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47: Redefining Assessment by Implementing Gradeless Learning feat. Jeffery Frieden, Aaron Blackwelder, & Nick Covington
20 Plays6 years ago
On today's podcast, we're looking at the gradeless movement. There's a lot to be debated in the education system, but I'm hard-pressed to find a topic so steeped in research as this one. Whether it be motivation, willingness to learn, and even traditional test scores, not giving a grade shows improvement across the board.
There's countless research articles, books, podcasts, psychologists, education experts, and more writing and studying the effects of grades. And every single time, whether it be 1850 or 2019, it seems to support the same outcome:
- Grades diminish motivation and do little to actually provide feedback for students to improve.
- If there is research that supports grades, it's stating that they improve standardized test scores, not necessarily motivate or improve student outcomes.
GUESTS IN ORDER OF APPEARANCE
Jeffery Frieden, an English educator at Hillcrest High School in Corona, California, and founder of Make Them Master It, an organization aimed at connecting teachers to mastery-based practice and identifying teacher struggle through a podcast, book, and blogs.
Aaron Blackwelder, an English educator in Woodland Public Schools in Woodland, Washington, and founder of Teachers Going Gradeless, an organization aimed at providing resources and connecting educators who diminish or eliminate the use of extrinsic motivators.
Nick Covington, a Social Studies educator at Ankeny High School in Ankeny, Iowa, who promotes progressive education in his own practice including developing portfolio-based gradeless assessments.
RESOURCES
- Make Them Master It
- Teachers Going Gradeless
- Aaron Blackwelder’s Feedback Report
- Aaron Blackwelder’s Soft Skills Rubric
- Redefining Quality: Working Towards New Measures of School Achievement by Aaron Blackwelder
- The End of Average by Todd Rose
- Nick Covington’s Medium
- Nick Covington’s Economics Evidence Journal
- Grading =/ Assessment HumResPro Resource
FURTHER LISTENING
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction to Gradeless Education
00:00:11
Speaker
Hello, and welcome to Season 3, Episode 5 of Things Fall Apart, our podcast at the Human Restoration Project.
00:00:17
Speaker
My name is Chris McNutt.
00:00:18
Speaker
I'm a teacher in Springfield, Ohio.
00:00:20
Speaker
On today's podcast, we're looking at the gradeless movement.
00:00:23
Speaker
There's a lot to be debated in the education system, but I'm hard-pressed to find a topic so steeped in research as this one.
00:00:29
Speaker
Whether it be motivation, willingness to learn, or even traditional test scores, not giving a grade shows improvement across the board.
00:00:36
Speaker
We summarized this research on our website as well as on a previous podcast, which you can find in our show notes.
The Case Against Grades
00:00:42
Speaker
Therefore, instead of diving too far into why the gradeless movement is needed,
00:00:46
Speaker
Much of this podcast is about implementing it.
00:00:49
Speaker
But before that, let me give a quick shout out to Bill Ryder, Jenny Lucas, and Aaron Flanagan for being some of our Patreon supporters.
00:00:55
Speaker
We deeply appreciate you and your willingness to keep our resources, podcasts, writings, and more afloat.
00:01:00
Speaker
And if you haven't checked out our extensive progressive guides ranging from gradeless assessment to mindfulness, take a look on our website.
00:01:07
Speaker
That's all free.
00:01:08
Speaker
If you like what you see, consider donating on Patreon.
00:01:11
Speaker
Thank you.
00:01:25
Speaker
There's countless research articles, books, podcasts, psychologists, education experts, and more writing and studying the effects of grades.
00:01:33
Speaker
And every single time, whether it be 1850 or 2019, it seems to support the same two outcomes.
00:01:40
Speaker
1.
00:01:40
Speaker
Grades diminish motivation and do little to actually provide feedback for students to improve.
00:01:45
Speaker
And 2.
00:01:46
Speaker
If there is research that supports grades,
00:01:48
Speaker
It's saying that they improve standardized test scores, not necessarily motivating or improving student outcome in the long run.
00:01:55
Speaker
I challenge you to find data that supports otherwise.
00:01:58
Speaker
I say that not out of spite for people that disagree with this, but because I'm genuinely curious if there is any.
00:02:03
Speaker
It seems to be one of those things that is really common sense when you start thinking about it.
00:02:07
Speaker
People have thought about this for a while.
00:02:09
Speaker
Even back in doing Thorndike's time, you know, grades were intentionally brought into schools as a way to show student growth, a way to open up dialogue between teacher and student.
Challenges in Going Gradeless
00:02:18
Speaker
But in practice, they do the exact opposite.
00:02:20
Speaker
Essentially, grades are a shortcut that communicate pass or failure, with many students seeing anything under an A as a failure.
00:02:27
Speaker
And for those at the bottom who receive an F, they're pushed out of our schools.
00:02:30
Speaker
They're rank and filed to be the quote unquote losers in the education system.
00:02:34
Speaker
But there's a lot of barriers to best practice and going gradeless isn't just, yeah, I'm just going to stop giving grades.
00:02:40
Speaker
Many districts have gradebook requirements, whether that be simply giving someone a grade or even just requiring a grade per week, and therefore many don't even attempt this.
00:02:48
Speaker
It seems impossible.
00:02:50
Speaker
I'm here with our guests to show that it actually is possible.
Innovative Teaching Practices with Jeffrey Frieden
00:02:53
Speaker
There are educators throughout the world going gradeless even in the most traditional systems.
00:02:58
Speaker
Of course, there are varying degrees of making this happen, but going as far as possible within one's own district for the benefit of their students is worthwhile.
00:03:10
Speaker
Make Them Masters is kind of like the larger project that I'm doing and the book is part of it because it bears the similar title, Make Them Process It.
00:03:18
Speaker
And it's a little self-published book that I have.
00:03:20
Speaker
The main drive behind that book was I was having this really great experience with my students using writer's notebooks for writing instruction.
00:03:28
Speaker
It's really a place for a lot of informal writing, a place for students to make lots of mistakes with writing as they learn and grow.
00:03:36
Speaker
without a lot of pressure for them to produce a grade.
00:03:40
Speaker
Because when I first started teaching writing instruction, basically all of my writing instruction would take place during the high stakes, big assessment type writing.
00:03:48
Speaker
So they're doing big essays.
00:03:50
Speaker
And I'm putting all of my writing instruction in those times.
00:03:54
Speaker
So it's like, here's how you pre-write.
00:03:55
Speaker
Here's how you draft.
00:03:56
Speaker
Here's how you revise.
00:03:58
Speaker
And then on top of that, there's just also we got to go over formatting and then we've got to go over sentence level writing.
00:04:05
Speaker
So I'm just unpacking those assignments with just an intense amount of instruction, which is really unfair to my students.
00:04:12
Speaker
And I learned that over time.
00:04:13
Speaker
And so I spread it out and space it out into a writer's notebook now.
00:04:16
Speaker
And I'm talking to a colleague of mine.
00:04:19
Speaker
I'm saying, look at all this stuff my students are doing.
00:04:21
Speaker
He's kind of wowed
Transforming Traditional Education
00:04:23
Speaker
by it too.
00:04:23
Speaker
And he kept telling me, are you writing this down?
00:04:26
Speaker
Are you writing this down?
00:04:27
Speaker
And eventually I said, I should probably write this down.
00:04:31
Speaker
This is Jeffrey Frieden, who teaches English at Hillcrest High School in Corona, California and founded Make Them Master It, an organization aimed at connecting teachers to innovate their practice through a podcast, book and blogs.
00:04:43
Speaker
Make Them Master It?
00:04:44
Speaker
Long before I had that URL, I was dealing with, I think it was kind of born initially out of a lot of frustration, maybe even a little bit of anger.
00:04:54
Speaker
What I was noticing as I came into education,
00:04:58
Speaker
in like the year 2005 was when No Child Left Behind was in full swing.
00:05:05
Speaker
And there was, in some places, a bit of a panic with how we're supposed to respond to that as schools.
00:05:11
Speaker
Looking back on it, I'm not sure the administrations I was serving under at the time fully understood what was going on, but there was basically this just real push to have test scores going up.
00:05:22
Speaker
And then when it came time to look at why the test scores weren't going up,
00:05:27
Speaker
it pretty much all fell back on the teachers.
00:05:29
Speaker
Like, hey, teachers, come on, what's going on here?
00:05:31
Speaker
And I was watching the, we were bearing the brunt of the responsibility.
00:05:37
Speaker
And
00:05:38
Speaker
the students were starting to bear less and less of that responsibility.
00:05:42
Speaker
And that was kind of getting me a little frustrated.
00:05:44
Speaker
I'm now frustrated about other things when it comes to assessment and accountability.
00:05:49
Speaker
But for a time there, I said, this feels really unfair for the teachers.
00:05:53
Speaker
So I'm like, we got to get the students to do more of this, take more ownership.
00:05:57
Speaker
I mean, that's a big term that's been going around in the last few years is having students own their learning.
00:06:04
Speaker
So I wasn't using that term back then, but it's like, man, I got to get these guys to take more ownership for what's really theirs and it's their learning.
00:06:11
Speaker
And so that's kind of where that make them master it.
00:06:14
Speaker
Like I'm the one who's doing all the learning here.
00:06:16
Speaker
I'm the one that's constantly reflecting.
00:06:19
Speaker
When are we going to get the students to do that?
00:06:20
Speaker
So I was trying to work that in as much as I could more and more over time, getting students to assess themselves.
00:06:26
Speaker
Giving feedback to one another, not just relying on me and any kind of grade that comes down from me or from their other teachers, but to get them to take more and more ownership for what it is that they're there to do instead of it all falling back on the teachers.
Feedback Over Grades
00:06:44
Speaker
needs to fall on them.
00:06:45
Speaker
And that sounds really nice.
00:06:46
Speaker
But again, it was a it was a frustration place where I was trying to I was actually trying to push the work back on them initially.
00:06:52
Speaker
But I've really grown since then.
00:06:53
Speaker
And now it's more of a challenge that I'm bringing to my students is like, all right, guys, how can you take more ownership for the learning?
00:07:01
Speaker
This has come up with many of our guests, but it seems like something most progressive educators share is the realization that what they're doing isn't worth it.
00:07:08
Speaker
And coming to terms with the fact that traditional education isn't just unsustainable due to how poorly it functions, but because it's ultimately soulless for the teacher and no longer feels like you're doing what you signed up to do, which is obviously helping and mentoring kids.
00:07:21
Speaker
Instead, you're almost roboticized.
00:07:23
Speaker
You're discouraged to show any kind of true emotion, whether that be, you know, not showing any emotion or putting on this like
00:07:29
Speaker
like entertainer style moniker, or maybe you're just held to ridiculous accountability measures and standardized testing.
00:07:36
Speaker
Could you go into further Jeff on what this shift looked like for you?
00:07:39
Speaker
I was really, really close to quitting.
00:07:42
Speaker
I was really, really close to throwing in the towel because of how much, um, and really a lot of it came down to grading.
00:07:49
Speaker
at the time where I was just expecting.
00:07:53
Speaker
Largely, it was me being idealistic as a teacher.
00:07:57
Speaker
I was thinking I could do it all.
00:07:59
Speaker
My teacher hero in my mind that I was aspiring to be, and I didn't even really know this at the time.
00:08:04
Speaker
It was on later reflection, but he was a bachelor and he had nothing but time to give to giving feedback to his students and getting all this work back.
00:08:12
Speaker
And I had two kids at the time and was just trying to juggle that.
00:08:16
Speaker
I say at the time because now I have four kids at home.
00:08:20
Speaker
So I also needed a solution.
00:08:22
Speaker
I needed just practically like if I'm going to do this next year and not feel immense guilt for not getting the work done or missing time with family, I need to figure out a way to get the students to take more ownership of their learning because I won't survive.
00:08:38
Speaker
Right.
00:08:38
Speaker
I know going gradeless for me was empowering because you end up doing a lot less at home.
00:08:42
Speaker
I mean, obviously it's not a replacement for giving feedback and we're still expected to work with kids, but I found myself spending way more energy at work, guiding and mentoring and way less energy at home.
00:08:52
Speaker
Since if it's a project framework, I'm not really doing a lot of the planning.
00:08:56
Speaker
It's mostly the kids.
00:08:58
Speaker
How did you go about changing up your grading practice?
00:09:01
Speaker
By doing summative conferences at the end of a grading term and taking points off of assignments.
00:09:07
Speaker
So it's been kind of a fun little joke to say in class where this class is totally pointless.
00:09:13
Speaker
But what I mean is.
00:09:15
Speaker
I'm not, what I'm doing instead of just throwing points or a grade on there is I'm giving students meaningful feedback and it's taking me probably just as much time as in the days when there were points to put some information on there for the students to get back.
00:09:32
Speaker
But what's different this time for me as the teacher, my experience is I'm telling them where they are, like here, here's where you are, here's what you're doing well.
00:09:41
Speaker
Here's your next step as a learner in this particular skill that we're working on.
00:09:45
Speaker
And then for them, they get that back and they can, they're freed up to look at it.
00:09:49
Speaker
Now the points aren't making so much noise for them that they can focus on that feedback.
00:09:55
Speaker
And then they'll put together a kind of like a portfolio.
00:09:58
Speaker
They're bringing their work to me and then they're talking me through their learning.
00:10:01
Speaker
And then at the end of that conversation, we negotiate what their grade is in the course.
00:10:06
Speaker
So...
00:10:08
Speaker
They are taking ownership, but it is just as much work for me.
00:10:12
Speaker
But now also more for them.
00:10:14
Speaker
They really have to think through how they're going to make their case for their grade.
Community and Support for Gradeless Education
00:10:18
Speaker
And the influx of social media and in general, the ability to find sources that supports gradeless learning make this a lot easier.
00:10:25
Speaker
I know early on in teaching, I was always very anxious about things I was doing.
00:10:28
Speaker
I tended to over plan.
00:10:30
Speaker
I always felt like students need to be accounted for.
00:10:32
Speaker
I had a ton of grades.
00:10:33
Speaker
It was really rote.
00:10:34
Speaker
And a lot of this was part of a savior complex, if you will, that a lot of teachers tend to feel.
00:10:40
Speaker
I wanted to be a teacher because I wanted to help others.
00:10:42
Speaker
So that teaching mythos, you know, it makes us feel like we're trying to save the world, that students need saved, and we're superheroes almost.
00:10:50
Speaker
And I know that's not the mentality now that we should be framing education with.
00:10:54
Speaker
I'm curious about what connections you've made on your podcast, writings, and on social media that have affected your desire and willingness to shift towards gradeless learning.
00:11:04
Speaker
Yeah, there's been a major shift in that where I've also hit a point too in my own self-efficacy as a teacher where I don't need as many external voices or measures on me where I'm like relying on what other people think of my practice.
00:11:20
Speaker
because I'm confident in what I'm doing.
00:11:23
Speaker
So that actually takes the stress out right there.
00:11:26
Speaker
But when you're a young teacher, that's not there yet because you're still figuring out who you are and you're having new experiences with students on a regular basis.
00:11:35
Speaker
And so you're not sure how to interpret all that and how you handled it.
00:11:38
Speaker
So I've really just been reflecting on my own practice over the years, and that's really helped too.
00:11:44
Speaker
And I never really struggled with a savior complex where I felt like I had to
00:11:50
Speaker
to save the students.
00:11:51
Speaker
My struggle was, it's a really weird one, I don't know if I've ever stated this online, I've talked to a few people about this before, but there was very, very early on, I think before I even taught my first class, so in my early 20s,
00:12:08
Speaker
I'm putting together my syllabus and I'm talking about that in some venue where there's like new teachers there and I say, you know, like, oh man, I'm struggling with what to put on my syllabus.
00:12:19
Speaker
And I don't even remember what the guy looks like, but there's somebody there that kind of dropped this thing.
00:12:24
Speaker
Well, make sure whatever you write on your syllabus can stand up in court.
00:12:28
Speaker
That's it.
00:12:29
Speaker
And for whatever reason, that really terrible advice stuck with me.
00:12:34
Speaker
And the way I kind of describe it is every time I wrote in the syllabus and I tried to actually make it legally ironclad.
00:12:43
Speaker
And then every time I'm doing an assessment of my students work, putting points or a grade.
00:12:48
Speaker
there's kind of this thought in the back of my mind that I might have to give an account to it.
00:12:52
Speaker
So that becomes this sort of Dickensian specter that's behind me, like this hooded figure with a gavel, like just waiting to drop the hammer on me if I don't do something right or if I don't provide the right kind of feedback.
Addressing Concerns and Justifications
00:13:08
Speaker
And the way that takes shape or the way that it took shape for many, many years for me
00:13:14
Speaker
If you're dealing with a like an analytical rubric that has, say, 24 to 36 boxes of like how a student could score.
00:13:22
Speaker
on a piece of writing is all of my advice, all of my feedback was how students weren't getting the top mark.
00:13:30
Speaker
So it's like, here's how you missed.
00:13:32
Speaker
And like you missed here, you missed there.
00:13:34
Speaker
Oh, you really missed on that one.
00:13:37
Speaker
Or and people rarely got the top scores on the categories.
00:13:41
Speaker
And so for me, it's like I'm living in fear of this specter behind me.
00:13:45
Speaker
But I'm also just giving this advice to students about how they're not doing perfect
00:13:50
Speaker
And it's just kind of creating this bad feeling all around for everybody.
00:13:56
Speaker
And this year I decided that I'd had enough of that and I could actually name what was going on.
00:14:02
Speaker
So to find out how I could approach young teachers about that, having to move away from sort of that anxiety that's wrapped up in how we assess
00:14:14
Speaker
is kind of becoming my new mission, I guess, is to connect people with, hey, it doesn't have to be the way that you think.
00:14:21
Speaker
It doesn't have to be this oppressive in a way.
00:14:25
Speaker
You know, I know a lot of this isn't very easy either.
00:14:27
Speaker
I know it's really hard to convince everyone that Greedless is the way to go.
00:14:31
Speaker
I mean, if you're brought up in the traditional system, saying that everything you're used to is really the wrong way to do things is very much an uphill battle.
00:14:39
Speaker
What has been your experience in this regard?
00:14:41
Speaker
The scary part for me this year, and I still kind of wrestle with it a little bit, but now that we're most of the way through the year, I'm seeing that it works.
00:14:52
Speaker
But the scary part for me was how do I justify this?
00:14:55
Speaker
to somebody who has questions, if a parent or if an administrator has questions, which I've only dealt with a couple and they've been pretty softball questions.
00:15:05
Speaker
So I've been fortunate in that regard.
00:15:07
Speaker
I know some people have tried to go the route that I'm going and have been met with a lot of opposition.
00:15:13
Speaker
Because the word I'm going to use here is schema.
00:15:17
Speaker
I mean, everyone's schema about what schooling is and what you do at school, it doesn't quite fit what I'm doing in my classroom.
00:15:24
Speaker
I mean, it largely does.
00:15:25
Speaker
Kids show up every day.
00:15:26
Speaker
They sit down in relatively assigned seats.
00:15:29
Speaker
And I take role, and I instruct, and they do work.
00:15:32
Speaker
I mean, it looks very similar.
00:15:34
Speaker
But it's just kind of like how we get that sort of end result that we're all, I mean, more or less, the students are there for that grade teaching high school.
00:15:41
Speaker
And this led us to a discussion of Jeff's platform, Make Them Master It, which is developed to connect teachers in a safe place to consider these progressive ideas.
00:15:50
Speaker
For him, it encourages practice in his own classroom because he knows that others are considering and doing the same things.
00:15:56
Speaker
For me, it's the same way.
00:15:57
Speaker
Human Restoration Project has allowed me to feel a lot more confident in the progressive ideals I try to hold up in my own classroom.
00:16:03
Speaker
Further, we as teachers can use our online platforms to bolster the why of using progressive ed showcasing our student work.
00:16:10
Speaker
Basically, there's a level of submitting to this external measure, a standardized test.
00:16:18
Speaker
And I would say if a school wanted to go all in with this more student-centered approach, now with technology being relatively inexpensive and really fast internet, things like that, I feel like a school could just say, we're going to go all in on this.
00:16:34
Speaker
And instead of just waiting for somebody else to tell us our results,
00:16:38
Speaker
How about we just show them?
00:16:40
Speaker
How about we put on our website here that we have, you know, video or we run a project that's all year long and we're just constantly updating and telling the community what we're doing here and showing what our really bright students are doing.
00:16:52
Speaker
And then when the test results come out, they can kind of decide for themselves when they look at, well, here, I got all this great stuff coming out from our school and we can see what our students are doing.
00:17:00
Speaker
And then we see these results that might actually cause some questioning.
00:17:04
Speaker
I'm just, you know, speculating.
00:17:05
Speaker
What if a school did that?
00:17:06
Speaker
I'm a huge proponent of this as well.
00:17:08
Speaker
I manage the website of our school and I make a point to upload the projects that we're doing, including our resources and promoting social media accounts of teachers who show off student work.
00:17:19
Speaker
And we emphasize student work, not teacher work.
00:17:21
Speaker
I really find it annoying when teachers take videos of quote unquote engaging lessons.
00:17:27
Speaker
I'm not interested in someone's amazing techniques of control, I just want to see cool examples of what students are doing and then I can use those ideas to propose new ideas to my kids.
00:17:37
Speaker
Next year we're planning on having students actually all upload their work on our website and make their portfolios even public.
00:17:42
Speaker
What goals do you have for them, make them master it when it comes to promoting your ideas?
00:17:47
Speaker
Well, my goals for the platform going forward, I do want to grow, get as many stories as I can of teachers at points where they really struggled in their career, but they found a way through and put that out there for other teachers.
00:18:03
Speaker
I want to connect more at Make Them Master It around the idea of these alternative ways to assess students and
00:18:14
Speaker
more ownership for the students and their learning.
00:18:17
Speaker
And as much as I can, kind of put that on my website.
00:18:20
Speaker
And I'm at, I'm toying with the idea of, you know, having other people come on the website too, to just kind of share their story about how they have students take on the learning or even like the teacher side too of,
00:18:35
Speaker
You know, it's really hard, but I push through and here's some encouragement for you too.
00:18:40
Speaker
So kind of opening it up a little bit for other teachers to share their story, but really to just kind of keep growing.
00:18:45
Speaker
And then that concept of getting students to own the learning and for teachers to sort of unburden teachers from the stresses of teaching.
00:18:52
Speaker
as much as possible in an encouraging way.
00:18:54
Speaker
I've seen some stuff out there that's the same kind of goal, but it's more of a de-stress or a vent.
00:18:59
Speaker
And I don't want that to take place on my website necessarily.
00:19:03
Speaker
I mean, we do need to vent.
00:19:04
Speaker
We do need to have time where we process stuff with people that we trust.
00:19:09
Speaker
But I also just really want to be an encouragement to really to learners and the teachers right there and just kind of build on that as much as I can.
00:19:17
Speaker
So I don't know if there's I do know there's other books in me.
00:19:20
Speaker
I got some books kind of in there that are going to come out eventually and I'll continue to self publish.
Sharing Progressive Education Stories
00:19:24
Speaker
So in the same vein, what advice do you have for teachers who may want to share their voice?
00:19:29
Speaker
I encourage everyone to make their voice heard because I mean, it's changed my teaching life.
00:19:32
Speaker
It seems like there's, like when I entered the profession, long before there was the proliferation of social media, there was a way, like a process you went through, an established process that you went through to be considered like a leader or somebody who could raise a platform and have a voice.
00:19:51
Speaker
But now with social media, it's more of like who's listening.
00:19:55
Speaker
And so it's a very different route where anyone, anyone can build a platform.
00:20:00
Speaker
And if the ideas are resonating, then some people can kind of flock there and they'll go there and it gets shared around.
00:20:07
Speaker
And it's not this established way.
00:20:09
Speaker
Like I don't necessarily need to get a PhD or an EDD to be heard.
00:20:14
Speaker
I can invite, almost invite people into my classroom with my platform and say like, hey, this is what's going on in here.
00:20:20
Speaker
And if ideas resonate, people kind of hover around that.
00:20:24
Speaker
And then over time, there's no actual process of this.
00:20:28
Speaker
No one's handing me a diploma and saying, you're an expert.
00:20:31
Speaker
But at a certain point, I'm being treated like I'm one.
00:20:35
Speaker
And me and my colleagues have been teaching for about the same amount of time, about 13 to 15 years.
00:20:41
Speaker
who are in the process of building a platform are noticing these things too, that, huh, people are, they're taking me just as seriously as they would, you know, this traditionally published author over here.
00:20:55
Speaker
It's been a fascinating kind of concept to think through that there's different routes now too.
00:21:00
Speaker
There's alternative routes to this expertise in this platform building.
00:21:04
Speaker
Exactly.
00:21:04
Speaker
And as a soft promo, I'm always willing to share the human restoration project with you.
00:21:09
Speaker
If anyone listening has a story to tell, advice to give, or anything surrounding progressive education, I'll help promote you.
00:21:15
Speaker
We'll coach you through setting up some basic account stuff if you're not familiar and really offer just to promote your message for free.
00:21:22
Speaker
Just send us a DM on Twitter or you can reach me by email at chris, C-H-R-I-S, at humanrestorationproject.org.
00:21:42
Speaker
In my opinion, it's valuing the student where he or she is.
00:21:47
Speaker
It's recognizing the individual's strengths and weaknesses and challenging them beyond where he or she is currently at.
00:21:56
Speaker
Grading in of itself is comparative.
00:22:00
Speaker
It's either norm reference or criterion reference.
00:22:04
Speaker
And either way, when we're doing that, we are we're saying that the students should be here and not all students should be somewhere.
00:22:14
Speaker
They should be exactly where they are.
00:22:15
Speaker
And we should be challenging beyond where they.
00:22:18
Speaker
Here's Aaron Blackwelder, an English educator in Woodland Public Schools in Woodland, Washington, and founder of the organization Teachers Going Gradeless, which connects educators and provides a crazy amount of resources concerning gradeless education.
00:22:31
Speaker
Aaron references the end of average by Todd Rose.
00:22:35
Speaker
Throughout history, we have made these attempts to average or quantify things and place the ideal around something.
00:22:46
Speaker
And one of the biggest comparisons he uses is jet fighters in that...
00:22:52
Speaker
pilots were, you know, we weren't very successful when we had these average built cockpits.
00:22:58
Speaker
But as soon as they started developing the cockpit to be adjustable to the pilot, then we've been able to get pilots of all sizes, shapes, genders into the cockpit.
00:23:09
Speaker
And we've been, you know, we've had the greatest air force.
00:23:14
Speaker
ever since.
00:23:15
Speaker
Now, I'm not promoting the Air Force or war or anything like that, but what I'm saying is the idea is that has been transitioned to our automobiles and made us better drivers and more comfortable in our cars.
00:23:26
Speaker
And he goes on to talk about education and that when we start looking at different aspects of learning and learning styles and learning abilities gearing towards that mindset,
00:23:39
Speaker
then we open up possibilities that can basically challenge each person and, you know, develop ideas that would never be developed if we didn't open up those opportunities.
Gradeless Learning for Personal Growth
00:23:50
Speaker
So, yeah, to me, gradeless learning is about acknowledging the learner where that learner is and exploring his or her potential rather than the potential somebody else thinks that they should be at.
00:24:03
Speaker
For sure.
00:24:03
Speaker
And it benefits the teacher just as much as the student.
00:24:06
Speaker
find myself much more relaxed and less stressed when i'm not expected to put a number in for every student every single day or every single week sometimes i'm expected to summarize a grade for eligibility or state requirements but mostly i spend most of my time giving feedback in class or through something more student-centric and i think that some might look though at gradeless learning and say you know specifically i'm referencing your progress report which i'll link in the show notes if you're not familiar it's a sheet of paper
00:24:34
Speaker
that lists a bunch of learning objectives with some banked-in remarks, and then there's a summative section at the bottom for growth and what someone's doing well.
00:24:43
Speaker
For some, they might look at that and go, man, that's a lot of work.
00:24:46
Speaker
How has gradeless learning affected your workload?
00:24:48
Speaker
In some aspects, I'm doing a lot less work than I've ever done before.
00:24:51
Speaker
I have to really think about what it is that I want to read and assess.
00:24:58
Speaker
So homework,
00:25:01
Speaker
I don't give homework.
00:25:02
Speaker
I haven't given homework in years.
00:25:04
Speaker
However, we do a lot of project-based and problem-based learning, and I'm looking at the work in progress constantly.
00:25:12
Speaker
And from that perspective, I'm doing a lot more in-class working with individual students.
00:25:19
Speaker
reading their work while over their shoulder, essentially, and giving ongoing feedback.
00:25:24
Speaker
So by the time that it's done and turned in, I don't need to sit down with it and assess it.
00:25:29
Speaker
I've sat down with the students through the process and helped ensure by the time it's turned in, they're not having to get a grade from me or get the evaluation.
00:25:41
Speaker
They pretty much are confident where that work is by the time they've turned it in.
00:25:45
Speaker
Through the process, it's a lot more work, but in the summative,
00:25:49
Speaker
Really easy at that point.
00:25:52
Speaker
As far as building that progress report, yes, it does look pretty daunting, doesn't it?
00:25:58
Speaker
In all honesty, it takes me about four to five minutes to fill one out for each student.
00:26:01
Speaker
And that being pretty generous with time, I can probably whip them out a little faster than that.
00:26:08
Speaker
I actually use Google Forms.
00:26:11
Speaker
I have two rubrics that I use that are, one is based on the Common Core.
00:26:19
Speaker
and what our learning targets are for that standard.
00:26:22
Speaker
And for the one that you saw, it's based on freshman first semester.
00:26:28
Speaker
It's all about learning to use text evidence to support a claim.
00:26:32
Speaker
That's everything we do the whole semester long.
00:26:35
Speaker
And the other rubric that we use is a soft skills rubric.
00:26:41
Speaker
And both of those are embedded into the teaching and the learning in the class.
00:26:48
Speaker
And I find that the soft skills are far more important to talk about with students than the hard skills of writing.
00:26:56
Speaker
And so I like it because a lot of those conversations I have with students, like we do a lot of group collaborative work in my class.
00:27:05
Speaker
And I have this young, one young lady who I've had multiple conversations with.
00:27:11
Speaker
And, you know, she started off the semester by complaining that she was the only one doing the work.
00:27:18
Speaker
And so I pointed it to our soft skills rubric.
00:27:20
Speaker
I said, well, let's look at let's look at this.
00:27:22
Speaker
Let's see.
00:27:23
Speaker
Are you with the collaboration?
00:27:25
Speaker
Are you acting as a leader or are you taking this on yourself?
00:27:30
Speaker
Are you working?
00:27:31
Speaker
Are you being respectful by taking on the work or is it more respectful to challenge people?
00:27:37
Speaker
And if they don't do the work, let them fail.
00:27:40
Speaker
And so it challenges students who are that type A personality to look, to step back and go, hmm, what I'm doing is unhealthy.
00:27:49
Speaker
It's unhealthy for me and it's unhealthy for my group.
00:27:53
Speaker
So I really like those soft skills in reporting those.
00:27:56
Speaker
The one thing that I truly believe in is when I talk about these, I don't report the full rubric to the parents.
00:28:07
Speaker
I don't want parents to look at,
00:28:11
Speaker
when I report, say, one item, let's say it's a level three, I don't want them to see, oh boy, they could be a level four.
00:28:19
Speaker
I just want them to acknowledge where their child is and just accept that.
00:28:22
Speaker
Because as soon as we start having conversations around, well, why is he a level three?
00:28:27
Speaker
We start having a conversation around a grade.
00:28:29
Speaker
Why is my child level three and we're at a level four?
00:28:31
Speaker
And I don't want to have those conversations.
00:28:32
Speaker
I want to have a conversation about where your child is right now.
00:28:36
Speaker
And if you're interested in moving your child forward, we can talk about how we can
00:28:40
Speaker
make things better without looking at level four.
00:28:44
Speaker
And even though you find yourself doing all this, you still have to report grades within your district, right?
00:28:48
Speaker
Yes, I do.
00:28:49
Speaker
I have to report a grade.
00:28:51
Speaker
And what I found is over the last, I started doing that, that long report this year.
00:29:00
Speaker
And I found that parents,
00:29:03
Speaker
have loved it.
00:29:04
Speaker
They've absolutely loved it.
00:29:05
Speaker
And all they get on my report card is a letter grade.
00:29:08
Speaker
And so there's no comments, nothing on the report card anymore.
00:29:11
Speaker
It's just the letter grade.
00:29:13
Speaker
And then the child gets the long form sent home with them.
00:29:17
Speaker
And I find that I'm having more conversations with parents through email, phone calls about that report than I am about the letter grade anymore.
00:29:28
Speaker
I've not had a parent call and complain to me.
00:29:31
Speaker
Why is my billy getting a
00:29:33
Speaker
B plus and not an A or whatever it is.
00:29:37
Speaker
They're calling me and saying, hey, I noticed that in one of the challenges for my son, you said that he could develop his leadership skills.
00:29:49
Speaker
He's involved in this, this, and this.
00:29:51
Speaker
What are you seeing in class?
00:29:52
Speaker
Because I would like to help him out with that.
00:29:54
Speaker
So I enjoy those conversations.
00:29:57
Speaker
And those, I think, are much more meaningful than...
00:30:02
Speaker
what can I do to get my child from A minus to an A?
00:30:07
Speaker
It does just don't make sense in those conversations, but the conversations about how to make my child a better human being are so rich and so rewarding.
00:30:17
Speaker
Of course, we have to still deal with the ramifications that grades have on our schools as well.
00:30:22
Speaker
Let's take a second and talk about the article you wrote recently called Redefining Quality, Working Toward New Measures of School Achievement, where you talk about the effect that school grading has on the surrounding community.
00:30:33
Speaker
Well, the school report card emphasizes test scores, which is... And if you look at my article, I put a screenshot of Washington State's overall report card.
00:30:42
Speaker
And you can go to any school district report card.
00:30:46
Speaker
When a state emphasizes test scores, such as Washington does, you'll notice on that screenshot that 50% of the page is directed towards the result of the test scores.
00:30:58
Speaker
And the bottom right-hand corner
00:31:02
Speaker
It kind of hidden away under other measures is four-year graduation, five-year graduation rate, and attendance.
00:31:10
Speaker
I don't know why graduation rate is clumped with attendance.
00:31:14
Speaker
Who gives a crap about attendance?
00:31:16
Speaker
But graduation rate should have much more preferential treatment to it than the test scores.
00:31:23
Speaker
It isn't part of what our goals in high school is to
00:31:27
Speaker
get kids to graduate, but more than graduate, there are so many cool things going on in schools that just are not reported in state test scores.
Critique of Test Scores in Education
00:31:36
Speaker
And when we only publish state test scores, we are being reductive in what is possible in a school.
00:31:47
Speaker
We know that through years and years and years of research that the number one indicator of the success of the school on state
00:31:56
Speaker
eight test scores is the socioeconomic status of the community that surrounds the school.
00:32:02
Speaker
So when we report test scores as the number one indicator of equality of a school, then we're automatically disadvantaging students of poverty, students of color.
00:32:14
Speaker
I mean, we are perpetrating institutionalized racism as we continue to report state test scores.
00:32:23
Speaker
And we're going to continue to give preferential treatment to the white affluent neighborhoods.
00:32:30
Speaker
So, of course, you know, parents who are white and affluent are going to back up the state test scores because it is going to give their children higher preferential treatment with the schools.
00:32:42
Speaker
But the sad thing is, is what are their schools really doing to prepare their kids for beyond?
00:32:50
Speaker
Are they just doing a really good job preparing them for the test so that they could take this test?
00:32:56
Speaker
Or are we really preparing kids for life?
00:32:59
Speaker
You know, a lot of the things I listed off in my article, some of the wonderful things that my school does.
00:33:04
Speaker
We have two Washington State Regional Teachers of the Year.
00:33:11
Speaker
And this is in the past six years that these teachers have been recognized.
00:33:18
Speaker
And then we have...
00:33:20
Speaker
We have a culinary program that has won several states and has gone to nationals.
00:33:27
Speaker
We have a FFA program that has won several states and gone to nationals multiple times.
00:33:35
Speaker
And we have an art program that he uses pottery class and the kids make bowls and he sells the bowls for charity.
00:33:46
Speaker
I mean, these are wonderful things, and these are not put into a school's report card.
00:33:52
Speaker
And if I saw those things listed on the school's report card, I'd go, man, I want my kid to go there.
00:33:58
Speaker
But when I look at my school's report card, we are rated as a 4 out of 10.
00:34:04
Speaker
And it makes me sad that our quality is not even on the top half.
00:34:11
Speaker
because our test scores, and we have a large community of, we're a very rural school, and we have a large community of poverty students.
00:34:22
Speaker
And we're automatically saying our school is not high quality because our test scores are not bad.
00:34:28
Speaker
And to me, I just find that very sad.
00:34:30
Speaker
And I think that when we show that to parents, when we show that to community members, if we put it into their face, look,
00:34:38
Speaker
you're automatically disadvantaging schools and When we flip that over if we stop de-emphasizing test scores and we start expecting schools to begin to report how is the school connecting with the community and what impact are you making in the community in your school then we're gonna have to start redefining and and challenging ourselves as administrators and teachers and
00:35:07
Speaker
to what we're doing in the classrooms.
00:35:10
Speaker
I'm no longer going to be doing some direct instruction that's telling my kids how to answer the correct bubbling answer on a question on the state test.
00:35:22
Speaker
Instead, I'm challenging my kids to publish their writing to a blog spot so that they can impact our community or we're doing some community activists to reduce
00:35:35
Speaker
to reduce drug dealing in our community, or we're dealing with how do we increase the salmon population in our rivers because the salmon population is on a decline.
00:35:49
Speaker
So we're beginning to look at those and reach out to the community and work with the community to solve problems.
00:35:56
Speaker
And when we get to report those things, our school is going to be much better than they were.
00:36:03
Speaker
than just, hey, we did a great job on this test.
00:36:05
Speaker
So I'm curious then, is there a question that you believe that state-standardized report cards should be addressing?
00:36:11
Speaker
I think that when we begin to quantify learning, we begin to reduce it to, I mean, it dehumanizes, period.
00:36:21
Speaker
And I think what we need to do is start asking, not instead of asking the question, what do we begin to quantify, but
00:36:29
Speaker
but rather how we're going to begin to qualify this.
00:36:33
Speaker
How do kids get to report what they've learned in the process for four years of high school or their 13 years of education?
00:36:44
Speaker
How do kids get to reflect upon that and say, here's what I've learned in my 13 years of school, and I'm so glad that I went through my schools, and here's where I'm going to go with this information.
00:36:56
Speaker
And then what we can do is, and this is hard to do, is we check in with them four, five, ten years after graduation and see where they are.
00:37:06
Speaker
And our kids, because of what they've learned in school, are they now people who are shaping their community?
00:37:14
Speaker
Are they shaping their jobs?
00:37:16
Speaker
Are they people who are influencers and creative and creative?
00:37:22
Speaker
Yeah, I think those are the questions we have to ask, but that's the hard work.
00:37:28
Speaker
It's much easier to throw a piece of paper in front of 1,600 kids and then pull the results in and have a machine run it and report the results by the end of the year.
00:37:39
Speaker
But those reports of a state test don't tell us where the kids are going to be 10, 15, 20 years from now.
00:37:45
Speaker
And I think those are the questions that we need to ask.
00:37:48
Speaker
We need to be asking a lot of time.
00:37:52
Speaker
How did your high school program help prepare you for college?
00:37:57
Speaker
Or how did your high school program help prepare you for the career that you were involved?
00:38:03
Speaker
Or how did your high school program just help you to be a better person?
00:38:07
Speaker
And I really think that's the question that we need to ask is, how did school make you a better person?
00:38:13
Speaker
And that's not quantifiable.
00:38:14
Speaker
And what final thoughts do you have surrounding your practice and gradeless ad?
00:38:18
Speaker
A couple of years after I first started teaching, ratemyteacher.com came out.
00:38:23
Speaker
And I remember thinking, this is cool.
00:38:27
Speaker
I can get feedback from my kids and from their parents.
00:38:31
Speaker
And people can see this around the world.
00:38:34
Speaker
what I'm doing and I can learn from what I'm doing bad and what I'm doing good.
00:38:39
Speaker
And I remember teachers being up in arms.
00:38:41
Speaker
Hey, we can't have this.
00:38:44
Speaker
What if I get a kid that hates me?
00:38:46
Speaker
And I think what it comes down to really why teachers fear the students reporting of the teachers is because I really think that we, if we really think about it, we know we're failing our kids.
00:39:01
Speaker
We know that we are not serving social emotional needs.
00:39:05
Speaker
We know that we're really not preparing them for life.
00:39:09
Speaker
We are, because nowhere in the real world
00:39:13
Speaker
Do we sit in a desk in isolation, not work with somebody next to us, take a test every week?
00:39:22
Speaker
We don't have six different bosses telling us what to do, six different rules.
00:39:26
Speaker
We're working collaboratively.
00:39:29
Speaker
We're working, you know, most jobs, we're solving real world problems and working with people to do that.
00:39:38
Speaker
And I really do think that if you ask a teacher, hey, how does what you're doing prepare kids for real life?
00:39:46
Speaker
If they're being honest, they're going to say it's not.
00:39:50
Speaker
And I think that's part of the fear of having people report on us.
00:39:56
Speaker
But I think that if we move away from a test data-driven school,
00:40:04
Speaker
to a more holistic and problem-based or project-based outreach where we're working with our communities.
00:40:12
Speaker
then kids are going to be more satisfied with their learning.
00:40:16
Speaker
Kids are going to be more satisfied with who they are and their teachers because they'll look at their teachers as somebody who worked with them rather than worked at or did to them.
00:40:29
Speaker
And nobody wants somebody to do to them.
00:40:33
Speaker
They want somebody to do with them in life.
00:40:35
Speaker
I know like with my principal, my principal's phenomenal and he comes into my classroom quite often.
00:40:41
Speaker
And he'll just ask me questions.
00:40:44
Speaker
He'll give me some suggestions.
00:40:45
Speaker
He'll tell me what he likes that I'm doing.
00:40:47
Speaker
He'll point out things that he doesn't like.
00:40:49
Speaker
But it's a relationship that we have.
00:40:53
Speaker
And it's built on trust.
00:40:55
Speaker
And it's built on how do we get kids to learn better rather than, hey, you're not filling in these checkboxes.
00:41:03
Speaker
And at the end of the year, we're going to do our evaluation.
00:41:06
Speaker
And I'm going to grade you down for everything that you got wrong.
00:41:09
Speaker
It's more of, hey, how can I make Aaron Blackwater a better teacher?
00:41:13
Speaker
And I trust my principal.
00:41:15
Speaker
And I look at him.
00:41:17
Speaker
I don't fear him walking in my door.
00:41:19
Speaker
I'm excited when he walks in my door because I think, hey, I have another opportunity to have a conversation about what's going on in my classroom.
00:41:26
Speaker
And I think that's the same thing that kids need.
00:41:28
Speaker
They need to look at us when we're walking by their desk.
00:41:31
Speaker
Hey, this is an opportunity for me to share what I'm doing with my teacher and get some feedback so I can become a better writer, a better scientist, a better thinker, rather than, oh, I hope my teacher doesn't see me off task playing on my phone.
00:41:45
Speaker
Or, oh, boy, I hope my teacher doesn't see that I've made this mistake.
00:41:49
Speaker
So, yeah, I think that those are the relationships we need to build.
00:42:04
Speaker
I hope you're enjoying the podcast thus far.
00:42:06
Speaker
I sincerely appreciate you listening in.
00:42:08
Speaker
And if you enjoy this work, head on over to humanrestorationproject.org to find a ton of free resources and a wealth of writings.
The Human Restoration Project and Future Education
00:42:16
Speaker
And then, if you think we should keep going, take a gander at our Patreon page.
00:42:20
Speaker
For a dollar a month, you'll receive a professional, print-ready electronic magazine of our works every two months.
00:42:26
Speaker
But as always, all of our work is available free online.
00:42:29
Speaker
The best practices shouldn't be gatekept.
00:42:32
Speaker
So we're here as a resource to support progressive ed for everyone.
00:42:36
Speaker
Thank you.
00:42:37
Speaker
And finally, Nick Covington, who is both one of our earliest supporters and a social studies instructor at Ankeny High School in Ankeny, Iowa, who promotes the use of portfolio based learning as well as other progressive practices on a social media as well as his blog.
00:42:52
Speaker
had a strange journey into education, graduated into the Great Recession, had tons of odd jobs, worked at a cemetery, worked for the census, worked as a substitute teacher for two years, and then landed in Ankeny, which is the school that I graduated high school from, and kind of fell into a social studies position from there.
00:43:12
Speaker
So, yeah, here I am seven years later, I think, and teaching social studies.
00:43:18
Speaker
What was your journey like into progressive ed?
00:43:20
Speaker
Getting into progressive education and was seeing how the system cultivates accumulation, whether it's like through points or through, you know, exit tickets and those kinds of things over like the messiness of actual thinking, you know, and then we don't
00:43:37
Speaker
we don't really help students develop tools to even think about their thinking or evaluate their learning.
00:43:44
Speaker
And for me, the big wake-up call was, I think, maybe five years ago now.
00:43:49
Speaker
And we had a pretty, you know, PLC culture is a pretty strong thing in our district.
00:43:54
Speaker
So I was kind of tired of giving these cumulative finals.
00:43:57
Speaker
And so I said, I was like, I'm going to give a portfolio for a final and just kind of see, did some research on that and kind of see what happened.
00:44:03
Speaker
But it was a challenge.
00:44:05
Speaker
kind of an interesting failure for the first semester because I didn't change anything about the ways that I was teaching.
00:44:11
Speaker
It was just, okay, well then let's compile this all at the end and kind of see how this connects back to standards.
00:44:16
Speaker
And so kids were putting in their summative assessments, they were putting quiz scores in there.
00:44:21
Speaker
and so we get to the end and you know it had these conversations say okay how does how does how how can you show that you learned the role of individuals in groups as promoters have changed the status quo and they pull out a quiz score that's a wall has the show that you learn anything it's a way to 90 percent
00:44:37
Speaker
And I would say, okay, so what did you learn about individuals and groups to show that you got a 90%?
00:44:42
Speaker
And they would say, I don't know, but I got a 90%, so I must have learned it.
00:44:46
Speaker
And so it was like this circular thing, you know, and kids were just trapped in this language of like points and grades.
00:44:52
Speaker
And so I really did realize that we need to switch.
00:44:55
Speaker
If we're going to give them a language to be able to communicate learning separate from points and grades, we need to start using different things.
00:45:03
Speaker
you know ways of communicating those things too so we we can act in school like if we just cover the accountability parts in and and keep students accountable that you know then maybe they'll just figure it out at the end but like really I think what it does is just create kids who haven't had a chance to think about their learning in a in a meaningful way
00:45:24
Speaker
And then they just get to the end and there's no time to reflect.
00:45:26
Speaker
They just have a GPA to show for it.
00:45:29
Speaker
But the consequences are vast.
00:45:30
Speaker
The kids are more risk averse.
00:45:34
Speaker
They're extrinsically motivated, almost exclusively.
00:45:38
Speaker
They don't really feel like a shared sense of collaboration or obligation to anybody else because at the end of the day, what goes in the grade book isn't what reflects your
00:45:51
Speaker
effort or your values or, you know, and I'm pointing around the room here, the collective or group work, it's just what did I do?
00:45:58
Speaker
How can I accumulate more of those things?
00:46:01
Speaker
And so they leave school just with a lack of curiosity of, you know, purpose or direction and they can't ask and answer meaningful questions about
00:46:11
Speaker
about their place in the world and literally all that stuff that I described started with just a switch to portfolio conversations that failed terribly you know my second year of teaching and then realizing I was gonna have to backfill all of these other I think my lights turned off backfill all these other skills and abilities to be able to have these conversations like you can't just go into this in the final and expect that they're gonna do well you have to model it
00:46:37
Speaker
You have to practice it.
00:46:38
Speaker
You have to build it into the structures of your day.
00:46:42
Speaker
And that has just taken me down a rabbit hole of every other sort of thing related to those kinds of ideas.
00:46:49
Speaker
It started with portfolios.
00:46:50
Speaker
And what are the goals when it comes to using these practices?
00:46:53
Speaker
What's the point of using a portfolio and diving into gradeless learning?
00:46:57
Speaker
In thinking about those goals of using progressive practice, I mean, I can get to more specific things, but here's the thing that keeps me up all night.
00:47:05
Speaker
And I tell my kids this almost every single day, too, is
00:47:08
Speaker
at commencement on May 25th when I'm sitting there in the audience and they're walking across the stage and I'm sitting there applauding them and then they hit the other side of the stage, what then?
00:47:19
Speaker
There's not going to be someone there to hold you accountable with bells and all the intense learning structures that we built up around this.
00:47:29
Speaker
You're not going to necessarily have the instant feedback of something like a grade book or all those other accountability layers that we have.
00:47:36
Speaker
I just ask them, what are you going to do then?
00:47:39
Speaker
Why should I do those things in my practice now if that's not really supporting you for a world without those kinds of things?
00:47:45
Speaker
So what replaces it if you're going to have to be intrinsically motivated?
00:47:49
Speaker
What replaces me asking questions or teacher-led questions when there's no teacher to lead those questions?
00:47:56
Speaker
And sure, some kids are going to have, they're going to go on to have other educational experiences, but they're going to look very different from the ones that are in school.
00:48:04
Speaker
I think about my own college experience or even beyond that in adult learning environments.
00:48:11
Speaker
and they don't necessarily look like traditional classroom practices.
00:48:14
Speaker
They look more like reflective conversations and they look like ungraded writings that just kind of ask you to grow and think and reflect as a professional practitioner or I haven't taken a multiple choice test in 10 years because there's a part of the world that doesn't necessarily value those things.
00:48:36
Speaker
So if the entire experience
00:48:40
Speaker
molding a particular type of student but the world values things that are different than being successful in school but we send kids on a very specific path of success there what are they going to do with the rest of their life outside of school and so yeah I think we just have to strive to make learning environments more authentic in that world and to understand through experiences rather than through rote learning
00:49:08
Speaker
and some of the ways that maybe we learned when we were in high school.
00:49:11
Speaker
I thought a little bit about something that I'm trying to do in my own experience here and trying to apply in my own context, which is the concept of assessment as learning.
00:49:22
Speaker
And I've learned about it through Twitter and talking to people through Twitter,
00:49:27
Speaker
like that seems to be like the key here in terms of understanding like learning as a process, you know, instead of learning as assessment, assessment as learning.
00:49:38
Speaker
Literally it turns the whole thing on its head.
00:49:41
Speaker
And here's a quick anecdote just from an econ class.
00:49:46
Speaker
So even in cases where students don't have a whole lot of choice over content, so say we're learning about economic systems and
00:49:53
Speaker
and to scaffold that loosely, we're building a quick little organizer, but I'll leave a blank space in there to say, okay, draw.
00:50:00
Speaker
Draw a symbol, draw a cartoon, draw a diagram, draw something that to you represents in their brain economic systems.
Creative Learning Approaches
00:50:08
Speaker
This experience that I had with a student the other day was, I haven't graded anything
00:50:13
Speaker
the entire semester in the sense of putting points in a grade book.
00:50:17
Speaker
But this student said, if I just draw a coconut for the traditional economy, would you accept that?
00:50:22
Speaker
And I was like, well, what do you even mean will I accept that?
00:50:26
Speaker
So my mind went in a million different directions, and I was just like, well, what does the coconut mean to you?
00:50:31
Speaker
And he says, the coconut shows how in a traditional economy they would just barter for goods like coconuts instead of using money.
00:50:39
Speaker
And in my head I was just, yep, you get it.
00:50:42
Speaker
So there wasn't a need for additional testing or assessment or anything else.
00:50:48
Speaker
It's like that fluid ongoing process.
00:50:51
Speaker
It's that like the Frank Smith idea from his forgetting and learning, that classical view.
00:50:56
Speaker
Learning is effortless when it happens as a result of being in a community of learners who are doing the same thing together.
00:51:04
Speaker
So I want to make my classroom environment more like that, even if we have some traditional structures because I still have to
00:51:12
Speaker
talk about economic systems and PPCs and some of those things in economics class, but how can we build that assessment as a learning part to just make it a fluid part of what we do and not a series of tests that you study for and forget.
00:51:25
Speaker
One thing I really want to point out is your economics evidence journal.
00:51:30
Speaker
Could you go into more details about what this is?
00:51:32
Speaker
I mean, the evidence journal as it's designed to do, the evidence journal is, you know, it provides just clear language and clear paths to get to, you know, whatever we define as proficiency.
00:51:46
Speaker
You know, if we want kids to understand and to provide examples of wants and needs and goods and services, I don't care if they want to
00:51:51
Speaker
talk to me about that.
00:51:53
Speaker
I don't care if they want to plug it, if they want to write it down on a sheet of paper or type it up on a Google Doc and have that as evidence or have some activity that we did plugged in there.
00:52:03
Speaker
For the factors of production, we did an activity where we did a virtual tour of the Chamber of Commerce through Ankeny and I was like, hey,
00:52:14
Speaker
of production, land, labor, and capital.
00:52:16
Speaker
So if you're a kid who wants to rely on that as an artifact of evidence, then pull that up as we go through this.
00:52:22
Speaker
But the checkpoints basically are, okay, we might do some learning around here, or you might just need to be in charge of finding out some of those objectives and meeting those.
00:52:32
Speaker
And whenever you get to that point,
00:52:35
Speaker
I have some quizzes in there just so that way they can self-reflect and say, okay, if you really get it, maybe you should get this score on the quiz and if not, maybe go back.
00:52:43
Speaker
And I put that on like the quizzes.
00:52:45
Speaker
Have you ever used quizzes before?
00:52:47
Speaker
Yeah, so that's great because they just have the number on there and they can go through and do that and then they just do some conference prep work for me to say like okay what are one or two of the biggest takeaways of that learning for you, what are connections that you made to the material.
00:53:01
Speaker
So for example I had a student today talking about how when she goes to the store and has to make decisions about name brand versus store brand stuff that's a trade-off that she's gonna have to make a look perfect.
00:53:12
Speaker
You get it, right?
00:53:12
Speaker
So it's all about getting it and I'm not gonna put
00:53:15
Speaker
I'm not gonna put anything in the grade book that reflects less than you getting it.
00:53:18
Speaker
You know, the only thing I'm gonna put in there is an incomplete to show that you don't get it yet.
00:53:22
Speaker
And the other question there is show the depth of your understanding by answering the essential question and that kind of just differs based on the, you know, I'll use units loosely because we don't really have units because
00:53:33
Speaker
we're assessing as the kids are ready to assess.
00:53:36
Speaker
I'll be doing some instruction, the econ content is more like on my pace of delivery compared to the other content of the classes but if you can provide some evidence or talk me through this, you have this all through at your disposal here.
00:53:50
Speaker
You can load it with artifacts, you can put papers in here, you can type up responses but the big checkpoint is just a conference with me.
00:53:57
Speaker
So it's just a narrative conference.
00:53:59
Speaker
It takes two, three, four minutes
00:54:01
Speaker
And it's just, okay, so I just start with, you know, how would you rate your learning?
00:54:05
Speaker
And that's that smiley face thing.
00:54:06
Speaker
So if they're super stoked about it, then it's, okay, why were you so excited about scarcity?
00:54:11
Speaker
Or if they hated it, like, I want to know that too.
00:54:14
Speaker
Why did you hate this unit?
00:54:15
Speaker
You completed the learning for it.
00:54:16
Speaker
What did you hate about it?
00:54:18
Speaker
and then just start talking to them through, okay, what are takeaways?
00:54:21
Speaker
How did you answer that question?
00:54:23
Speaker
How can we use economic thinking to help revenue decision making?
00:54:25
Speaker
So it's everything that we just talked about 20 minutes ago, which was about how do we give kids language to communicate learning is by communicating using the language of learning.
00:54:37
Speaker
Giving the objectives, I don't ever talk about points or
00:54:40
Speaker
or grades, it's all in reference to those objectives.
00:54:44
Speaker
And just semester long things that we'll do, like we did the PBL project, like the economic engagement project, and there's checkpoints in their journal for that too.
00:54:53
Speaker
So where are they at in there?
00:54:55
Speaker
Have they completed the research agreement and conference with me about that?
00:54:58
Speaker
Okay, cool.
00:54:58
Speaker
Well then you're good to go, so that way we have, and I show them a video from the
00:55:05
Speaker
from one of the talk shows back in the 60s of some guy doing some plate spinning.
00:55:08
Speaker
We talk about how we're always spinning these plates and so what plate are we spinning today?
00:55:13
Speaker
We might be tending to some econ content today so that's what we're going to be going.
00:55:17
Speaker
Or you get to make some choices about are you going to do the EverFi financial literacy online learning piece which is due by the end of the semester?
00:55:25
Speaker
Are you going to tend to your economic engagement project which is due by the end of the semester?
00:55:30
Speaker
and like that just frees up me from basically minimum instruction so that way I can just be with kids all class.
00:55:37
Speaker
That was today and I love those days because I'm just talking with kids about hey what do you got, what do you need help with?
00:55:43
Speaker
You know I'm initialing in here so it shows their progress and their growth as they're going through it.
00:55:47
Speaker
The goal is just to have a completed
00:55:49
Speaker
booklet, you know, a packet of showing all their learning and all the objectives so that way it makes that, when I go to parent-teacher conferences on Thursday and we're not talking about, you know, how can my kid go from a 90 to a 92 or how can my kid keep the D minus, it's oh here's all the stuff your kid has done, right, here's how they've shown that learning.
00:56:12
Speaker
I'm not putting a grade in the grade book until they can show their learning.
00:56:15
Speaker
That was part of the process today too was just, okay, we've done some learning, so what does that look like now here at six weeks?
00:56:21
Speaker
We have these big 18-week goals, but are you meeting now?
00:56:24
Speaker
Are you in progress?
00:56:25
Speaker
Do you not have any evidence?
00:56:26
Speaker
How can we move you from having evidence to
Building a Learning-Focused Classroom
00:56:29
Speaker
all that stuff?
00:56:29
Speaker
I love it because I call it the no surprises rule.
00:56:32
Speaker
you know, econ agenda.
00:56:34
Speaker
You know all the stuff that you have to do in advance, right?
00:56:37
Speaker
So how are you gonna get there?
00:56:38
Speaker
How are you gonna show it?
00:56:39
Speaker
Are you gonna talk to me about it?
00:56:40
Speaker
Do you need to, some people, some kids build a Google slide, you know, and they have every single slide has the objective on it and they have the evidence in there, perfect.
00:56:49
Speaker
Some kid just wrote on here, show the depth of your understanding by answering the essential question.
00:56:52
Speaker
He wrote words.
00:56:53
Speaker
I was like, what does words mean?
00:56:55
Speaker
He was like, well, I'm going to talk to you about it.
00:56:56
Speaker
I was like, okay, we'll go.
00:56:58
Speaker
Talk to me about how you can do those things.
00:57:00
Speaker
So, you know, it's just, it's, again, going back to that classical model just of building, you know, a classroom culture that's focused on the learning and not the artificial things that, like,
00:57:14
Speaker
preclude real learning, right?
00:57:16
Speaker
And that might be a controversial, you know, thing to say just generally, but like all the crap that we put in place of just talking to kids about what they're learning, like gets in the way of getting learning done.
00:57:28
Speaker
And then just having this awesome artifact at the end to say, okay, this represents the six weeks of work that you've done in econ class.
00:57:36
Speaker
It's just such a cool thing.
00:57:37
Speaker
So the final then at the end, so let's come full circle and talk about portfolios.
00:57:41
Speaker
So
00:57:42
Speaker
We complete one of these things for the first six weeks.
00:57:45
Speaker
We've kind of got a year-long one for some of the year-long goals.
00:57:48
Speaker
We've got a second and third six weeks because those are our big chunks.
00:57:51
Speaker
So then by the end, we just mash those suckers together and then just have some reflection questions to ask them,
00:57:59
Speaker
How do you think this semester went?
00:58:00
Speaker
What do you think you understand the most?
00:58:02
Speaker
What could you teach to somebody else?
00:58:03
Speaker
Like if you went to the middle school right now and had to teach a lesson on economics, what would you teach to them?
00:58:09
Speaker
What can you walk away from here and changing the way that you look at the world?
00:58:13
Speaker
How does what you've learned in this class connect to other learning inside or outside of class?
00:58:19
Speaker
How has your learning this semester changed your view of economics?
00:58:21
Speaker
And even, you know, then some personal questions that I'll ask them at the end like, okay, so what's next?
00:58:26
Speaker
You know, this is the last time I'm going to get to talk to you in this, the final narrative conference.
00:58:30
Speaker
I'm just out in the hallway talking to kids for four or five days and it's awesome.
00:58:35
Speaker
You know, end with a fist bump or a high five or something and say, hey, you did it.
00:58:39
Speaker
Great job.
00:58:40
Speaker
I'm so glad for the thing that's coming up next.
00:58:44
Speaker
And none of the baggage of redos and retakes and grade-grubbing and all that stuff.
00:58:52
Speaker
A focused conversation on how are you, how are you doing, how are you doing on the learning, how are you doing on your goals, how are you doing on my goals sometimes.
00:59:02
Speaker
But I mean, that was a long way to get to that question, but it kind of seemed like it came full circle for me with just putting this journal together.
00:59:09
Speaker
In the grand scheme of things too, is it awkward to have all of these progressive techniques, let alone at a traditional school, but at the school that you yourself went to?
00:59:18
Speaker
I mean, just the relationship factor there of coming into a school that you were a student at.
00:59:23
Speaker
I mean, I feel awkward with the things that I might say or the things that I might share and how my coworkers might see that.
00:59:31
Speaker
What has that experience been like with your peers when you're pushing all these boundaries?
00:59:35
Speaker
I had the exact same thing.
00:59:36
Speaker
I didn't invite my... Honestly, I was a little bit anxious about that part of it.
00:59:40
Speaker
The idea of the narrative conference is way different than what a lot of... I've been doing portfolios for five years and nobody else around me has even dipped a toe in that.
00:59:51
Speaker
I'm always the weirdo out in the hallway talking to kids and people are closing their doors because they're taking a test or something.
01:00:00
Speaker
I guess whatever, do your thing.
01:00:02
Speaker
But it was so interesting because, you know, it's not just about the learning, but the relationships that I have with kids from first semester are so much stronger than any relationships that I've ever had because you don't end with that single stressful moment of,
01:00:17
Speaker
you know, oh, I'm stressed and anxious.
01:00:19
Speaker
The last time you see this kid is when they're at their most stressed and anxious and when like their grade is on the line to pass this final.
01:00:25
Speaker
It's just like, hey, let's just celebrate and talk about what's next for you here because, you know, this is the last time we're going to get to do these things.
01:00:32
Speaker
So I was out in the hallway.
01:00:33
Speaker
We're kind of by a stairwell that goes to our second floor and our main, our head principal was walking by and walking up the stairs and I was just talking to a student and we were just kind of
01:00:46
Speaker
going through that list, right?
01:00:47
Speaker
So talking about what it is that they learned or talking about the next steps for them and you know I was just asking him questions and he stops and he kind of walks a few steps back and he just has a big smile on his face and he's like, oh I had heard that this is what you were doing but it was just so great to actually hear you do
01:01:03
Speaker
doing this and I love what you're doing.
01:01:05
Speaker
He gave me a fist bump and he gave the student a fist bump on here too and then just stuck around for a few more seconds and then walked back upstairs.
01:01:13
Speaker
I think people are afraid, like, oh, if I don't have a score to show whether kids know something.
01:01:20
Speaker
The thing is, you're too scared to try something new and you don't even know what the rewards could be reaped for those kinds of things.
01:01:30
Speaker
And thinking that administrators wouldn't support that, but here I am in the hallway under the stairs talking to kids about their internships or their college choices or something else and admins smiling and walking around giving fist bumps.
01:01:43
Speaker
So I think it works out.
01:01:45
Speaker
super active on Twitter too.
01:01:47
Speaker
You're incredibly involved in posting your thoughts and sharing ideas.
01:01:50
Speaker
What are you finding on social media that you might not find in the quote-unquote physical world, if you will?
01:01:55
Speaker
Back when I was kind of making this transition, I was on more of like an instructional leadership team.
01:02:00
Speaker
I've been on a PBIS team.
01:02:02
Speaker
I've been on the standards-based grading team and all those things.
01:02:06
Speaker
I thought maybe those would be the vehicles to
01:02:09
Speaker
to be able to do that kind of work, but I found that those are just vehicles to systematize more of the doing school part of those kinds of things.
01:02:20
Speaker
Over the last two years, I've really just dropped out of the instructional leadership stratum, I guess, of colleagues.
01:02:28
Speaker
Then in continuing the Twitter work, that actually has led into a lot of great conversations.
01:02:33
Speaker
Maybe you've seen between