by Luann

     I
just completed 20 years of classroom teaching.  My goal is never
to become one of those "old" teachers, sneering at innovation while
pulling an ancient worksheet from a dog-eared folder. I've asked
younger colleagues to alert me should they
observe these tendencies in my practice.  I stay in tune with the
world, and my profession. I listen to students, with a focus this past
year on the (lack of) skills of a particularly interesting class of
intentional non-learners. 

     I actively seek out and employ
practices that I identify as the best practice for my students at the
time and in their setting.
I can smell a gimmick that will make students roll their eyes from a
mile away.  I take risks in my classroom so long
as the risks lead to student learning, er, being able to meet a
standard.  I threw out my worksheet collection awhile back when I
noticed that no student ever wrote, in an end-of-course review, "I
really enjoyed doing all those amazing worksheets and I learned so much
from them, too. I know they will help me to be successful in my future
career." Lately, though, I've been
questioning more and more emergent strategies being labeled as best
practices. Is the voice in my head directing me to the retirement
line or is my well-seasoned malarky detector speaking?  Do years of
formal education, classroom experience, and professional development not make me
qualified to choose appropriately for my students?  Apparently they do not…..  

     A somewhat (from my perspective) recent movement to revamp
assumed-to-be-broken "grading" policies is now considered by some as a
"best practice" in education. This voice promotes the new (?) method of
assessing (read: grading) students strictly on the meeting of a
standard, but with a twist. Time is not a factor, nor work ethic, not
academic integrity.
Multiple retries on all tests and quizzes must be allowed. The number
50% replaces zeros in gradebooks, because according to the assumption
that every assessment is created equal, a zero is mathematically
invalid as a score and puts the student so far behind that he loses all
hope of success. Homework is never part of the grade, because practice
should never be graded and all homework is assumed to be kill-and-drill or something students are not prepared to explore on their own.  Much formative assessment is done and perhaps
checked off but like homework, is never a part of the grade. Change
your assessment practice, this voice
promises, and presto! student achievement will appear to increase
measurably – by a
new assessment standard. A huge piece of this puzzle is missing:
student learning. Where, in this new system, do students learn? 

Last school year, I implemented some practices promoted by a
well-known and respected, but apparently pretty much self-proclaimed,
assessment guru. He assumes my grading practices are broken and need to
be fixed, because some students still fail. Failing as defined at my
school is not achieving an average of 70%, or having earned 70% of the
points available to be earned. Nevermind that every opportunity to
accumulate points was also demonstrating the degree of mastery of a
standard; my method of measuring student success is broken because
failure is a possible outcome. So, I allowed due dates to be extended
into infinity, recorded so many Incompletes that our school secretary
went on a manhunt for my grades spreadsheets, and made many forms of
quizzes and tests for retakes. I threw my previously finely-tuned assessment policies away, and took the risk.

     I've honed my
assessment system with an eye toward student learning, over the
years. When something I'm doing in the classroom does not contribute to
genuine student learning, I no longer find it attractive. My classroom
changes character regularly with the intent to better showcase student
learning with each upgrade. Before choosing a method to assess a learning adventure, I consider how
to let the assessment and score best reflect student learning. I've made changes based on feedback from
parents, practiced teachers, most of all, students.  My late work
policy is not without
compassion for a student who is genuinely working hard for mastery or
who has extenuating circumstances.  For years, I excused a student if
an assignment is clearly busywork for him/her (known to my former AP
Chemistry students as "the redundancy rule.")
I sometimes offer a few options for students to demonstrate mastery of
a standard. I know my students as people;
I am trained and skilled in making decisions about what is best for
each student, at this time,
in this setting. My intent is to help each student show success. Fixing
broken grades assumes that all assignments are scored on a weighted
100% scale, that students make a fairly continuous and honest effort to
learn, and that there is no compassion or second chance.  None of those
assumptions are true in my practice, nor are they true in the practices
of many of my colleagues. Every student who is willing to engage in a
way demonstrating the
meeting of standards not only passes, but by default earns a "good
grade" on his or her report card. I ask, then, what is broken?

Proponents of this system are making a lot of money selling
professional development (interestingly, of the sit-n-get variety) and accompanying
resource materials to school districts harboring large numbers of
low-achieving and/or failing students.They draw crowds of
educators and administrators desperate to mask the clear evidence of
student disengagement.  How will this look when the students who are
products of this system report to work and fail to understand why a
deadline must be met, or why they must show up each day to receive a
paycheck?

If this tactic were employed in the private sector and school
districts were retirees, the salespeople would be branded as scam
artists.

By
the way, my experiment with these "fixes" did not result in a
difference in student grades, but I did see evidence that significantly
less student learning took place with these policies in place.

Stay tuned for *my* fix.