The last few years have been fascinating in the teaching profession. In the depths of the Covid lockdowns, teachers were hailed by the public as heroes. I knew this would be fleeting and it wasn’t long before a “these lazy teachers need to get back to work” narrative took hold in the discourse. People went from lauding educators to calling us bums faster than you could say “​​severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus.” 

Then we reopened buildings, in some locales this went smoothly. In others there was chaos and nasty “will we or won’t we?” fights over mask mandates. I remember watching this video from Florida and saying to myself “man, it can’t get much worse than this.” Boy, was I wrong.

Well, this was our year to “return to normal.” Let’s recap this school year: There is a contrived moral panic over what to share about race in classrooms, leading to teacher speech codes. We have teachers being accused of “grooming” for validating the existence of LGBTQ+ students and colleagues in our midst. More recently, we experienced another senseless, preventable mass shooting that took the lives of nineteen children and two educators. 

If I’m being honest, at the start of this year, I cringed every time I heard an adult talk about wanting to get “back to normal.” Beyond the building closures, reopening fights, and bickering adult nonsense described above, there was the massive loss of life in our society. 1,033,830 of our fellow Americans died of Covid (as of June 7, 2022). This included my own father, the parents of many of my colleagues, and most importantly (for our discussion here) the parents and grandparents of hundreds of thousands of students in our classrooms and playgrounds. There are students still quietly mourning. There is collective grief and trauma walking our hallways. There are a lot of kids who aren’t okay.

Knowing this has led me to examine some of my pedagogical routines and practices. I am a veteran teacher: sixteen years in the classroom and in my third year at my current school. I’ve taught one of my courses for a decade; I have a supportive admin team that doesn’t micromanage my work. I have room to experiment. So I set about this year rethinking my assessment practices and how to reduce the anxiety the assessment process gives my students. 

First, I increased the number of summative assessments in my class by chopping up larger tasks into more manageable pieces. This allowed me to give students more targeted feedback and gave me a more clear picture of gaps in their understanding. Rather than saying “Hey [Student X], it seems you don’t understand [Y-broad concept], I am now able to provide students with specific knowledge and skill areas where they have room for growth: “Hey [Student Y], on the assessment you struggled with [Z-narrow knowledge or skill].” This shift gave me more targeted information for my post-assessment debriefs and reteaching. 

In addition, I escalated my use of whole-class reflections immediately after each assessment. Each time we completed a summative task I asked students to discuss these two questions: 

1. To what extent was this task aligned to our instruction? 
2.  To what extent was this task a fair measure of our in-class learning?

This was followed by a whole-class conversation about the task. Doing this helped accomplish two goals: It reinforced the importance of the formative process for students. They understand that my assessments aren’t generated by me throwing darts at a dart board. They follow a logical sequence and are carefully aligned to the skills and concepts we practiced in class. Secondly, it reduced the desire for students to engage in stress-inducing, last-minute cramming rituals. The assessment is the logical end goal of the path we have walked throughout the sequence of previous classes. They understood that if they had done their jobs along the way, the assessments would largely take care of themselves. 

Lastly, I stopped putting scores on papers, only offering narrative feedback. The scores are posted in our online grade system (this is a dragon I am yet to slay), but I don’t put them on their papers. Additionally, I don’t publish scores until we have collectively debriefed the assessment. This means the conversations we have after a task is returned aren’t about scores, which can bring added anxiety but, they're about learning, which is supposed to be the whole point of school. 

The results. Students definitely appreciated having more summative assessments, more opportunities to “demonstrate proficiency” (our school's assessment language for “meeting standard”). Notably, there was less anxiety on and around assessment days and more in-class conversations about actual learning, rather than scores, afterward. The first time I passed papers back without scores they kept flipping the papers over thinking I must have forgotten or expecting them to magically appear. I then explained my process and told them to take some time to read (and listen to the feedback, thanks to the Mote app). As they did, heads started to nod around the room and several people mouthed “yeah, this makes sense.” Most hilariously, my “was this assessment aligned to our instruction?” became a bit of a meme in our class. Students would come in and give movie critic-style reviews of other assessments they were receiving, rating them on their aligned-ness. A student would walk in and announce “Oh boy, that [insert subject] assessment was definitely not aligned to the instruction. Two stars,  good luck folks.” Then the whole room would bust up laughing. 

Listen, none of this is revolutionary. Perhaps you are doing some or all of these already, but these shifts have changed the way my students talk about their assessments. Instead of focusing on a score, they focus on the feedback. On occasions, when they get score obsessed because there is always one (or a few), I can redirect them to the focus on learning. In 2022, I feel like life is hard enough for students, so why should my assessment practices add more stress?

Nate Bowling currently teaches Social Studies at the American Community School of 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. You can find him on Twitter @nate_bowling.