Colleagues, parents, and students are usually taken aback by the fact that I don’t assign grades for formative tasks like classwork or homework. There are so many reasons that assigning a letter or percentage grade is inequitable, unjust, and a poor practice. If you’re curious about more strategies for equitable grading, I encourage you to check out Grading for Equity, by Joe Feldman. This book started it all for me! Let me tell you why I stopped grading homework and what I do instead! First, I call it homework, but that can mean different things for different people! What I mean by “homework” is any classwork that is designed to…
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It’s Time to Get Rid of Extra Credit
When I first started teaching, I offered all kinds of random extra credit. If students brought me supplies, like tissues. If students saw a movie related to the novel we were studying in class. If students finished their work early, and I had them do random tasks around the classroom. I also had enrichment tasks ready for extra credit too. It took me a long time to realize that my extra credit opportunities were inequitable, and let me to get rid of extra credit. Let me explain why. WHY DO STUDENTS ASK FOR EXTRA CREDIT? What I came to realize, though was that the opportunities I was giving were unfair…
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Stop Penalizing Late Work in the Classroom
Anytime I mention the fact that stopped penalizing late work in my classroom, I can FEEL the judgment coming from other teachers, especially old-school ones. Even if they don’t verbally criticize my policy, their eyes say it all. “How do you expect kids to learn about deadlines?” “The real world doesn’t let you turn things in whenever you want!” “Back in my day….” I get it, I do… after all, I am a product of a school system that penalized late work. But – listen. In the real world, you can almost always get an extension on your taxes You can be 5 minutes late for a meeting Real adult…
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10 Ways to Support Soft Skills in the Secondary Classroom
Things like working well as a team or meeting deadlines often require a lot of practice. I believe that a grade is a summary of a student’s content skills, not behavior, so I learned some ways to teach soft skills without penalty. When we penalize a student’s grade for being late to class or turning something in late or not being prepared, we are not teaching them HOW to learn that behavior we are punishing them. This a practice that can have harmful effects on a student and their future. Here are 10 ways you can support soft skills (without interrupting your curriculum) so that students have many opportunities to…
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How To: 5 Tips for Equitable and Meaningful Grading
After I read Grading For Equity and started my own research into the way we assign grades in the United States, I was eager to systematically evaluate each of my grading policies. Ultimately, I wanted to read every policy I have and be able to answer yes when I ask: does this policy support a final grade that provides a summary of student academic accomplishment in my course? Below are the steps I took along my journey to a more equitable and meaningful grading system. If you are interested in doing the same, I hope this helps you along the way! 1. Get to know the community in which you…
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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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Ditch These 5 Biased Grading Policies Now
What does a grade represent? In reality, grades don’t mean what we think they do. What we experienced as students and brought into our own class are largely biased grading policies that harm many of our students. In so many classrooms in schools across the country, a grade could represent any combination of the following: how many absences the student had the number of mistakes made early on in the quarter ( regardless of how much their skills grew toward the end) The student’s ability to get to class on time How often students turned in late work, regardless of their understanding of the material Teacher’s implicit biases toward students…
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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…
