What happened when I got a C

"Did he grade your essay yet?" my classmate asked me.

I hadn't, so I immediately logged onto the website to check...and my heart sank:

15.75/20.


Hmmm.. let's just say it's been a while since I've gotten a "C."

Rapidly cycling through the stages of grief, denial, anger, etc., I quickly pulled out of it and decided to ask the instructor for clarification later.

The next day in school I told the story to my honors chemistry students:

"Now you know how we feel!," said one young lady.

Funny... that's exactly what I thought when I saw the grade the night before. I thought about my students and how lightly I sometimes issue grades, and how I'd better be more mindful when I'm grading.

And it reminded me how inhumane grades are--a cold and crude reward and punishment system. Though I quickly recovered, and though I ended up contacting my instructor and revising the paper, when I first saw that C, it's effect was to make me discouraged and doubt myself. I felt the pang of being branded like a substandard cut of meat. And if I hadn't been allowed to revise it, what good would that grade have done?

I'd simply have a label, a brand, and a little more self doubt, and a little less excitement about the course and maybe even learning in general.

If I were some of my students, I may decide to just "play the game," working for points and grades and not worrying about what I was learning, just trying like heck to avoid the punishments and score the points. Or I might just give up.

As it turns out, I was able to dig back into the assignment, learn more, clarify my thoughts, and hopefully increase my mastery in the process. (Haven't gotten a final grade yet, but I feel good about my revision.)

My guess is I'm no different from my students.


I'd love to throw out grades altogether and opt for a 100% mastery-based approach. Grades are motivate to a certain extent, like electric shocks motivate mice, but what really motivates humans to learn is mastery, autonomy, and purpose, and that's where I'd like to see education go.

Students determining their own grades

I've been inspired by +Starr Sackstein to work towards a system in which students help determine their own grades. In this video, she describes how she set up a Google form the students could use to self-assess, and in this one, she reflects on their self-assessments.

Hattie's work pointed to "students self-reporting grades" as the greatest of all influences on learning he investigated, so there's little doubt this will be a powerful strategy.

Of course, it's combined with lots of teacher feedback.

Today, as the #blizzardof2015 wound down, I revised the student "Learning Plan" form I've used with my biology and geology classes and combined it with the self-assessment form I've used to make one form students and I can use to track their goals and self-assessments.

I've got it set up so the same form is used for their goal-setting and self-assessment. When they visit the form, they're asked whether they are starting or finishing an assignment. The course is project-based: every assignment is a project designed to allow them to demonstrate mastery of a short list of learning objectives. They always get to choose among options for their projects: posters, essays, animations, labs, etc..

On the new form, they'll record the essential question and standards they are working on, and also what they are shooting for in terms of their rubric score on each standard. After they've finished the project, they return to the same form and use it to assess themselves on the standards. My plan is to make a copy of the form for each student so they can view the summaries of their responses with the Google forms summary feature.

My goal is that they could chart their own progress through time. That will be awesome. And I'd love to allow students to have  a voice in their own quarter grades, like Starr is doing.

I'll let you know how it goes.

Comprehensive semester exams need to go

When the goal of learning for learning’s sake runs smack into the wall of semester exams...

That’s what it felt like today in my mastery-based class. I’ve been doing my best to use autonomy, mastery and purpose to motivate students instead of grades. But how do you do that when you’re up against a comprehensive semester exam?

If that exam is not based on standards that are inherently meaningful to students--if the exam itself does not tap into autonomy, mastery, or purpose, then you’re stuck. It becomes an irritating parenthesis in an otherwise increasingly authentic learning experience.

Solution: Get rid of comprehensive exams and replace them with a more authentic assessment.

System-gaming vs. learning

A student told me today she sometimes thinks high school is all about teaching you how to cheat.

Maybe hyperbole. But maybe not. But I've been chewing on that this afternoon and evening.


I've often wondered similarly about CT's new teacher evaluation system. If improperly done, and it's all about points and ratings and scores and judgements on your worth and future, what's a teacher to do? You figure out how to make it work. You figure out how to survive. You learn to play the game.

I'll never forget a struggling students advice to another struggling student a few years ago in my general science classroom: "Just play the game. You have to learn to play the game."

That's what happens when we use accountability as a driver. All it does is produce system-gaming (and poor morale). It certainly doesn't produce the kind of motivation we want. That takes autonomy, mastery, and purpose.

So if it's true that high school is becoming a training ground for cheating, to whatever extent, what are we to do?

We could clamp down on the cheating, put up more and better dividers, more confusing test versions, use cell-phone jammers, make harder tests, drive harder, be tougher, and let the beatings continue until morale improves.

Or we could find ask what's wrong with the system and ask what we can do to make school about learning.

You are more than a grade

It's a tough balance--the balance between drive and contentment, between motivating students to push themselves, and realizing the value of contentment.

I find myself flipping back and forth between my own drivenness and this glimmer of an idea inside that the real way to happiness is just being mindful of everything.

I feel a bit like Siddhartha, I guess, and maybe I'm on that road, but right now I feel like the answer is somewhere between a headlong drive for achievement and Buddhist detatchment--a balance of the two, if that's possible.

And that balance, I hope, is making it's way into my classroom.

Achievement is a great goal, but it's not the only worthy one, and probably not the most important. There's a lot more to life than that sort of success.

There's a lot more to being human than that.

And if any of my students are reading: There's a lot more to you than your grades. You are not a grade. The value of your life is not measured by your grades.

But do your best.

And I'm here to help.

Flow at school, part 2

The basketball player typically knows immediately and exactly how well she's doing, as do the chess player, the gymnast, woodworker, runner, writer, and the artist. And this is apparently one of the key components of a flow-generating activity: immediate feedback.

It's also one of the biggest challenges of teaching.

I've been trying to give students more rapid feedback. Automated quizzes on Moodle, for which students get multiple attempts at mastery, help with this, but Moodle can't yet automate formal lab report or biology project grading (though it can automate the grading of short (20 words or less) written answers).

I think the reason many recoil at the idea of automated assessment of written work is they feel it will be missing something--the human element. I see their concern, but I'm confident that hurdle will eventually be overcome as more intelligent systems are developed. And the feedback we receive from flow-generating activities is not often in the form of human comments anyway--it's a ball bouncing off the backboard, the loss of a queen, or words that just aren't flowing.

And that last example brings to mind another possibility: If we can help students master self-assessment, then they can get the same immediate feedback that amateur and professional writers get as they write. Or we could make better use of peer-review. Or how about using more informal and immediate feedback, instead of always issuing formal ratings and grades. This idea of replacing grades with feedback has been the subject of conversation on a new Facebook page: Teachers throwing out grades.

Either way, it makes a lot of sense that immediate feedback is key. The typical high school student waits days or even weeks for feedback on a major assignment. Imagine tossing up a basketball and not knowing if it went in until two weeks later. This can't help with motivation and mastery. Instead, it sends the message that the real goal is not improvement, but evaluation. if the goal were improvement, we'd give feedback immediately.

Conversation with my former self on grading

Bill (2014): Bill, I noticed your test averages are usually around 75%. Do you scale them up to that average?

Bill (2010): I do. I guess I figure the performance of the students should roughly follow a normal distribution with an average of 75.

Bill (2014): Why did you pick 75?

Bill (2010): I don't know. Isn't that the historical concept of average? And if it's normally distributed, then that would put the high at 100 and the low at 50, so I'm ensuring that the best students are challenged.

Bill (2014): OK, so the best students set the standard, and you are measuring the others relative to that. So you're really using the grade as a measure of their relative ability. Is that what you intend?

Bill (2010): Not really. I guess I'm trying to measure their mastery of chemistry, but also trying to ensure that I am setting the standard for mastery high enough.

Bill (2014): Why not decide what skills and concepts they really need to master, and then measure their mastery of them?

Bill (2010): Hmm... that would make sense.

Bill (2014): And why not shoot for 100% of your students mastering them. Why does it matter how they compare to each other?

Bill (2010): I see your point. But how do I ensure they are all challenged?

Bill (2014): Why not ditch the whole percentage grade thing and use a different sort of scale--one with "Mastery" at one level (and that's your goal) and something like "Extraordinary" at a higher level.

Bill (2010): So some students will just shoot for Extraordinary just for the sake of being Extraordinary?

Bill (2014): Sure. Wouldn't you?