Prior to my gradeless classroom, I was a data entry clerk posing as a teacher.

I still did all of the things a teacher does: I planned lessons, worked with students, graded tests and quizzes, and checked for completion of homework and classwork. But a large portion of my job was sitting in front of a computer entering numbers into a grading program. These numbers represented completion of assignments instead of whether or not students showed understanding of the material taught.

After a number of years, I realized that this part of my job could be done by anyone. In fact, it did cross my mind that I could outsource this work to someone overseas. I wondered: Wouldn’t my time be best used helping students understand the material by giving them meaningful feedback rather than entering numbers into a computer?

In 2012, I left my teaching job of fifteen years to work on a long-term educational study to learn if students learn more when they receive immediate feedback on their math work. After five years the researchers and I learned that when students receive immediate feedback for a whole school year they learn significantly more than those that did not receive immediate feedback.

In 2017, I returned to the classroom armed with this information. I was on a quest to give students not only immediate feedback but also meaningful feedback. At the same time I decided to start a gradeless classroom and there was an unintended benefit from this decision. The time that I had been using to enter completion grades into the online gradebook became time that I was using to give students detailed and timely feedback.

The process that I use has evolved in the past six years but the basis has remained the same. I start with daily feedback to students. To be successful, students need to have a strong grasp of how well they understand a concept. This is why I work very hard to give students clear verbal and/or written feedback on their thinking on a daily basis in class when students are working individually or in groups. My feedback is intended to make it clear what they did well and what they can do to improve their understanding. This type of feedback is very different from sitting down with a stack of papers to correct. It happens in the moment while students are working in class with either verbal feedback or written feedback directly on student work on the whiteboards or paper. I believe that this type of in-the-moment feedback is underrated for its effectiveness because it is so informal. I have noticed a marked improvement in my students’ ability to not only understand a concept but also retain that understanding based as a result of focusing my classroom time on this feedback.

After students work to learn a new concept, they use the feedback that I give them to synthesize their thoughts in their notebook. I literally say to them to “Take notes to your future forgetful selves.” To help them with this note taking process, I start the school year by giving students a template for what their notes should look like. The template shows them how to set up their notes with “words that will help them remember,” which is my feedback to them, and examples that will help them remember. The examples are a slip of paper that I hand out to students when they are taking their notes. These slips of paper have three example problems of differing levels of difficulty. Students paste the example problems in their notes and then use my feedback to solve the problems.

When I feel that the class as a whole has a decent grasp of a learning standard, I give them a one-question assessment that is based on an individual skill and allow them to use their notebooks when taking the assessment. For the assessment, I use the Activity feature on Seesaw to assign the question to the students. They either do their work on paper or an individual whiteboard, take a picture of it, and upload it to Seesaw, or they type or write their work directly on Seesaw.

After students have submitted their work, it’s time for me to give them meaningful feedback. Seesaw has a feature that allows me to annotate student work while recording my voice or embed a video directly onto the student work. If a student has struggled to show understanding, I record myself giving them feedback on what gave them difficulty and how to improve it. I also give them written feedback pointing out where they made their mistake. If a student has shown good understanding, then I give written feedback on what they have done well.

When I started my gradeless classroom, I only gave students written feedback but I soon found that some students did not understand what I had written no matter how careful I was to make it clear. That is why I decided to record myself giving feedback along with the written feedback. With the video feedback students can see and hear me explaining the problem to them. It has made a HUGE difference with students’ ability to understand their mistakes.

After students have taken a look at the feedback that I have given them, I have them self-assess the level of understanding that they have shown for the standard. I give students sentence starters to help them respond to my feedback. The sentence starter for answering correctly is “I knew how to solve the problem because I…” and for answering incorrectly it is “I made a mistake when I…” I then look at their responses to see if they understand what they did well or what they need to do to show understanding. Students that did not initially show understanding are given a “retry” problem while those that showed understanding are given a problem that asks students to apply what they have learned about the skill on a deeper level.

You may be wondering, what does my gradebook look like? Instead of using numbers to quantify completion on assignments, I use words to represent each student’s level of understanding of the standards that I have taught. Below is a student view of their grades based on what I have entered in my gradebook:

Since doing away with data entry, I feel much more fulfilled as a teacher. I am making difference in my students’ learning now more than at any other time in my career. While I enjoyed my job for the first 15 years, I absolutely love it now due to my focus on providing meaningful and timely feedback to students.

Andrew Burnett currently works as a seventh grade math teacher at FA Day Middle School in Newton, Mass. He regularly blogs and tweets about education. He currently resides in central Massachusetts with his wife, two children and a dog.