Going Gradeless with Students Stuck in the Old System
After pondering, researching, and perhaps even advocating with administration for a gradeless approach, you are finally taking the plunge.
You spent your summer lovingly ripping apart the graded aspects of your course and putting units back together into a new and improved infrastructure. You painstakingly worked through each aspect of what your new system will look like with equity consequences at the forefront of your mind. You’ve restructured your methods of communicating progress and formative assessment to be humanizing yet rigorous.
And you feel like you’ve let go of a huge weight you didn’t know you’d been carrying.
You can’t wait to present it to this new class of students and see the fruits of your labor, aligning with the benefits you’ve heard from other teachers (perhaps even through TG2!): freedom to fail, shifting focus back to learning, a new approach to teaching, joy while assessing student work, decentering teacher authority, and more.
But when the first day of class rolls around in September, the introduction doesn’t go as you expected. One student raises their hand to ask a question about the new approach. A growing sense of anxiety builds in the room, and more students speak up. It seems to be contagious. Some even begin to complain that they don’t want to be gradeless. As you field students’ questions and concerns, you feel hurt and frustrated: this gradeless system is supposed to relieve anxiety, not cause it! What is going on?
First, let me say that this type of anxiety has the potential to be quickly resolved. You don’t know your students yet and they don’t know you; once a few weeks have gone by and they experience what your systems look and feel like, they will better understand the many benefits. However, on that first day of class—when students are first encountering a gradeless system and are expressing fear or frustration—it can be discouraging and confusing. And, if unaddressed, students may hang onto concerns shaped by problematic ideologies about grading far longer into the year than you would like.
In fact, I have found that many of these reactions stem from the harm that systems of grading have caused in these students’ previous experiences. To help you to cut through the fear without being discouraged by unexpected sources of resistance, I’m going to break down a few common questions I have encountered and navigated in my own gradeless journey, as well as responses I have used to quickly reframe their concerns and alleviate their anxiety. Though the particular student concerns I share stem from labor-based grading–the system I use and describe below–I hope that these responses and thought-work around ideologies of learning may be applicable to a range of gradeless approaches.
Student 1: If I’m doing great work, why do you care about my process for getting there?
In my classes, I use labor-based grading contracts, an anti-racist method of going gradeless developed by Asao B. Inuoe that focuses final grades on measures of labor that students put into their classwork instead of evaluations of their final products. This question from a student was frustrating to me because the answer seems self-evident: the process of getting there is the process of learning! Of course in a space dedicated to learning we ought to care about the process rather than the product. However, many students are socialized to think that summative assessments are the be-all-end-all of classroom learning, and they may be reacting to rigid formative grading structures that force everyone to follow the same process (for instance, having everyone fill out and be graded on the exact same brainstorming and outlining scaffold for essay writing).
A way to reframe this is to remind students that learning is not just about individual acquisition (think: Freire’s concept of Banking Education) but also a way of participating in larger communities of learning. You can even explicitly talk about disciplinary communities of practice and ways that participating in your classroom is supporting students with participating in future professional spaces.
Sfard’s essay about conflicts between metaphors of acquisition vs. participation as we talk about learning really helped me to understand how students or colleagues might be thinking differently than me.
Student 2: I just want to know that I’m doing A+ work on this assignment!
Some students acutely miss “objectively” measured instant validation from their teacher, while others may also feel anxious about peer feedback (or feedback from more public audiences) because of bad experiences in the past. To combat this kind of reaction, I try to address the myth of objectivity in our time together as soon as possible. A productive reframe can be: you have many sources of feedback, including me, but the worth of your work is never be determined by my sole opinion—and that’s a good thing!
For these students, I find it helpful to make my positionality as a reader explicit. For instance: I can give you feedback as a reader who knows the English discipline well. However, with expansive performance assessments intended for multiple kinds of audiences, you will need many types of feedback to know if you are successfully reaching your goals. I try to illustrate how their peers provide many distinct perspectives as readers that also helps them to achieve their objective—i.e. someone who is an insider in a particular space, someone who disagrees with you, someone who is new to the topic.
I am also clear to students that I will help support our classroom community in giving goal-directed feedback instead of just advice, which can be unwanted or unwarranted. I find Wiggins’ 7 Keys to Effective Feedback to be a helpful tool for training students to be better sources of feedback!
Student 3: But in all my other classes I just turn in my work at the end—and it’s fine!
We’ve all been frustrated by the student turning in all their work at the end of the marking period and expecting to pass the class. However, I wanted to lift up a more nuanced reason that students might act like this. Underserved students who have been repeatedly harmed by traditional school structures may have learned to get by with as little time in class as possible—in order to protect themselves and their mental health. Even though you promise your classroom is going to be different, they may be hesitant to believe you.
Instead of merely insisting that these students ought to come to class, my approach is to meet with them one-on-one to listen to what kind of harm they have experienced in school and work through the ways that going gradeless can start to address and undo white supremacist structures. As I’ve told students: in this class you have power to shape how you are assessed, but you have to be in the room to be part of those conversations.
I especially like Asao B. Inoue’s blog post Why Does Conventional Grading Feel So Unfair? which explores the troubling connection between grading, eugenics, and racial bias as a resource for thinking about talking through these systems of oppression with students.
Here are a few more tips and tricks for ways I have alleviated concerns and pushback from the start:
If you use a grading contract, have students read and digitally annotate it before class so you can quickly address their concerns while you are introducing the new systems
Take time for yourself and with your students to unpack the myth of objectivity and white supremacist ideologies built into traditional systems of grading
Return to your gradeless systems/contracts on a regular basis to collaboratively readjust or redefine systems that are not working for you or your students
Don’t get bogged down by details at the beginning of the class. Promise students that you will explain the gradeless structures as they come and that there will be time for feedback and readjustments if there are any problems
With these tips in mind, you will be prepared to proactively answer your students’ questions and help them let go of ways of gaming the system and instead focus on the real purpose of our time together—learning.
Karis Jones, Ph.D. is an Assistant Professor of English Language Arts for the School for Graduate Studies (Education Department) at SUNY Empire State College. As a teacher educator, literacy consultant, public humanities scholar, and community activist, she studies issues of equitable literacies learning across disciplinary, fandom, and gaming spaces. Connect with her on Twitter @Karis_M_Jones and read more about her work here.
