Originally published in a three part series in conjunction with What School Could Be. Learn more about their organization here.

Now that you’re familiar with why we might question grading and how you could approach tinkering with it, we want to share a handful of simple(ish) ways to start to de-emphasize grades and even grade less in your class.

1. Delay the Grade: Many teachers are familiar with the frustration of providing feedback and having their students not read or consider it. When students receive feedback with no score, however, they are much more likely to engage with the feedback and improve because of it. As Dylan William puts it, “if teachers are providing careful diagnostic comments and then putting a score or grade on the work, they are wasting their time, they might as well just give a student a score or a grade — the students won’t learn anything as a result, but the teacher will save a great deal of time.” (William 2011).
2. Self-Assess First: Another way to shift the impact of grading is to change the power dynamic. If teachers are the only ones who assess, then assessment becomes something someone does to you as a learner, rather than being a part of any learning process. Having students self-assess their work prior to your assessment increases self-regulation and metacognition, increases understanding, and it even gives you, the teacher, extra time.
3. Quiz for Learning: Quizzes are a common form of quick assessment in classrooms, but most teachers and students fail to recognize that quizzes can be most effective as a tool for learning, rather than a measure of learning.  The effort it takes to try to remember something in a quiz-like setting is very effective for cementing it in our memory. Rather than using quizzes in the traditional carrot-or-stick kind of way, offer a quiz worth 0 points to emphasize that the goal is to get retrieval practice and also determine what we know well and what we need to study more. Since it isn’t going in the gradebook, you can have students grade themselves in class or you can use an online quiz tool that does the marking for you.
4. Invite Students to Choose What You Grade: If you have a class where students do lots of practice on similar kinds of activities – think a daily bell-ringer, homework problem sets, reading reflection questions, etc. – you can dramatically reduce your grading by having them choose which assignment you grade. For example, let’s say students do a daily problem set with a word problem for homework each night. At the end of the week, have them submit all 5 sets, with the one they want you to grade on the top. This holds the expectation that they do all of them, but cuts your grading by 80%. Giving them the chance to choose activates some of the same metacognitive benefits of the self-assessment strategy above, while collecting all of their work gives you the security of peeking at all of it to ensure they aren’t making important errors. 
5. Don’t Grade Everything: Rather than starting with the assumption that if students are going to do it, then you need to grade it, start by asking if you think grading will improve student learning.  If the only answer we can come up with is motivation – that they won’t do it if it isn’t graded – then we need to think about how we can make the purpose of the assignment clearer to students. For example, if we want students to answer questions at the end of a reading to check their understanding and synthesize what they have learned, we need to ask how we can make that goal clearer and more meaningful. Framing that reading as preparation for a group discussion, debate, or larger project or assignment, can help create a clearer purpose for students and help them move away from the work-for-points default. 

You may have picked up on a theme with these five strategies. They all rely on a fair amount of trust between the student and teacher. A strong teacher-student relationship has been shown to be highly impactful for supporting student learning. Teachers earn students’ trust in many ways, one of which is demonstrating care by supporting the student in growing their understanding in the class. Trust is also reciprocal, teachers need to trust that students are giving an earnest effort and that their work reflects the best of their current ability at any given moment in time. 

Grading, and especially grading used as a primary means of motivation, can create a dimension of antagonism in the teacher-student relationship and undermine trust. When we rely on grading to motivate our students, we feel the need to grade everything they do. (How often do students ask, “How many points is this worth?” when determining how much effort to put into an assignment?) When your teacher grades everything you do, it can create a barrier to that trusting relationship because the signal is you are constantly being judged and your mistakes have consequences. 

However, when students know that their teacher believes in them, treats them fairly, listens and responds to their needs, and respects them, they are more willing to work hard, to persevere through challenges, to be open to new ideas, and to believe in their own potential. (Wentzel 1997) 

We hope you will join us for our Virtual Roundtable for Educators Who Are Rethinking Grading to Improve Student Well-being, Engagement, and Belonging on April 4, 2023 at 4pm PT / 7pm ET. Following the event we look forward to sharing some final thoughts and resources with you.

Don’t miss the other posts in the series:
– Part 1: Changing Grading Is About Learning, Not Implementation
– Part 3: Using Improvement Science To Build Know-How And Self-Confidence

The post Five Simple Ways To Start Grading Less appeared first on Challenge Success.

Learn how we define well-being as well as how schools can use practical strategies to create the conditions for it in this recent article by Challenge Success Director of Research Sarah Miles and Co-Founder Denise Pope.

This article was published in Getting Smart on June 13, 2023.

Read more here

The post What Is Student Well-Being, and How Do We Create the Conditions to Support It in Our Schools? appeared first on Challenge Success.

Originally published in a three part series in conjunction with What School Could Be. Learn more about their organization here

In our previous post, we explored some of the reasons we might consider beginning to question our grading practices, and how to get ourselves into a learning mindset for the work. Here, we will focus on  the nuts and bolts of anchoring your grading reform efforts in particular aspects of the student experience you want to improve and framing your efforts around learning how to get those improvements. 

Improvement Science Basics: PDSA

Improvement scientists often reference PDSA cycles as a way to organize an improvement effort. This elegant framework breaks the learning process down into four stages: Plan, Do, Study, and Act. At a simple level you PLAN your change, DO your plan, STUDY the results, and then plan to ACT in a revised way based on what happened. We highly recommend this simple method and you can find many forms and templates on the web that you can use to organize this thinking.

Invest in the Plan

In our experience, breaking down the planning phase can set teachers up for a much easier time as they get further into their work. Our aim here is to set you up with the framing for how to approach this work so that you can dive in with confidence and start building your know-how.

• Start with some (but not too much) research: While developing a change that works for you, in your context, with your students, is the goal, many have gone before you in this work and it is worth taking a little time to explore what others have done. It can be easy to get overwhelmed with the volume of resources out there; be judicious. Aim for sufficient practical research to locate an approach you like, and enough theoretical research to be able to articulate why you think that approach is pedagogically sound.

For example: We decide to try returning work to students only with written feedback and no grade. Research around feedback suggests this is a promising approach and it might be that this fits very well with our particular instructional approach. 

• Articulate your full theory: Once you arrive at a change it is vital that you pause and articulate your full theory about what you predict will happen if you try it. Your full theory is likely a set of predictions that go beyond simple “if… then” scenarios where one change in equals one change out. 

In the feedback-only example above, your theory might start out as: “If I delay showing my students their grades and just show them feedback first, then they will be more motivated to do revisions.” While this is a strong start, it likely leaves out other positive things you hope might happen as well as not accounting for concerns you have about what might happen. Given the complexities of teaching and learning, not to mention students and peers, it is likely that you have a number of predictions about what might happen. Naming them helps clarify your understanding of how the change works and sets you up to learn how to make it work the way you want it to.  

Where possible, push yourself to quantify your prediction. Whether your prediction turns out to be right or wrong is not nearly as important as comparing your prediction to your actual outcomes. Quantified predictions look like, “If I withhold the grade and just provide feedback, then 70% of students will opt to submit a revised version based on that feedback and 50% of the revisions will be relatively superficial and still aimed at bumping up their yet unknown grade rather than being the kind of deeper rethinking I might be after.”

• Let your theory inform your measurement: Our measurement does not need to be exhaustive (read exhausting) or perfectly precise to be helpful. We’re not being evaluated on the results, and the results are not a referendum on the value of the practice.  We are using the results to help us understand whether our change works the way we think it should and what we might do to close the gap between what happens and what we want to have happen. Because this is a learning process, we can ease off the pressure to prove or disprove whether something works. Our goal is to learn what it takes to make it work the way we want it to.

An easy way to do this is to simply let your predictions be your measurements. For example:

Do, Study, and Act! 

Armed with promising practice, clear predictions, and a simple plan to measure, you are all set for your improvement journey. Making time and preserving mental energy for these last steps is key. Once you’ve tried it out, consider what happened in comparison to what you thought would happen. Adapting from there is the real work of improvement. In this reflection and adjustment space you have the chance to learn about how these ideas really work in practice. It is through this reflection and adaptation that you can fine tune your plans to make the changes work for you. 

Now for a few final tips as you examine your results:

1. Ask students for their feedback! One of our mantras at Challenge Success is “let your students be your co-pilots” and there is no better time to tap into their expertise and ideas than when you are stuck with what to try next. Students will appreciate the effort you are putting in to improving their experience and they have great ideas about what you might try next. Actually trying their ideas and talking with them about it also helps build culture and ownership in your class. As a bonus, often sharing your improvement intentions can serve as an intervention in and of itself as it is another way to be clear with students about your learning intentions and class design.
2. Capture any differences between your plan and what you actually did! Often some of the best early learning comes in noting the adaptations you make between your plan and how you actually did it. Pay particular attention to how the plan played out in classes you teach multiple sections of – rarely does the 4th period version look the same as 1st period and those differences are part of the learning!
3. Seek out colleagues when you are stuck. When you have a result that isn’t what you hoped it would be, or you find yourself out of ideas for how to continue, colleagues can be a great resource for new ideas, energy, and inspiration.  Sometimes, just the process of talking through the dilemma out loud with a colleague can help clarify your thinking and help you arrive at a conclusion. As a bonus, this sharing can also help you spread an idea that is promising, but still in need of refinement.

Looking for some ideas to start? In part three of our series we will provide you with five easy ways to get started grading less. 

Don’t miss the other posts in the series:
– Part 1: Changing Grading Is About Learning, Not Implementation
– Part 3: Five Simple Ways To Start Grading Less

The post Using Improvement Science To Build Know-How And Self-Confidence appeared first on Challenge Success.

Originally published in a three part series in conjunction with What School Could Be. Learn more about their organization here

In our research at Challenge Success, we find that many students are lacking full engagement, going through the motions, or “doing school.” In other words, they are completing the work and may very well be working very hard, but they don’t find particular meaning or purpose in it, nor do they find it interesting or enjoyable in and of itself. Grading is a key factor as it can erode student engagement by emphasizing the transactional value of points earned towards a particular grade instead of the  inherent value in the material. Purposeful engagement is about the learning rather than the earning, but as Alfie Kohn notes: “A ‘grading orientation’ and a ‘learning orientation’ have been shown to be inversely related.” Unfortunately, grading tends to diminish student interest in whatever they are studying, moving us further and further away from the true purpose of education: learning.

While more and more teachers and schools are actively questioning their grading and assessment practices because of its impact on engagement (among other reasons), others are at a different place in their journey.  In our conversations with educators, we have found three general types of teachers starting down this path:

1. Troubled By Grading – Many teachers have come to question all or at least parts of the practice of grading. For some it is the frustration of having students (and their parents) perpetually more interested in how they can pick up a few more points as opposed to any genuine interest in course material. Others are troubled by the artificial precision implied by 100 point scales and modern grade books that calculate down to the tenth or even hundredth of a percentage. Across the board, teachers who are troubled by grading recognize that the enterprise of grading is ultimately at odds with their goals and values as an educator.
2. Inspired by Examples – Some teachers begin to work on their grading practices after being exposed to an alternative approach from a peer. Whether it comes from a compelling conference presenter, a blog they found on social media, or an innovative colleague down the hall, the “inspired by examples” teacher comes to the table energized about new ideas, possible strategies, and new tools that might transform their practice. This teacher can likely name a host of potential benefits for making the changes, but their initial interest is driven by “the what” more than “the why.”
3. Compelled by Colleagues (or Required By Administrator) A third group of teachers comes into this conversation with a little more reluctance. In the best of cases, the teacher is “compelled” to curiosity, in the way a good novel keeps you reading, “I’ve heard about what so-and-so is doing with their grading and I’d like to learn more.” Sometimes it is a matter of their co-teacher, course-alike counterparts, or department moving from a few people trying something out, to implementing a shared practice. And for some, it is an outright mandate from the powers that be to revise their grading practices. 

On one level, each of these teachers is asking the same question: “How do I begin to change my grading and assessment practices?” The energy and potential around this kind of self and practice examination is exciting, but things get sticky as the conversation shifts from why we are questioning these practices to how to go about making actual shifts in what to do. In this blog series, we want to first explore the importance of establishing a clear direction for your grading reform efforts and then get into how to pursue that direction in a focused and effective way.

Watch Out for Solutionitis

People in general, and teachers in particular, are problem solvers and doers and it is easy for us to jump to what improvement scientists label “solutionitis.” When faced with a new challenge, we immediately start scanning for a solution, often without fully unpacking the nature of the problem. Additionally, for some educators, there might be SO MANY reasons for them to want to change their grading practices that it feels silly to even ask why. However, we have learned that a lack of attention to “the why” can open up a number of potential problems, including the possibility that we might make changes that actually make our problem worse, particularly for students who are most in need of support. 

For example, with a shift to “standards based grading” one of the common goals is to redirect student attention from external measures of performance towards growth and improvement. Switching grading from the accumulation of points towards the tracking of growth towards particular standards, however, could unintentionally amplify fixation on level, performance, and potential failure.  In a traditional “omnibus grade,” high-achieving students often focus on making sure their grade is always an ‘A’ and panic anytime it drops. In a standards-based setting, that same student might have 10 or more standards they are being assessed on, each an opportunity to fixate on an evaluation that is less than the highest level.  The problem could be even more pronounced for struggling students. Often struggling students are those who are not motivated by the carrot-stick of traditional grading, and merely changing the language of those carrots and sticks might not be enough to tap into the motivation we are after. 

The Elephant in the Room: Change is HARD

These potential challenges stem from the reality that a shift in grading practices is a significant change for students as well as for teachers. If that change isn’t accompanied by shifts in classroom conversation, culture, and instructional practices, teachers might not see the improvement in student engagement with learning they seek, which may discourage and deflate the well-meaning educator. 

A teacher doing the work because they are “troubled by grading” may be sufficiently convinced of the need to change to persist through these early hiccups, but it is not hard to imagine them beginning to question whether it is possible to shift something as fundamental as grading. Similarly, a teacher who is “inspired by an example” may have the enthusiasm to continue to tinker with the idea through some early failures, but they too could reasonably have the sense that they tried it and it just didn’t work how they hoped it would. For those more externally compelled to change, however, these early set-backs are likely to be enough to call the whole endeavor into question and cause them to revert back to their comfort zone.

Underneath each of these potential issues is the reality that most changes, especially changes as complex and interconnected as changes in grading practices, are going to require trial and error, constant reflection, and frequent adaptation. 

Focus on Your Own Learning

In other words, we must commit to learning – but not just any learning. Bringing an improvement mindset to the change process involves dialing in on a very particular kind of learning. While much of what we typically consider learning consists of increasing our knowledge around a topic, improvement-oriented learning involves developing the ability to use that knowledge to achieve a particular outcome. 

As a field, we are awash with research and promising theories about effective assessment for learning. Taking that valuable knowledge and building real school level know-how involves developing practices that regularly create our desired experiences for students.

So how do we do that? In part two we’ll explore how improvement science provides a roadmap for the way forward. 

Don’t miss the other posts in the series:
– Part 2: Using Improvement Science To Build Know-How And Self-Confidence
– Part 3: Five Simple Ways To Start Grading Less

The post Changing Grading is About Learning, Not Implementation appeared first on Challenge Success.

“Educators want to foster meaningful and joyful engagement in learning, promote mastery of new concepts and skills, and support healthy, balanced students. But sometimes our daily policies and practices can get in the way of these goals.” Explore the full piece for seven strategies teachers can begin implementing to promot mastery and support student well-being.

Read full article published on November 14, 2019 on ASCD Express.

The post 7 Approaches to Alternative Assessments appeared first on Challenge Success.

Challenge Success, Crescendo Education Group, and Mastery Transcript Consortium offer joint guidance to educators, families, and policymakers.

We know that families are striving to balance childcare, remote student learning, and work responsibilities while navigating the stress of COVID-19, including caring for those stricken with the virus; and some face food, housing, and job insecurity as well. Every home learning environment is unique, and each student’s resources and access to support varies. Teachers are doing their best to balance their own home responsibilities and pressures while learning new technology and preparing remote lessons.

Given the current varying needs and environments of students, families, and educators, it seems improbable that the teaching and learning that takes place during the next several weeks will be comparable to the education that students experience during the typical school year.

In support of student well-being and equity, we recommend that schools across the United States:

• Shift all grading to Credit/Incomplete or No Record for work done during this time of remote learning:
  • Reassure families that COVID-19 has altered learning environments for almost all students; institutions that have traditionally relied on grades will not disadvantage students as a result (colleges, graduate programs, NCAA, merit grants, among others).
  • Allow students to complete work during the summer or at a later date as needed.
  • Offer to remove a course (leaving no record) from the transcript if students are unable to complete coursework within extended time frames.
• Communicate to students and staff that fostering a climate of care and connection is a critical protective factor for students and should be the highest priority.
• To the fullest extent possible, ensure equal access and support for technology and other tools to meet curriculum requirements and support student learning at home.
• Provide clear guidelines for teachers and students that less is more: a reduced load will lower stress and anxiety at this time and may lead to higher student engagement and an opportune time for teachers to reflect upon learning goals and competencies.

Our organizations believe that mastery learning and meaningful educational experiences can happen everywhere—in a range of contexts including outside the four walls of a classroom, in online and/or blended learning environments, as well as through developing agency and building resilience during a pandemic. We encourage educators, families, and policymakers to broaden their definition of learning and honor all student growth and development. Together we can ensure that grading/crediting policies reflect these shared principles, in a unified effort to support our nation’s students during this extraordinary time.

Three research-based educational organizations founded on principles of student-centered learning, well-being, and equity offer these recommendations to policymakers and school/district leaders looking for expert guidance on whether, and how, to grade students during this very unique time.

The post Guidance on Grading/Crediting Policies During COVID-19 appeared first on Challenge Success.