“What gets measured gets managed.” 

- Peter Drucker, Father of Modern Management Theory

It may seem counterintuitive to begin a post about going gradeless with tips on grading, but here goes. In the vast majority of schools, teachers ultimately have to record grades. What I have discovered is that grading the HOW (habits of mind and action) instead of grading the WHAT (essays, projects…) improves student performance, facilitates stronger teacher-student relationships, and provides greater job satisfaction. 

Over the last few years, I’ve stopped grading the products of student work and have instead created a Learning Rubric where I collaborate with students to assess their accountability for:

• Awareness of objectives for the unit and expectations for assignments

• Application of instructional resources

• Response to peer and teacher feedback

• Effective use of class time

• Contributions to the learning community

So if you’d like to stop grading student work and shift your use of this mandated evil (notice I did not use “necessary”) to value the habits of mind and action essential to future success, to change the dynamics in your classroom, and to improve student performance, read on. I’ve integrated principles of project-based learning, blended learning, growth mindset, and student choice to create a classroom culture that makes me look forward to going to work every day (even during a pandemic). What follows is a way of getting started in changing what you manage so you can change what you measure.

First, Begin With the End in Mind

Everything in my gradeless classroom follows this mantra: Begin with the end in mind. In a classroom guided by Wiggins and McTighe’s Understanding by Design principles, that end is generally the product students will create to demonstrate their learning—how will my instruction/assignments/activities prepare them to demonstrate mastery of the unit objectives on their essay/project/summative assessment? My guiding question turns the summative assessment into a means that leads to a more satisfying unit ending:

What do I want to read in student reflections at the end of the unit?

I’m not breaking any new ground here by focusing on metacognition. For a couple of decades, I’ve used reading portfolios and writing portfolios as unit assessments, and I taught and assessed kids on approaches to effective reflection and self-assessment. But even that approach allowed the ugly specter of grades to encroach too frequently (every 3-4 weeks) on the conversation of class, turned feedback on formative assessments into instruction on how to get a better grade. I still felt like I was stringing together boxcars filled with discrete skills rather than creating a fluid path where students recognized that they were developing transferable skills.

Then, Change How You Begin

The game-changer for me was less about changing how I ended the units and more about changing how I began the year. Once I began explicitly teaching growth mindset, once growth mindset became the shared core concept of the class, I and my students could focus more directly on developing the habits of mind and action that result in success. As one of my sophomores wrote in a year-end reflection: 

I wouldn’t say I am the easiest student to work with because I am not very organized and my timing is off with most things, but I felt as the year went on, I got better at organizing myself and getting on top of things. The idea of the growth mindset created some sort of vibe in the classroom that I can’t explain, but I feel like it allowed all students including myself to focus less on the grades they were receiving and more on the actual work that they were completing.

We already know that grades derived through traditional measurements—tests, essays, projects—have a significant impact on the way students feel about school. Students who get better grades feel better about themselves, and students who get lower grades feel increasingly distanced from their schoolwork. If the goal is for students to get a particular score on an assessment, then the most able students begin that race with a head start, and the ones who struggle the most have pianos strapped to their backs. Or, to use a different metaphor, some students know all the “hacks” so they can win the game of school, and others have already given up on the game by the time they reach high school.

If we focus on managing what we measure, and what we measure is solely short-term outcomes, then we as teachers are constantly focused on how to help students get better grades on assessments. Rather than meeting students where they are—honoring who they are when they enter our rooms—we create scaffolds to lift them to where they “need to be.” We try to help them avoid problems or obstacles that get in the way of success within the limited time frame of a unit, and in so doing, prevent them from learning how to solve problems, overcome obstacles. We do this because we want them to do well, or because we are evaluated on how well they do. 

A focus on growth, and on measuring the habits that lead to growth, allows us to manage what we can control: the process. And, as management consultants have pointed out, excellent processes necessarily produce excellent outcomes. If we focus on measuring growth, we change the conversation in the classroom without threatening the quality of the outcomes on external assessments.

That requires us to shift our focus a bit. 

Managing What You Measure

The most satisfying part of focusing on student accountability is the way it defines the ways I have to be accountable to them. 

• If I am going to hold students accountable for knowing objectives and performance expectations, I better be clear about objectives and expectations. 

• If I’m going to hold students accountable for using instructional resources effectively, I better make sure they have on-demand access to instruction in multiple formats. 

• If I’m going to hold students accountable for seeing and using feedback, I better make sure I project approachability every single day, and I set aside time for students to reflect on the feedback I give. 

• If I’m going to hold students accountable for contributing to a community of learners, I better make sure I value positive interactions in class and create the conditions for effective collaboration.

The Details

Providing Instruction in Multiple Formats

Start by turn instructional docs into slide decks, slide decks into videos using screencasting platforms like Screencastify or Screencast-o-Matic. Then make these resources available in all three forms. Organize these materials for easy access in your LMS and shared class folders. If possible, set aside a space in your classroom to make printed versions of instruction available to students. When the teacher takes on all the responsibility for instruction by giving verbal instruction, it’s easy for students to be passive learners; when you tell them to choose the learning modality that will help them do their work, they become more active and accountable.

To help students work at their own pace and choose the resources that best fit their learning style, I’ve created Instruction Boards that allow students to access all the materials they need to meet unit goals. Pictured above is part of my Sophomore Research Instruction Board, with links to instruction in document, presentation, and video formats for all the lessons in the writing workshop component of our research unit. 

Structuring Effective Use of Feedback

I have tried to move most of my feedback into the classroom, which means that these days I’m giving more verbal feedback while work is in progress—for example, when students are working on an essay, or completing group work—and less written feedback after they’ve completed a stage of an assignment. When students begin a project or essay, I’ll ask them to share a document with me when they get started so I can peek in on their progress. While they’re working, I’m walking around the room, looking around for signs of confusion or hesitation on their faces while reading their work on my phone. This allows me to guide them toward useful instructional resources, give immediate feedback when they are stuck, and validate work that is moving them toward their objective. I will also be sure to remind them to record the feedback so they can use it in reflection. 

When I return written feedback on student work, I ask students to copy and paste that feedback into a daily log or reflection prep doc (below) and to add a note about how their effort to apply that feedback improved their work.

Facilitating Reflection

At the end of each unit, I know I’m going to ask students to discuss the qualities of their work, the ways they’ve applied instruction to their work, and the ways they’ve used feedback. I ask them to keep a log where they identify what they did each class period, what instructional resources they used, and what feedback helped them complete their work. 

If, like me, you sometimes lack the discipline to set aside five minutes at the end of the period for this kind of reflection, you can also structure student reflections at the end of a unit by having them fill in a table for each artifact they’ve created so they can gather information before they begin to reflect:

It’s not easy finding the right balance of control and student independence. You’ll have doubts when you feel like you don’t know exactly how students are doing since everyone learns at a different pace. So it's important to have a support system. In addition to a few trusted colleagues, I also make sure I mine the gold from students’ reflections. That’s why I’ll let Olivia, one of my pandemic sophomores, close this piece for me; it’s a lot easier to get through the rough patches when you can imagine reading this at the end of the year.

Let me tell you, this class took me a while to get a hold of. I was taught things that I wasn’t used to and told to “unlearn” things I learned in previous years, so it took some time to actually absorb what he was saying and use it to learn/grow.

At first, it was confusing and I was frustrated because I was so used to being given everything to write my pieces (templates, strict instructions, detailed rubrics) in order to receive a good grade. It was the formula to getting an A. This year, I had more independence and more freedom on what to write and how to write it. You explained how we shouldn’t base our writing around knowing what will get a good grade. At the time, this made no sense to me because that’s exactly what I wanted. But because we didn’t get grades in this class, it took my mind off that and I got to see what was really important when taking an English class; learning and growing. 

Getting this independence may have been stressful in the beginning, but it’s the reason I learned and grew so much. I didn’t like that there weren’t any strict rules because that meant more space for me to mess up and get a bad grade. But messing up was part of the process of my growth.