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.

What Really Matters in the Classroom?

Spoiler Alert: It's not teaching content.

On a recent episode of the Modern Classrooms Podcast, my cohosts and I discussed of the shifting role of the teacher, both in a Modern Classroom, and in general as we strive to improve our teaching. The discussion was rather cathartic, frequently returning to the frustrations the three of us shared in our early careers - principally, the frustration with feeling like we knew what we wanted for our students, but also feeling unable to provide anything even close to our ideals of student-centered, authentic learning environment. As the discussion developed, it dawned on me just how much teachers seem to agree on what actually matters in a classroom, but how much we universally struggle to implement it - and that it's not necessarily teaching our content all the time.

Actually, let me not hedge or bury the lede any further: teaching content is not my priority, especially right now. But even putting aside the pandemic (and the myriad swirling uncertainties and anxieties to which my lessons pale in comparison, making the point of my argument rather obvious), I still think that our biggest priority - what really matters - should be to foster a love of school, a strong academic self-concept, and for our students to feel nurtured and cared for in our classrooms and see school as a part of their identity.

I don't think this is a particularly contentious opinion, but many of the struggles we face as teachers arise from the fact that we focus our time in class pushing our kids to succeed academically when they have other things going on that may or may not be a bigger deal, but are certainly more important to them in the moment. By forcing our content upon them and positioning it in opposition to what matters to them, we degrade its importance in their minds; even if we purport to care about them, we contradict ourselves if we constantly redirect students away from their interests in pursuit of success on some test we wrote. After 13 or 14 years of being told implicitly that their interests (and maybe their trauma) are less important than some numbers and symbols or some grammatical structures, it's not hard to understand why many people don't feel so fondly about school.

Responsive music educators recognize that our job isn't to churn out hundreds of professional musicians every year, and likewise it shouldn't be the job of a Math or English teacher to churn out professional mathematicians or authors or critics (students, of course, will follow their own path after school). I think (maybe I'm wrong) that most teachers know and feel this at least subconsciously, but external pressures are placed on us such that we tend to forget. We seek out strategies for classroom management rather than teaching for mastery or building relationships, focusing on what works without questioning (or at least, without listening to the nagging internal critic who questions everything) whether this is what matters.

There's a disconnect between the amount of professional development we receive on trauma-informed teaching, authentic relationships, and the buzzwordliest of all, Social Emotional Learning, and the way we're evaluated based on student achievement, or more specifically, classroom compliance (classroom management) and grades, which take a great deal of nuance to achieve without alienating students or silencing their voices (this disconnect also plays out in the types of PD teachers prefer and the types they actually receive. I have a future post planned on the kinds of PD I find most valuable, but the data in this report certainly validate the idea that we're evaluated on different standards than what we're trained on - poor pedagogy indeed!).

Of course the tricky bit here is that we do still need to teach our content, and our students need to learn it. While I think that systemically, we might be stuck in a loop where school only exists to teach students how to succeed on tests (particularly high-stakes tests) that school itself imposes on them, teachers themselves do aspire to develop kids' critical thinking skills and impart to them the knowledge and understanding that will bring them success as adults. It strikes me that our priorities (and the world of standardized testing) tend to focus on teaching students what to know rather than how to think. It feels like ubiquitous, common knowledge that kids just forget content after the test (and it might be true).

So, what does really matter then? How can a teacher, in his classroom or in her Zoom call tomorrow, put their students' needs before their content, while still pushing students toward mastery and academic growth but without pushing them away from a love of learning? I know how frustrating it is as a new teacher to hear "build authentic relationships with kids," and it's taken me until now (my fifth year) to actually understand what it means, so let's avoid that buzzword and get right to the nitty-gritty. Here's what to do: if a kid wants to talk to you about soccer during independent work time on some practice problems, listen to her for a few minutes. If some kids start blowing up your Zoom chat asking "who's the imposter" (it's from Among Us), play along for a little. If a student wants to tell you all about Fortnite or asks you who your favorite rapper is but you know she has a sentence to diagram, let it go and indulge her, even just for a bit. Listen to them. It humanizes you, and in their eyes, you are school, so you'll be modeling what it looks like when school becomes a place to be heard. Afterwards, you can direct these kids back to work, but they'll remember that you made their interests compatible with learning by making some time for them during class - time spent building relationships is not time lost . After 13 or 14 years of that, I can only imagine the kinds of curious, inquisitive young adults we'll see coming out of our schools and taking on the world as truly lifelong learners.

You can listen to this post as an audio podcast, here: