See if you notice a pattern.

As a high school humanities teaching intern, one of the first lessons I learned from my mentor teacher was to protect against the pressure from evermore grade-focused students asking, What do I need to do to get an A? He emphasized establishing clear, consistent guidelines, weights, and expectations for my grading policies, and never returning any test or quiz until the end of class so the kids wouldn’t lose focus once they had their grade in hand. A handful of innovative teachers in my school were taking a non-traditional approach to instruction, and the discussion around 4 C’s to 21st-century skills was just gaining momentum.  

Just before I left classroom teaching to join the Mastery Transcript Consortium, I observed that, in order to protect against the pressure from evermore grade-focused students asking What do I need to do to get an A, experienced veterans were counseling their younger colleagues on the need to establish clear, consistent guidelines, weights, and expectations. The “trick” of never returning any test or quiz until the end of class was still making the rounds. A handful of innovative teachers in my school were taking a non-traditional approach to instruction, and the discussion around 21st-century skills and the newest variation on the 4 C’s (now 6) was just gaining momentum.

Last spring, 2 months into the COVID pandemic, schools had almost universally moved to remote teaching.  The New York Times, Washington Post, Inside Higher Ed, and several other national news organizations were publishing articles about school districts’ increased interest in remote assessment monitoring platforms and plagiarism-detection programs. The explosion in the adoption of these platforms was designed to guard against the cunning and guile of evermore grade-focused students asking What do I need to do to get an A, while looking to capitalize on the remote learning environment. A handful of innovative teachers were taking a non-traditional approach to online instruction, and the discussion around how the current disruption to the status quo could energize a new 21st-century approach to education was just gaining momentum.

I’m still looking for the word learning in any of these narratives.

Efforts to Disrupt

As a teacher, I agonized over my classroom and the most effective way to reach and inspire my students to grow and learn in a system that seemed designed to stifle passion and engagement. As I developed my craft, my efforts at driving engagement moved from youthful “edutainment” (effective at times, yes, but exhausting and overly teacher-centered) to the pedagogical art of immersive, real-world, student-driven learning experiences and shared exploration. But for all my growth and development as an educator, I don’t think I ever fully succeeded in separating my students from the enduring question: “What do I have to do to get an A?”  

As a school administrator, I continued to wrestle with the best ways to create a culture of engagement and learning. I spent both political and financial capital to drive student-centered change.  Research on the adolescent brain and sleep patterns led to adjusted schedules with drop days, longer teaching blocks and later start times. Efforts to provide support for faculty thinking differently about their approach to instruction and role in the classroom were bolstered by encounters with educational thought leaders like Howard Gardner, Ted Sizer, Heidi Hayes Jacobs, and Grant Wiggins among others. The creation of new roles and titles like Director of Innovation or Assistant Superintendent for Teaching & Learning brought focus and resources to the discussion. Even physical space was redefined as millions of dollars were spent on new instructional spaces designed to enhance the engagement of students with an emphasis and focus on the need to develop 21st-century Skills. 

And again, none of this stopped students from asking: What do I need to do to get an A?

A New Cadence

As educators, our job is to do our best by each and every student in our care, and we have an obligation to think carefully about the impact of every aspect of the learner’s journey. While there is some legitimate discussion about the efficacy of grades as a predictor of student success in college—particularly in comparison to standardized test scores—there are few in education who would argue that the traditional grading system inspires deep learning and engagement from students. In fact, for most, there is an obvious and unhealthy disconnect between the two.

But as the anecdotes above and our own experiences illustrate, our current system of grade-based education is a contradiction. On one hand, it’s designed to capture, reduce, simplify, and sort student performance to a simple letter or number, a process which encourages any logical student to focus obsessively on the outcome. On the other hand, teachers are simultaneously designing mechanisms to stop students from obsessing over—or at least pestering us about—grades, in order to focus on engagement and learning. It’s like a dog chasing its tail. Endlessly.

And after exploring schedules, staffing, and building spaces as mechanisms for change, I believe the only way to truly address this issue is to focus on the foundational purpose and construct of the grade itself, and, to do this, we must trace back to the ultimate grade capture instrument. 

The high school transcript.

The Legacy Transcript

To think differently about instruction and evolve our education spaces, we must recognize and address how the traditional high school transcript reinforces outdated modes of education, constrains innovation, and impedes the pursuit of educational equity and excellence. It sorts and sifts students through narrow measures such as grades and GPA and pressures teachers to adhere to “standardized” assessments, while reducing each complex and unique individual to a simple number. We talk a great deal in education about 21st-century skills, or workforce readiness, or some other future-focused metric, but the truth is, too many of our students graduate high school uninspired and/or unprepared for today’s world. Rather than learning how to work collaboratively, think critically, and solve complex problems, today’s students are too often trapped in an outdated system that rewards only the attainment of letter grades through the acquisition and regurgitation of information segregated into single subject areas. And teachers are trapped there too.

In his December 7, 2020, blog post, “How I Go Gradeless,” Arthur Chiaravalli notes the role the Mastery Transcript can play in helping teachers move past grades into the role of advocates conferring “credit” for course work while also helping students tell their own stories of growth and success through narrative and curated exemplars of student work. As an alternative to the current high school transcript and its promotion of the status quo, the Mastery Transcript relies on a “Wigginesque” theory of backwards design, serving as both a beacon and destination to help support school- and district-wide shifts to mastery- or competency-based learning. It’s a shift that not only allows schools to reconsider their approach to teaching and learning, but also could ultimately break the relentless cycle of teachers balancing being both judge and jury of student achievement and inspirational partner in student growth. 

Grades may be the way that most teachers currently signal how well students are doing in the classroom, but they don’t necessarily signal what students know and can do. The purpose of schools should be to grow learners, not sort them, and we should never hesitate to question the systems that make this work more challenging. Changing grading isn’t simply changing school policy. It’s changing the way we understand how we learn, how we discover who we are, and how we relate to each other.

And in truth, it can’t be done at the margins. Only a wholesale and honest examination of these entrenched mechanisms and the impact they have on learners will allow us to recognize where changes are needed and the steps we can take to go about making them.

Ben has spent the prior 25 years as a teacher and administrator: a school journey that has taken him from a history teaching internship to senior administrative and school leadership positions. Ben earned his BA in American Studies from Amherst College, and an MS Ed in School Leadership from the University of Pennsylvania. Ben currently resides in Raleigh, NC with his wife and two sons and currently serves as the Senior Director of Outreach & Partnerships at the Mastery Transcript Consortium, a non-profit, global network of member schools introducing a new high school transcript that supports mastery learning and celebrates each learner. Contact him at rein@mastery.org.