I’m not going to lie: the summer of 2020 was the most stressful summer of my life. I had one glorious day of lightness and liberty when I dropped my kids off at their first day of camp. (I continue to be grateful for everything and everyone that made last summer awesome and safe for my children.) And the next day I awoke in a panic. There were about 8 weeks left of summer, but all I could think about was how much I did not know about the coming school year—for both me and my children. My greatest fear was that I would have to go back to in-person teaching and that my children would be hybrid or remote. And once I had that thought, it lodged deep inside of me, a little summertime leech that refused to let go.
So how was I, an anxious pre-crastinator, going to get through the summer? I did what I always do: I started reading. And I’m not talking about beach reads or escape novels (although I love those, too)—I’m talking about pedagogy. I did not know what school would look like in the fall, but I knew I wanted to bring in more choice reading, more writing workshop, and less stressful assessment practices. Enter Book Love, 180 Days, and Point-less.
It would be pretty easy for me to just list all the things I appreciate about these texts, but this is not an advertisement for Heinemann; it’s a blog post about how I revised my gradeless assessment practices over the summer to prepare for gradeless assessment on Day 1 of the 2020–2021 school year. Before reading Point-less by Sarah Zerwin, I had planned to spend much of my summer (when I wasn’t busy ruminating on my fears) mapping out instructional units, identifying the most important skills I wanted to assess in each, and then creating single-point rubrics to contain all that data. After reading Point-less, I took a deep breath and said, “New plan. I’m just going to do everything she does. This book is awesome.”
While I do think progressive teachers in any subject area could adapt Zerwin’s goals-based approach in their classes, it really did help me that she is an English teacher. Basically everything she offered in this book—from the goals she based her classes on to the types of assignments and experiences she created for her students—was exactly what I always already wanted for my teaching.
So instead of mapping out my entire instructional year (which I knew would be the other kind of pointless since our instructional model was still unknown), I spent the summer re-reading Point-less, reflecting on Zerwin’s ideas, creating templates and slideshows, and figuring out how to teach my students to be better learners (while also implementing a reading and writing workshop). It sounds like a lot, and it was—but I enjoyed the process because it felt right. It felt meaningful. And I would be able to use everything I was creating regardless of the instructional model my district chose.
Here is a brief summary of the ideas I “borrowed” from Point-less and how I used them in the fall.
- I started with Zerwin’s list of goals. Literally. I took them, shamelessly, and typed them into a Google doc. There were a few things I wanted to emphasize that were not directly stated in her goals, so I modified a few of them. But otherwise, I kept it the same.
- I looked at her weekly routine graphic, compared it to the ones in 180 Days, and got stressed about how I wouldn’t be able to do any of it. So I jotted several ideas, attempted to create a plan that would work for hybrid instruction (which my district seemed to be leaning towards), and then stopped wasting time on this because I knew I would have to continually adapt our routines anyway.
- I put post-it flags on all the pages I wanted to review again once the school year started. Zerwin has great ideas for creating a culture of peer feedback and organizing the qualitative data that will replace numerical grades.
- I created a list of her suggested lessons about learning and tried to figure out when/how I might incorporate them. (Including her first day lesson in the appendix, which I adapted for remote learning.)
- I drafted a welcome letter to students and an expository letter for parents in which I explained how I would be assessing their children. I asked the students to read their letter and write a response for homework the first day. I sent the parent letter a few weeks into the school year, after we had settled in a little. If you compare it to the one I sent in February of 2020, you can see that it’s much less complicated because my intended assessment system was much less complicated.
Reviewing Point-less now to write this post, I realize I need to reread it again this summer. There is so much valuable thinking about teaching and learning in this book. Many of the practices I intended to do sort of fell by the wayside as the year progressed. Others I feel that I adapted pretty successfully based on my teaching context. And there’s a third group of ideas that I want to revisit now that I have spent an entire school year grading without numerical grades. I have learned and unlearned so much this year (many of those lessons will be future blog posts); I am so grateful that about a month from now, I will have time to pause and process all of those lessons.
Ms. Hastings 