tall they are in inches, but using a ruler graded in centimeters - the measurement isn't unfair, it's just wrong. One excellent practice to combat this issue is rubric norming, in which multiple teachers apply the same rubric to the same piece of work - by discussing aspects of the sample and hashing out the particular language of the rubric, we normalize our approach to grading (in my measuring stick analogy, we calibrate our inches to all be the same). Furthermore, if the assessment criteria are clear and precise, we can better communicate them to students, who, with so much on their plates, need to be told clearly and precisely how to meet our expectations of learning (i.e., how to master the material and have it measured accordingly, resulting in high grades). I have a whole other set of opinions on the importance of standardization for assessment (i.e., consistency in how we measure "inches" on our metaphorical measuring stick) and its implications when looking at medium- and long-term trends in grades data (these trends are meaningless if we're not measuring on the same scale from class to class or from year to year), but that's not my focus here.

Finally, while there are many, many factors that are beyond our control (and frankly we should learn to cut ourselves a little more slack), it is nonetheless incumbent upon us to teach our content effectively so that our kids can learn it ("effective" teaching is obviously a massive topic, and one I won't address here, except to say that it involves a close partnership between teachers and students in which the responsibility for learning is shared, not placed entirely on either party). It bears repeating that systemic, societal issues and other mitigating factors such as behavior, trauma, and truancy, for which teachers themselves are not responsible, can be the cause of low grades (although in an ideal world, these should not be barriers to effective learning). Still, if the students' grades are an objective measure of how much they know, then in a sense they are also an objective measure of how effectively they were taught, which means the grades, in part, reflect back upon us as the teachers. Low grades are a red flag that we may need to critically address some aspect of our teaching.

I'm cringing a little thinking back to all the failing grades I gave out as a first year teacher, but let me be crystal clear: it is not my intention to further stress out young teachers who are struggling to coax better performance out of their students - quite the opposite in fact. I hope that dissociating emotional reactions from value-free measurements helps first-year teachers adopt a growth mindset. Just like our students, it is not productive for us to wallow in our own failures, regardless of who or what is responsible for them. However, it's even worse to shrug off a student with low grades and place the responsibility for success entirely on their shoulders, defending ourselves behind the "if you don't do it, you get a zero" mentality - we do have a responsibility to intervene where we can. Even in the classrooms of the world's greatest teachers, students receive low grades - it's part of the reality of teaching, but the best teachers (many of whom are striving to change this reality) recognize low grades as an area for targeted intervention and improvement on their own part (not the students').

Again, this is the substance of learning to teach, which is an ongoing and never-ending journey: a confident teacher who gives out low grades will reflect objectively upon her own practice and also upon the practice of the student (or the class in general) and consider what may have gone wrong and needs to change (change = growth = learning [to teach]). Where possible, she'll develop improvements to her teaching or her curriculum, or interventions with specific students to address shortcomings revealed by low grades, which she views purely as data. If we adopt this growth mindset, we can instill it in our students by articulating to them that grades are not a reflection of their character but rather an objective measurement of what they've learned (or haven't). If we do, they'll not only be better learners who get higher grades (since they'll know to target specific misunderstandings, which they can easily identify on their report cards); they'll also grow up into rational, reasonable adults, bringing a growth mindset to their practice (and in particular their mistakes), and thus be poised to innovate and improve in whatever field they chose to pursue.