Saturday, March 19, 2022

Teachers second-guess letter grades as they search for a fairer way

Flexibility and relaxing due dates is what grading should have always been about. In a more perfect world, we would also be less about grading and more about evaluation. For this to happen, teachers need smaller class sizes and time during the week to develop curriculum and to work one-on-one with students. This is a funding issue since all of this obviously comes at a cost.

There is definitely an ongoing debate about grading students, as you can read here. I land on the side that students will rise to the level of, and even exceed, our expectations when given the opportunity to own their own learning. Here is where pedagogies like Critical Race Theory, project-based learning, participatory action research, culturally responsive and sustaining pedagogies, abolitionist teaching, and any kind of learning that promotes students asking questions, thinking deeply, developing ideas, sharing ideas, and assuming tasks that are meaningful to them.

And as we think about assessment, we should think deeply about authentic assessment that involves students and teachers in meaningful tasks where "grading" is more a relationship than an outcome. This is what I see reflected in the piece below.

A clear advantage is overcoming our many years of test-driven schooling. Drilling phonics into students' heads for a test is a far cry from assessing students' actual comprehension of the material. It's one thing to decode. It's yet another to be able to explain what they've "read." If they can't explain what they've just read, then they actually cannot read.

At a deeper level, inasmuch as students are also youth of color, we must always seek to affirm and even celebrate their identities, cultures, and languages—albeit while also acknowledging and being responsive to the traumas they have faced both as members of historically marginalized groups in society and ongoing ones as a result of the pandemic. 

I am definitely glad to see that a serious debate about grading students—as well as schools themselves—is taking place today. While test-optional college admissions has encouraged this conversation at the higher education level, more must be done. We need to have a broader conversation focused on the costs and benefits of evaluating, as opposed to grading, or some combination of the two.

-Angela Valenzuela 


Teachers second-guess letter grades as they search for a fairer way

Across the country, educators are experimenting with a more tolerant grading system

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