A Love Letter to My 40-Page Transcript
Before we get too far into this, I think it’s worth laying out a bit of my own personal journey. For those unfamiliar, my name is Nate. I am a social studies teacher, usually in the areas of political science and geography. Before departing the US, I worked at a large urban high school in Tacoma, Washington. It was highly racially and economically segregated—the brownest and most low-income school in a mostly white city—and it was amazing and truly fulfilling work. I spent a decade there but for a host of reasons laid out elsewhere I decided to leave the school and the US in 2019. I now work at an American embassy school in the UAE’s capital of Abu Dhabi.
Here in Abu Dhabi, my fourth year teaching overseas and seventeenth in the classroom is wrapping up. As a matter of principle, I don’t do countdowns but as I sit to write this, we have just over two weeks remaining in the year. Many of the conversations at school are turning toward next year. As a community, we’re moving to a new campus. This brings other changes. They’re building a new daily schedule better suited to the larger campus and UAE’s recently implemented four-and-a-half-day work week. We’re also transitioning to a new tool for managing our grades. Each of these: the move, the reworked schedule, and the new grading system, represent an opportunity to rethink the way we do things. I think part of the reason I am excited about rethinking evaluation and assessment is that I’ve lived a better model.
To me, narrative evaluations are the gold standard. I did both my undergrad and graduate studies at the Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington. Evergreen, as it’s colloquially known, is notable for several things: a spate of C-list celebrity alumni including Matt Groening, the creator of The Simpsons; the rapper Macklemore (sorry about that one); and Carrie Brownstein of the band, Sleater Kinney, and show, Portlandia. The school also became notorious in right-wing media in 2017 when a former professor went on Fox News and complained about the liberal atmosphere on the campus (no, I won’t be linking to that story). This led to the campus closing temporarily and a spate of death threats to student organizers, including former students of mine. But most famously, Evergreen is “the school with no grades.”
Since the school's founding students have received narrative evaluations rather than grades. At the end of each term, faculty write an evaluation of student academic performance. In addition, students write self-evaluations reflecting on their learning journey. Faculty share their evaluation with students at a one-on-one evaluation conference during evaluation week, which the school has rather than finals week. Then, both parties submit their evaluations to the school for review and they’re entered into the student’s academic record.
Professors have the opportunity to discuss the arc of a student’s learning—the journey—rather than a crude snapshot that letter grades too often represent. Students have the opportunity to reflect on their own trajectory and contextualize what transpired during the academic term. Rather than getting a “B,” you and your faculty both tell your academic story.
An important part of moving overseas to teach is having your documents attested in order to secure work visas and residency permits. I recall getting a shocked email from my HR Director here in Abu Dhabi when my documents arrived via FedEx: “Nathan, what in the world is this mountain of paper?!”
You see, thanks to Evergreen, I have a massive 40-page transcript. It tells my academic story. It describes my inconsistent performance in my junior year and how I fell flat on my face during my first practicum placement in graduate school. It also describes how I gained confidence (and competence) over that term, eventually earning plaudits from my mentor teacher and a job offer at the school. My transcript shows who I was as a student far better than any series of letter grades or GPA could dream of.
Grading and assessment are a source of uneasiness for me. The more you interrogate the everyday practices of assessment, the more you see how many spaces there are to introduce prejudice and bias. The more you think about the accumulation of those biases over thirteen-ish years in school, the more you should feel uneasy about the whole grading endeavor. More than usual, as of late, I find myself unsatisfied with my own practices and all the noise and variability inherent to the evaluation process.
What specifically does an “A” mean to parents? Is their child among the best I have ever taught? Are they uniquely gifted in the subject area? Or are they a really hard worker who just grinds out every assessment? What minimum skills should a student demonstrate in order to earn a “B” in a given course? What does a “B+” or “B-” tell you that’s fundamentally different from a regular “B”?
The more I think about each of these questions (and dozens of others), the less certain I am about all of them, and the more I long for a different model. Look, this blog and organization are called Teachers Going Gradeless but for many practitioners that isn’t really an option. I am in that boat. So my focus is on being hippocratic and doing no harm in my evaluation practices.
All this ambiguity is compounded by other factors including teacher bias. It doesn’t matter how justice-oriented you are, we all have our internalized prejudices and preferences. Anyone saying otherwise is lying. This video and the study that inspired it made the rounds but they’re worth revisiting. If you accept that bias is real and there’s ample research telling us it is, it’s worth considering how we can remove bias as much as possible from our assessment practices.
Recently, I recorded a winding interview for TG2Chat LIVE. A point I made repeatedly in that conversation is that we should try to control for our personal and cognitive biases as much as possible, and we should also lean into professional practices that remove or limit subjectivity in grading. I think we pay lip service to this in the profession but many of us, if asked to defend a given grade, would find ourselves at a loss.
We shouldn’t hold our breath waiting for the death of grades. I’m certainly not. But in the meantime, I seize opportunities to provide feedback to students and families that is descriptive of their work and learning. At our school, we write periodic narrative comments for students. Completing them is time consuming, but they provide the opportunity for us to give real, meaningful narrative feedback.
Here are a couple of recent examples:
| Midterm Comment | Semester Letter Grade |
|---|---|
| [Redacted] has made significant strides this academic year. While much of the content in the course does not come easy to her, she is diligent in completing assignments and asks thoughtful questions in class discussions. [Redacted], communicates her ideas well in writing and increasingly steps up to contribute to our classroom conversations. Although she had a rough start to the year, struggling on assessments in the fall, her assessment performance is trending in the right direction, typically in the [our school’s term for “meeting standard”] range. I look forward to seeing this trend continue and [Redacted] finishing the year well. | B |
| [Redacted] is enjoyable to have in class. He started the year a bit roughly and took time to adapt to the classroom culture but it feels like he largely sorted things out as the year progressed. While his exam performance is consistently in the developing range the level of understanding he shows in class has greatly improved throughout the year. He does a good job of accepting, processing, and applying teacher feedback to his in-progress work, which is commendable. As far as an area for growth, there is room for improvement in the organization of the ideas in his writing. In addition, he would benefit from utilizing Office Hours after school, which he rarely ever does. | C |
Which more effectively tells the arc of the student’s learning? Which of these tells the family more about what’s happening in the classroom? Which provides a plan of action for the student going forward? Which is better feedback for the student and their learning?
To me, the answer is obvious.
Nate Bowling teaches Social Studies at a US Embassy School in Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates. He is a past Washington State Teacher of the Year and National Teacher of the Year Finalist. He and his wife blog about living and teaching overseas at BowlingsAbroad.com and he is the host of the Nerd Farmer Podcast on the Channel 253 Podcast Network. He writes a weekly newsletter called Takes & Typos on Subtack and you can find him on Mastodon’s Scholar.Social as @natebowling.