By Thomas Healy
“It’s not about the grade, it’s really about the learning.” I find myself using this phrase more and more recently when discussing a child’s progress in middle school. As a social studies teacher at Greenwich High School, I spent countless hours grading essays, using rubrics and checklists in order to provide each student with an accurate representation of their progress and achievement in my class. Additionally, I remember taking a thoughtful and comprehensive essay rubric with very specific feedback language and figuring out how to assign points so the entire grid added up to 100 (this was critical for a humanities teacher as it cut out any unnecessary math).
After spending approximately 30 minutes writing comments directly on a child’s essay, carefully highlighting key phrases on the rubric and then converting all of it into a percentage to enter into my gradebook, I would proudly hand back my work to students. What occurred next was most dejecting but is typical in our traditional system; students would flip to the back page, check the rubric, find the grade and shove the paper into their binder, folder or backpack. I would ask myself, Why did I spend so much time writing specific comments on every paper only to have them glanced at or even ignored? Don’t they care about my feedback and how they can improve? Ask any teacher at the secondary level and you will hear a similar story of the almighty grade distracting from our actual goal, student learning. After a while I realized that I needed to provide the time in class for students to engage with the essay and individualized feedback I gave them. We spent time looking at content and skills, craft and evidence, and thought about how to improve as writers and practicing historians. It was in these lessons that I found the rich learning opportunities that made me excited to teach.
Deeper learning occurred as students stopped focusing on their overall essay grade and engaged in a process of reflection and growth toward a rigorous performance standard. As I shifted into school administration I carried this formative experience with me down to the middle school level.One of the major adjustments for all students entering middle school is understanding what traditional grades are and how they are used to monitor progress and achievement. The adults that make up the support network for each child, parents, family members, teachers, etc, know all too well what a grade means and have had first hand experience with this powerful element of the education system. As a result, middle schoolers hear a great deal about the importance of grades and are told numerous strategies for “getting an ‘A’”. What the adults know is that while the traditional grading system assigns point values to academic tasks, it also often includes a level of compliance that factors into a child’s overall average. That experience leads to support and coaching that can reduce a student’s academic experience to that of exercise in collecting points. However, the actual learning experience we want to create for our children is one that is an exercise in critical thinking, inquiry and creative pursuits of knowledge and deeper understanding.
While grades do give us some indication of “how we are doing” in a class or subject area, all too often this mathematical activity is an oversimplification of the complex learning process. Therefore, it is no coincidence that studies have shown that student engagement and joy in learning decreases as they advance in our school system. The plateau begins in middle school and takes a marked turn downward by high school. Consideration of this information would beg the question, Do traditional grades have an adverse impact on student engagement with respect to their enjoyment of the pursuit of knowledge? Or, Have we given the wrong message to our students when we talk to them about their grades, as opposed to talking about their learning?
All this is not to say that we should do away with traditional grades per se, yet it does open up an important conversation about what makes up a grade and how we communicate learning and progress to our students. I feel fortunate that I lead a middle school that engages in these discussions with teachers, parents, students, and other stakeholders in our community. Not having the pressure of a GPA to make the conversation even more charged affords us middle level educators the opportunity to encourage academic risk-taking and reward imperfect performance. It is in these “non-A” moments that deeper understanding is achieved and a love of learning is fostered for a child’s lifetime. So, when you next speak with a school-aged child about school, please don’t ask them the age-old question, How are your grades? Rather ask, What are you learning right now that is really important or excites you? I am confident that the answers you hear will be inspiring!
