The last several weeks, my posts have been all about getting rid of subjective grading practices, biased grading practices, and any kind of soft skills or executive functioning skills in our grade books. You can read more about my thoughts on this here. But just because we aren’t incorporating executive functioning/ soft skills into our grades doesn’t mean we cannot teach them to our students! Executive functioning and soft skills can mean different things to different people, but most often, these skills are included: Collaboration Ownership Problem solving Self advocacy Punctuality Respect for self and others Responding to adversity/ conflict Time management Perseverance Creative thinking And Joe Feldman, author of…
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It’s a Myth: Grades Don’t Motivate Students to Learn
Yep, me too. More times than I can count. Even my students who love reading and writing only do so if there’s a grade involved. It took me a too long to figure out that it’s because students are motivated to EARN POINTS, not to learn and grow as readers and writers. If that’s you too, it’s not your fault! It’s the system we’ve been taught to believe and participate in. The educational system in the United States begins assigning point values to learning as early as 5th grade – and sometimes even earlier. From that time on, students are conditioned to believe that they need to earn points to…
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The History of Grading in the US – What You Need to Know
In my quest to understand how I could make my grades have more meaning and be truly representative of my students’ success I had to ask – how did we get here? What does a grade “A” represent? Why does any number from 0-59 mean an F, but only 80 – 89 equal a B? The only answer I could come up with was “That’s the way it’s always been done.” Any rational human knows that is not usually a good enough reason to do something. So, if I couldn’t explain WHY I graded on an A-F scale, how could I justify ANY of the grades I gave to my…
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Grading in the Classroom: It’s Time for Change
It’s scary to talk about grading in the classroom I want to talk about something that teachers tend to be very territorial about: grading. Talking about grading is hard. Our grades are sacred – they are the final word on whether, in our professional opinion, our students demonstrated success in our classroom. The Grade Book is often the one aspect of our classrooms that teachers have total control over, and it also holds a lot of power – one 59% can change a students’ life in innumerable ways. So, teachers ( myself included) are naturally very defensive when asked to talk about or grading practices. Funnily enough, we are rarely,…
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5 Lessons I Learned from a Year of Pandemic Teaching
I’m going to say something that is not being said enough: The pandemic did not create problems in education. It forced us to recognize and stop ignoring the ones that were already there. Before, there was no money to waste on 1:1 technology. Suddenly, students had access to wifi and laptops. Before, students had to sit in a chair for each class from 7-3. Suddenly, we could give independent, asynchronous options. The list goes on. Although this year of teaching has easily been the longest and most exhausting year of my career, I realize that in a lot of ways it has been a blessing, and not just because my…
