For most of my career until last year (January 2020), I tried and failed to shift the thinking in my classroom, and then in my school, around grades. I succeeded in making my students feel cared for. I also unintentionally succeeded in making my classroom a place where students knew they shouldn’t be anxious about their grades, but were anyway.
The process started with discomfort: my own discomfort with my students’ anxiety. I was an incredibly anxious teenager, especially when it came to my school work. As an adult, I have learned how to manage my anxiety (largely through mindfulness), but it’s always still there, a ravenous energy shadow. Each time my students became anxious about an upcoming test or essay—or more commonly, about a test or essay they were about to receive back—my shadow would feast on their anxious energy. I felt it expand into my heart, my lungs, my shoulders. Whenever this happened, I would take a deep breath, release the tension from my shoulders, and remind my students of the big picture: “This is just one test. It won’t define your quarter grade. It won’t define your course grade. And it doesn’t define you.” As I distributed the exams, the students tapped their heels on the floor and their pens on their desks, a frenetic morse code. The message: I’m scared.
When I graded the exams, my heart always sank because a few students always underperformed. As I imagined the tears and the phone calls, I reviewed the exam to prepare my remarks and strengthen my resolve. “This is a fair test,” I would tell myself. “Plenty of kids did well.” In retrospect, these self-directed pep talks were a manifestation of my own unease with the testing process itself. But since I did not see that then, I honed my motivational speaking skills and promised the students that if any single grade they earned in my class prevented them from getting into college, I would change the grade. Most laughed whenever I said this, but there was always one who piped up with, “Really?” More laughter, some head shaking. In my stomach, a sinking stone.
When the “famous Hastings’ speeches” failed to shift things, I brought in the tool that had been most helpful to me: mindfulness. I won’t describe the process in detail here because I have already discussed it in so many other posts, but let’s just say, this change was a winner. While teaching my students mindfulness eliminated neither their anxiety nor my unease with assessment, it was still a game-changer. Before tests, we practiced a mindful minute. When we lost focus, we redirected our attention to the present moment. After the AP exams, we practiced yoga. Mindfulness helped us create a community of relative calm, even though for many students, the storm still raged inside. I felt good about this work and continually sought opportunities to both learn and teach mindfulness. But the little stone in my stomach was still floating around in my energy shadow.
As successful as the mindfulness initiatives had been, I never quite felt satisfied that it was enough. Because it wasn’t. My own mindfulness practice made me acutely aware that putting numerical grades on student work to show their “learning” was inconsistent with my values as a teacher and human. I wanted to lift students up, to encourage them to follow their passions and take risks with their writing. But every time I gave them an essay rubric or a test format, I was sending the message that it was not actually safe to do these things.
So I stopped giving tests and starting allowing revisions. It was five months of non-stop grading. I was drowning, and there was no “island of incredible learning” in the distance that I could swim to. The students were happy not to have tests to worry about, but that’s about as far as this particular change took us. Another year. Another failure.
That summer, 2019, I explored alternatives. I listened to a few episodes of my favorite podcast, Cult of Pedagogy. From there, I found a book called Hacking Assessment by Starr Sackstein, which laid out an alternative: mastery based grading. Energized by her ideas, I read it in one day. But I did not know how to actually implement a system like this. Just that school year, my district decided to make our electronic gradebook data viewable to students and parents. How would I explain the complete absence of such data in my own gradebook? The timing wasn’t right.
Until it was. Until I couldn’t take it anymore. Until the pain of returning a graded essay became greater than my fear of change. In January of 2020, my ninth grade honors students had spent the better part of a month working their hardest on a literary analysis of Lord of the Flies. They submitted thesis statements and outlines. I gave them feedback and they revised. Again and again. When the essays were finally submitted, they breathed a collective sigh of relief. I was actually looking forward to grading them because we had all already invested so much time and energy.
And . . . they were . . . not great. The writing had improved from the first literary analysis essay, but the grades were still mostly B’s and C’s. I knew the students would be devastated. I was disappointed. Not in them, but in the process. I wasn’t comfortable inflating the grades. And I could not give those essays back knowing the scores would knock everyone’s quarter grade down a substantial amount. I couldn’t face the disappointment and the tears and the knowledge that this is not what learning should feel like.
So I asked for permission not to grade. It was easier than I expected. On my way into the building one morning, I ran into the assistant principal in charge of our digital gradebook. I said, “If I can’t find a way to assess differently, I don’t think I can do this job anymore.” Her jaw dropped, and she agreed to meet with me. I invited her to read Hacking Assessment and we discussed how I might adapt this in my classes. She encouraged me to go slowly, maybe just start with my ninth graders. But I couldn’t do that. I already felt lighter, reenergized by the prospect of turning my dream of a world with no grades into reality.
I knew that the road ahead would involve many iterations. It already has. And I am grateful for all the failures that led me there.
My next post will describe the process of on-boarding my students.
Ms. Hastings 