Professional Learning for Busy Educators

Nick Sigmon first encountered the idea of “grading for equity” when he attended a mandatory professional development training at San Leandro High School led by Joe Feldman, CEO of the Crescendo Education Group. As a fairly new high school physics teacher, Sigmon says he was open-minded to new ideas, but had thought carefully about his grading system and considered it fair already. Like many teachers, Sigmon had divided his class into different categories (tests, quizzes, classwork, homework, labs, notebook, etc.) and assigned each category a percentage. Then he broke each assignment down and assigned points. A student’s final grade was points earned divided by total points possible. He thought it was simple, neat and fair.

Ah, the letter grade– a much-maligned symbol of an era where kids would go to school and passively ‘get’ grades written on thick blue and green and beige paper to take home and have signed and returned to school so the teacher could be sure the parents ‘saw’ the thing.

And that wait–the slow tick of the analog clock on the classroom wall that measured the time between when you saw the grades and when your parents would see them. Whether the grades were good or bad, that wait was unbearable. They’d already waited a month and a half since the last blue or green or beige thick-stock paper had been sent home.

There were even times I had my report pinned to the back of my shirt, between my shoulder blades. I could reach back with my little arms to grab at it, but my teacher was clever as a fox–clearly a master of engineering and geometry and angles because no one earth was getting to that report card but my mom.

But like lunch boxes and pigtails and playgrounds and varsity jackets, while iconic, letter grades are full of spectacle and half-truths. We’ve talked about this idea before–one article below, for example–but today we’re going to address parents directly with the hope that they might better understand what they’re looking at when they see that ‘grade.’

Teachers know that students learn a tremendous amount from scrutinizing their mistakes, but getting them to take the time to stop and reflect is a challenge. Some teachers have stopped giving grades altogether to try to refocus class on learning instead of on grades. For others, that's too extreme. Leah Alcala, a seventh- and eighth-grade math teacher at King Middle School in Berkeley, California, developed a grading strategy that falls somewhere in the middle.

"What I was finding when I was handing back tests the old way, where I put a grade on it, was kids would look at their grade, decide whether they were good at math or not, and put the test away and never look at it again," Alcala says in a Teaching Channel video featuring her strategy.

Now when she returns tests, Alcala highlights mistakes and hands the tests back to students without a grade. She doesn't tell them what they did wrong; they have to figure that out.

"By not putting a grade on the test, I feel like what I'm allowing them to do is wrestle with the math they produced for me first and think of the grade second," Alcala said.