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What We Talk about When We Don't Talk about Grades

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Title: What We Talk about When We Don't Talk about Grades
Language: English
Authors: O'Connor, John S., Lessing, Avi D.
Source: Schools: Studies in Education. Fall 2017 14(2):303-318.
Availability: University of Chicago Press. Journals Division, P.O. Box 37005, Chicago, IL 60637. Tel: 877-705-1878; Tel: 773-753-3347; Fax: 877-705-1879; Fax: 773-753-0811; e-mail: subscriptions@press.uchicago.edu; Web site: http://www.press.uchicago.edu
Peer Reviewed: Y
Page Count: 16
Publication Date: 2017
Document Type: Journal Articles
Reports - Evaluative
Descriptors: Grades (Scholastic), Teacher Student Relationship, Decision Making, Educational Practices, Learning Processes, Educational Benefits, Student Motivation
DOI: 10.1086/693793
ISSN: 1550-1175
Abstract: In this article, John O'Connor and Avi Lessing discuss their decision to create gradeless classrooms. They reached this decision by witnessing the profound cost grades hold for students and teachers alike. Grades threaten to reduce students to mere scores and teachers to bookkeepers, both groups focused more on grades than learning. By eliminating grades, O'Connor and Lessing observe tremendous benefits, including a greater sense of intrinsic motivation, a more robust approach to revision, increased conversations with their students, and more authentic student-teacher relationships.
Abstractor: As Provided
Entry Date: 2017
Accession Number: EJ1160172
Database: ERIC
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  Value: <anid>AN0125838969;[64yk]01sep.17;2018Oct25.08:21;v2.2.500</anid> <title id="AN0125838969-1">What We Talk about When We Don't Talk about Grades. </title> <p>In this article, John O'Connor and Avi Lessing discuss their decision to create gradeless classrooms. They reached this decision by witnessing the profound cost grades hold for students and teachers alike. Grades threaten to reduce students to mere scores and teachers to bookkeepers, both groups focused more on grades than learning. By eliminating grades, O'Connor and Lessing observe tremendous benefits, including a greater sense of intrinsic motivation, a more robust approach to revision, increased conversations with their students, and more authentic student-teacher relationships.</p> <p>In his recent memoir, <emph>Little Failure</emph>, novelist Gary Shteyngart ([<reflink idref="bib6" id="ref1">6</reflink>]) tells the story of how school "failure" affected him:</p> <p>The report card printed on dot-matrix toilet paper is handed out in morning homeroom, our eyes skirting past individual grades to the bottom number, the average. I am crying even before I see the four digits.</p> <p>82.33.</p> <p>Essentially a B.</p> <p>Harvard,</p> <p>Yale,</p> <p>Princeton?</p> <p>Lehigh, Lafayette, <emph>maybe</emph> Bucknell.</p> <p>What does it mean for an immigrant child of the top rank to go to</p> <p>Bucknell University? It means I have failed my parents. I have failed</p> <p>myself. I have failed my future. We may as well have never come.</p> <p>(<reflink idref="bib219" id="ref2">219</reflink>)</p> <p>High drama—and all this for a B! Imagine the effect a C, a D, or an F might have had on young Shteyngart and his family.</p> <p>While not every student cares about grades as profoundly as Shteyngart here, most of the students we have taught internalize the numbers and letters and class rank. John has taught for 30 years in a wide variety of junior high, high school, and university-level posts. He currently teaches at New Trier High School, a wealthy suburban public high school north of Chicago, and as an adjunct professor at Northwestern University. Avi has taught at a progressive independent school and has spent the last 14 years at Oak Park and River Forest High School, a public school west of Chicago. Sadly, many of our students have conflated how they've scored with who they are. In response to this phenomenon and from our own equally miserable personal experiences with grades as students and as teachers ourselves, we have each made the move to stop grading assignments. John first started this practice over 10 years ago, and Avi has followed his lead over the past five years. (We still give grades—required grades on report cards at the quarter and the semester—but we don't grade individual assignments.)</p> <p>For many years, we have witnessed firsthand how entrenched we all are—teachers, students, and schools, in general—in a system driven by external rewards and punishments, at the heart of which are letter grades. It's a system that prizes a wide array of external marks (test scores, grades, and resume "tokens" such as the number of extracurriculars) over lived experience. It's a system that attempts to commodify learning and even turns students themselves into commodities that are packaged and disseminated to colleges, where the system starts all over again. By eliminating grades, we have rejected this grades-based system.</p> <p>In this article, we discuss the reasons why we've moved away from grades; we lay out some of the profound costs grades hold for students and teachers alike; and we highlight some of the powerful benefits we've seen in our classes. By eliminating grades, we have seen tremendous benefits for our students, including a newfound appreciation for intrinsic learning, a more robust approach to revising, increased conversation, and more authentic student-teacher relationships.</p> <hd id="AN0125838969-2">Why We Went Gradeless</hd> <p>Though we've stopped giving grades for different lengths of time, our motivations were quite similar: we wanted to inspire intrinsic motivation, and we wanted to enter into meaningful relationships with our students—to get to know each other as individual people—rather than settle for the bureaucratic transaction between grade giver and grade seekers.</p> <p>We shouldn't have expected our students to act any differently. After all, we felt the same way about teacher comments when we were students. Growing up, we had the distinct feeling that our teachers liked or hated us based on the grades we received. We recall only a couple of rare teachers having shown any personal interest in our lives, and we almost never talked to teachers outside of class, apart from those occasions where we were given a detention and were forced to spend extra time with our teachers. This view pervades among our students as well—and grades are a paltry substitute for meaningful attention.</p> <p>John realized that he, like most English teachers, spends a huge amount of time reading and commenting on students' papers. To use rough numbers, if he assigns on average 10 papers per year to 100 students and spends about 20 minutes per paper that has added up to well over 300 hours per year (more than 10,000 hours over the course of a career). It occurred to him—probably later than it should have—that crafting individually tailored comments did not in fact ensure that all those carefully constructed comments were being read.</p> <p>For a while, he tried pleading—"If I spend most of my time lavishing comments on these papers, the least you can do is read them"—but this practice only led to the same depressing result: students parachuting papers nonchalantly into the recycling bin after flipping to the back page to see the grade. The most conversation these transactions engendered was the occasional "C+? Sweet!" as students walked out the door.</p> <p>In his first two years of teaching theater at Waukegan High School, Avi's classes were essentially gradeless. He evaluated students based on what they had been working on in class—grading would have made them more unnecessarily afraid than they already were. He held meetings with students to self-evaluate their progress at the end of the semester. But he was essentially hiding in the shadows, afraid of being found out and reprimanded.</p> <p>In his early years teaching in Oak Park, he went back to his cooperating teacher's words of advice—at least one grade in the gradebook per week. Until he connected with John, years later, he was doing all of the things on the periphery that give students more agency—no longer requiring bathroom passes, offering choices for assignments, creating different forums for dialogue—but not the single most important thing to tilt the balance. When he talked to John, five years ago, a certain euphoria crept over him, and he found himself pacing back and forth in his den. That year, he planned to abandon grades for his senior elective class, and then decided if it was for the students' benefit, then it should benefit all his students, not just the ones for which the change would be the easiest. With some trepidation, he made his AP classes gradeless as well. He waited for the blowback from students and parents but it never came.</p> <p>Though it is undeniably true that some students are motivated by grades, it is also true that there are endless other ways to motivate young people. And many students' grades do just the opposite: they make students give up. The objective measures leaving them feeling, well ... objectified. There has been considerable research to back up this point.</p> <hd id="AN0125838969-3">The Problem with Grades</hd> <p>In <emph>Punished by Rewards</emph>, Alfie Kohn ([<reflink idref="bib3" id="ref3">3</reflink>]) argues that grades "actually undermine the sort of motivation that leads to excellence" and that "using them to sort students undercuts our efforts to educate" (<reflink idref="bib203" id="ref4">203</reflink>). This is largely because grades, rather than learning, are what students then come to seek. Most troubling of all, perhaps, is that rewards such as grades "disrupt relationships in very particular ways that are demonstrably linked to learning, productivity and the development of responsibility" (<reflink idref="bib54" id="ref5">54</reflink>). A pedagogy that promotes progressive ideas such as valuing student voice and promoting authentic learning ultimately falls short if it's only measured through points that culminate in a grade, with little to no qualitative feedback.</p> <p>In an unpublished master's thesis, Thomas Pack, one of John's education students at Northwestern, independently studied the role of self-assessment as an alternative to teacher grades. He chose this tack since the research led him to a clear conclusion: "Bad grades do not serve to motivate students. Students who are accustomed to receiving poor grades are decidedly disengaged by high school. Receiving more bad grades does not help a student desire to achieve higher grades, but reinforces previous assessment. In this case, grades can be harmful to students in that they create and reinforce perceptions of a person, rather than assess their ability to grow and learn" (Pack [<reflink idref="bib5" id="ref6">5</reflink>], 45).</p> <p>Students are often disincentivized by a grading system that was presumably designed to do the opposite—to improve in areas where students' ability or drive is lacking. But it is not only students with low grades who are harmed by letter grades and test scores. John had a student named "Elaine" who wrote chillingly about the death of her "10-year-long dream to be a National Merit Semi-finalist." Though her "selection index of 215 put her in the rarified company of the top.05% of test-takers in the nation," she fell a fraction short of the "semi-finalist status" she had "always yearned for," and even felt compelled to recite the "mourner's kaddish for [her] dead dream." Each year, Avi tells a handful of high-achieving, grade-obsessed students that they have A's before the semester is over, so that they can relax and focus on the work, rather than just the results. Their writing and participation invariably improve without any drop-off of their effort. It may seem counterintuitive to throw the reward out the window, or offer it preemptively, but we find that it can be a necessary step in a seesaw tipped so heavily to extrinsic marks. We find students on the whole are less distracted, more engaged, and more imaginative when they are freed from the constant stress of the grade.</p> <p>Of course, we don't deny that we live in a system where grades determine one's standing in high school and even the strength of one's college application. We are not so naive as to think our classrooms are not impacted by the overall structure of school. We ultimately give grades, just far less often—and not on individual assignments. John gives grades at the end of each quarter. Avi gives grades eight times a year: at the end of each quarter and, because of a computer grading system teachers are required to use (efficiency, always efficiency!), he is required to give a grades at the half-quarter as well.</p> <p>Some colleagues have wondered, "If you're going to give students grades anyway, what difference does it make if you wait for the marking period?" We have found it makes an enormous difference in student performance and in our relationship with students. Report cards are not a reason to capitulate on the goal of intrinsic learning. In fact, Alfie Kohn ([<reflink idref="bib2" id="ref7">2</reflink>]) goes so far as to say that teachers "should do everything in their power to make grades as invisible as possible for as long as possible. Helping students to forget about grades is the single best piece of advice for creating a learning oriented classroom." Learning as its own reward is the goal we have sought in our classrooms.</p> <p>Learning for its own sake not only makes learning more enjoyable but it also encourages learning beyond the classroom. This is because intrinsically motivated learning can lead to what the eminent education psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi calls "flow experiences"—activities in which our concentration is so intense the person is completely involved, utterly absorbed. Such a state almost never happens with extrinsic motivation alone. According to Csikszentmihalyi ([<reflink idref="bib1" id="ref8">1</reflink>]), we all do some things for extrinsic reasons:</p> <p>Namely, you work for forty hours a week so you can get a paycheck at the end. And you don't really like the job much but you want the paycheck to do things with that you will enjoy. So that's extrinsic because the reward comes after the activity from the outside.</p> <p>Now, flow is a type of intrinsic motivation, that is, there you do what you're doing primarily because you like what you're doing. If you learn only for external, extrinsic reasons, you will probably forget it as soon as you are no longer forced to remember what you want to do. Nor will you be motivated to learn for its own sake. Whereas if you are intrinsically motivated, you're going to keep learning as you move up and so you are in this lifelong learning mode, which would be the ideal.</p> <p>It is this ideal we have tried to reach in our classrooms and, though we have made other additional changes in our classroom practices, eliminating grades has been at the core of this effort. A classroom without grades turned out to have been easier than we had initially anticipated.</p> <hd id="AN0125838969-4">A Gradeless Classroom in Practice</hd> <p>Here's how this all works in our classrooms, although we don't presume to suggest that this is the optimal arrangement for every classroom. Assignments of the "did you do it" variety are collected or checked off in a gradebook. Essays, projects, and end-of-the- quarter exhibitions are not graded but are commented on according to criteria developed with student input.</p> <p>At the end of the quarter or half-quarter, John and Avi both look over the objective assignments (i.e., did you do it) and the criteria-based assignments (papers that students can revise as many times as they'd like) and then come up with a holistic grade (e.g., A or B). The students are asked to self-evaluate as well. We ask students to particularly reflect on their preparation, presence, and participation in class. We both briefly confer with students. If the grade is the same (which it often is), there's no problem, that's the grade. If our grade is higher than theirs, we go with ours (that way students know there are no tricks up our sleeves). If their grade is higher than ours, we have a conversation. We look at both the objective and subjective measures.</p> <p>Sometimes that's all that's needed for clarification. A student will say, "Oh I get it, now," or "Wait! I handed that in. Here it is." Either way, it's an authentic conversation. We talk about their work, their growth, and how they plan on participating and working the following term. Have we had students try to take advantage of the system (or lack of) to press unfairly for a higher quarter grade than they deserve? Sure, but far less often than one might think, and much less frequently than the near-everyday bartering that occurs with a numerical system.</p> <p>Readers may wonder if such a system is "too easy," one where any student can succeed. We'd both proudly answer, "Yes!" And what a radical pedagogic shift that represents. Imagine it: a classroom where every student can be successful, even with very challenging material. We can't guarantee student success (a host of social and medical crises may arise), but we are confident that we are giving students every possible chance to succeed, and by building in time to meet with students in and out of class, we also increase the likelihood that we are getting to know students personally and that if they are facing severe problems, we may be able to refer them to other professionals in the building.</p> <hd id="AN0125838969-5">Classroom Principles</hd> <p>Some additional principles, we believe, can positively impact our work with students.</p> <p>First, create criteria for judgment with students' input instead of giving grades, like the example shown in table 1. John and Avi use rubrics like the one in table 1, and they find that narrowing the field focuses students on a few things instead of everything. To borrow from an Anne Lamott ([<reflink idref="bib4" id="ref9">4</reflink>]) metaphor, it allows them to close and open the door on their audience in a way that makes writing both private and public, personal and shared. For each product, final project, writing assignment, and the like, we have a discussion with students on the central skills we have been focusing on in class. This is key since it offers a chance for students to review and keep practicing skills while inviting students into the process of determining the success of their own writing. Alfie Kohn ([<reflink idref="bib2" id="ref10">2</reflink>]) concludes an essay on transforming grading practice by saying that although he is proud of his efforts to de-emphasize grades, what he wishes he had done was "to get students involved in devising the criteria for excellence." Partnering with students not only helps us all reflect but it also gives students greater agency in their own work.</p> <p>Graph</p> <p>Table 1. Rubric for a Personal Narrative</p> <p> <ephtml> <table><tr><td valign="bottom">Personal Narrative</td><td valign="bottom">S</td><td valign="bottom">O</td><td valign="bottom">W</td></tr><tr><td valign="bottom">Sensory detail</td><td valign="bottom" /><td valign="bottom" /><td valign="bottom" /></tr><tr><td valign="bottom">Figurative language</td><td valign="bottom" /><td valign="bottom" /><td valign="bottom" /></tr><tr><td valign="bottom">Dialogue</td><td valign="bottom" /><td valign="bottom" /><td valign="bottom" /></tr><tr><td valign="bottom">Organization</td><td valign="bottom" /><td valign="bottom" /><td valign="bottom" /></tr><tr><td valign="bottom">Lesson learned</td><td valign="bottom" /><td valign="bottom" /><td valign="bottom" /></tr></table> </ephtml> </p> <p>11 S = strong; O = okay; W = weak. This rubric is for a personal narrative but could easily be adapted for any assignment.</p> <p>Table 1 offers a sample rubric for a "personal narrative from which the author learned a lesson." Before collecting a class set of papers, John often reveals a "blank rubric" and asks students to decide what the main areas of class focus have been. Teachers obviously have some say in this as well, but students are often excellent at synthesizing the lessons that have come before. This method invites students to share in the feedback process and helps to focus teachers' responses (this rubric does not mention paragraphing or sentence variety or character development, for example—but those aspects of writing can wait for other papers).</p> <p>Second, limit the criteria to three to six concepts and make these criteria the focus of comments. Students can't be expected to address every writing issue with every paper. (Neither can teachers!) Essays littered with negative feedback and every sentence fixed or commented on often overwhelm students and leave them unmotivated to change.</p> <p>Third, encourage students to write self-analysis paragraphs on the back of drafts they hand in. John's standard questions are these: How did you move from idea to rough draft to final draft? What were the most helpful choices you made? Any new choices? Any particular problems, sources of frustration in writing the essay? These questions are so routine in John's classes that students sometimes come to class having already answered them. The self-analyses serve two critical functions. First, they empower students by reminding them of successful strategies they may have employed (e.g., writing multiple drafts, visiting the writing center, reading their paper out loud for cohesion or flow). Second, the self-analysis allows students to create their own individual goals and allows teachers to focus their feedback on particular areas with individual students. Avi has students write essays about their writing and how it has changed over the course of the semester, citing their own work and their own learning experiences specifically. In this way, students are in dialogue with themselves, each other, and their teachers about their writing, reading, and classroom experiences. The information flow is richer, more nuanced and dynamic, than a system in which students merely hand in completed work that the teacher grades.</p> <p>Fourth, have students read their essays out loud in class, or out of class, while everyone writes down their feedback based on the criteria you've established. Then have them share their feedback with classmates via email or shared docs. In Avi's classes, this leads to a shared community that both transcends and reverberates within the classroom. Reading aloud and giving feedback creates a community, which then becomes more bold and direct in its feedback. Too often, the teacher is the only audience for the student.</p> <p>We also seek ways of having students explicitly write to audiences beyond the teacher—blog exchanges, letters to politicians, Amazon reviews, poems to be performed before live audiences in and out of school, interviews converted into monologues, letters to the school paper, to name a few. Authentic writing shows students that their work is not merely something to please teachers, but an activity professionals practice on a regular basis. It normalizes feedback as something that will help us improve and not just the means to a higher grade.</p> <p>Fifth, tell a student about your reaction to their essay not in terms of what they did right or wrong, but just as a reader, as a human being with your honest response. This means offering positive comments (we aim for a minimum of one per page) and, especially with personal writing, treating the subject matter as separate from the set of skills being learned. As a colleague told John years ago, "There's nothing sadder than an end comment reading, 'Sorry to hear about your grandmother. C+.'"</p> <p>Sixth, when the quarter and the semester marking periods roll around, invite students into the process, reflecting on their own performance in class and on written assignments. In this way we can work with our students to help them become more successful readers and writers. We want to try to help all our students succeed. While almost everyone takes that notion for granted—and why wouldn't they? Teachers are among the most caring of all professionals!—what percentage of students actually succeed in the typical classroom? What's an acceptable percentage? Consider how truly radical a paradigm shift we would make if our goal was to ensure that every student succeeds.</p> <p>As the education philosopher William H. Schubert once said to Avi regarding students who are not high achieving: imagine going to a place where adults tell you in a variety of ways that you are a failure, that you are not good, that you need to improve or else there will be dire consequences. Now imagine going to that place most of the year for 15 years, and you will have some sense of how terrible school is for some young people.</p> <p>And what would be so wrong with not being talented at the subject but still attaining a good grade? You wouldn't fail someone in a yoga class, for example, for not being able to do the downward-facing dog pose. Just because Clarissa can stand on her head in a pose where say Steve's arms start shaking like a jellyfish, doesn't mean that Clarissa is a better person than Steve, or even that she's trying harder; it just means that Clarissa is currently more flexible. What if Steve isn't given any kind of encouragement while he's shaking (e.g., "No worries. Just go to your edge, Steve, and then go back into child's pose")? If, instead, you said, "Look, Steve, I guess you're just a C yoga student," what are the chances Steve comes back? Isn't the best Steve can do is get to Steve's edge, the place where he may be uncomfortable but where he does not panic and where he certainly is still able to breathe? Establishing personal relationships with students fosters trust and has helped us understand our students and their writing much more fully than we could if we were mere grade arbiters.</p> <hd id="AN0125838969-6">Reactions to the Absence of Grades</hd> <p>Readers might also wonder about the reaction of parents, other teachers, and administrators. In Avi's experience, parents have been the strongest allies for a classroom that promotes engagement through intrinsic motivation. They're happy to exchange "What did you get on the test?" for "What are you reading and discussing in class?" Avi has begun the practice of recognizing (or asking students to recognize) other students' efforts publicly. Avi calls the selected student's parent on speakerphone to congratulate them on their child's accomplishments. Of course, he tells the parent right away the call is being broadcast to the class. After the initial hesitation and concerned greeting (why else would a teacher be calling at 11:15 a.m.!?), Avi launches into specific, direct, and appreciative feedback about their child. Often the call ends with the words "You made my day."</p> <p>Each time a teacher reduces evaluation to a mere score is a time they are not offering more meaningful feedback. After all, the grade not only accentuates the authority, agency, and expertise of the teacher, it reinforces the "fixed mindset" of the student that in order to succeed, she must figure out what the teacher wants and that her success is largely arbitrary and outside of her own control. One of the great benefits of foregoing grades is it opens a more meaningful conversation on what other kinds of techniques are available or have yet to be used. The meaningful dialogues we have had with students (which we will highlight in the following two case studies) are possible, we think, only by removing the extrinsic reward of grades.</p> <hd id="AN0125838969-7">Case Study 1: Avi's Student, Sam</hd> <p>Sam hated my guts at the start of the school year. In the first week of class, students generated their own writing assignment, worked on three drafts, none of which I graded, and only the last one in which I gave feedback. Initially, this made Sam feel confused and discouraged. Sam is a self-described perfectionist: she couldn't deal with going down a road if it was going to lead to a dead end. If it wasn't going to reap the expected reward, why do it? She said she liked to "work smart, not hard." But she mostly thought I was weird, especially in that first week, when, out of sheer desperation to convey an idea, I had a student throw a ball back and forth with me, and asked the students' reaction. Pretty boring, they concluded. Sam fumed in the back. What did this have to do with English? Then I had the student throw the ball out of my reach, and I dove across the floor to try and catch it. The students erupted with glee. Their teacher had sprawled out and dove to the floor in order to catch a ball. Which one was more interesting, I asked. They concluded the latter was decidedly more interesting. "Exactly," I said sweating, but beaming. "An attempt even if it ends in failure is often more interesting and rewarding than merely doing something you've already done." I thought about going into my metaphor about yoga class (and how everyone has to go to the edge) but thought better of it. The majority of the students seemed to catch my drift. I looked at Sam, and she was wearing a poker face. Had I lost her?</p> <p>Sam describes it this way after a writing conference on her <emph>Jane Eyre</emph> essay first semester: "I feel like I'm on my train, and I want you to help me keep my train moving, right, and like, you're kind of going off on a completely new train the other way." She continues: "I had always loved and been good at argumentative essays: stating the obvious, using some more obvious quotes that basically rephrase what you are saying, and then say it again in a conclusion sentence to drill it into the reader's mind (which is what I've been taught). Thus, I had a hard time coping with the fact it wouldn't just take one draft." A classroom without grades meant a classroom without rigid expectations, a nailed down structure, and my approval or disapproval as the end all be all.</p> <p>I knew that Sam wanted directions. In fact, she wanted the route before attempting to begin. What I wanted was for her to come up with original ideas.</p> <p>One of the benefits of abandoning grades is that it immediately increases a student's ability to take risks. First reluctantly and then with more purpose, Sam wrote multiple drafts of all her essays. Over time, incrementally, something changed. She writes,</p> <p>I discovered new meanings of the topic as I wrote, not just the obvious meanings that come first to mind ... something new I haven't successfully done. In my other essays, I made plans and came up with my ideas as I made the outline, but not during writing, it was through thinking in advance.... I was kind of amazed at what came out of my brain.</p> <p>I realized my papers aren't always going to fit together nicely, they're not always going to be perfect, but I need to take them as far as I can go. Every time I have to tell myself this, I think back to Mr. Lessing's demonstration. He caught the ball standing still, pretty boring. Then, he had a student throw it across the room, and he dived over a chair to try to save it. While he didn't catch it, the attempt was much more interesting than the first successful catch.</p> <p>Sam's work in English translated to the kind of deeper learning about herself that we want for all our students. It was neither linear nor easy, but it was a far more interesting journey than if I had told her every step of the way where we were going and how we were going to get there. In her second semester portfolio final, she describes her growth: "Instead of only reading and writing about books, we need to explore them on a personal level. It is interesting how people interpret things differently, and you want to know why they think a certain way, so you get to know more about them.... Now, I can see through people better and instead of being intimidated by my math teacher for example, I respect them in the way that they want themselves to be respected, but I see them as a person underneath and don't stress myself out too much any more."</p> <p>It's not that a gradeless classroom subtracts grades. It's that a gradeless classroom creates space for so much more communication. This shift requires a certain kind of teacher gymnastics, where sometimes you have to raise the discomfort to paradoxically increase a student's comfort. I wanted students like Sam to dive for the ball and miss to see that's what all writers (indeed what all adults) are doing all day long—missing, getting it wrong, missing the mark. Yet those attempts, full of mistake-making, ambiguity, and resistance, are actually the very processes that lead to aliveness, insight, and originality.</p> <hd id="AN0125838969-8">Case Study 2: John's Student, Sean</hd> <p>At the beginning of the year, Sean was a little weirded out in my class since "students like knowing around where on the grading spectrum they are." As a senior in an advanced writing class and a star athlete, he had never really loved English class. He always did his homework and seemed pretty confident he could earn a high grade without much effort. But a class with no grades?</p> <p>Some students see a class without grades on papers as an unfair disruption of business as usual. They figure they have to learn a new game to play, find out from the teacher what the new rules are, and do what the teacher wants at all costs. Sean might once have been such a student. He wrote of "playing the game" as a junior, for example, when he was told he needed to write 10 pages and to amass 100 notecards for a research paper. (Why 10 and 100, I wonder? Likely for the sake of grading ease.) Sean wrote 259 cards even though he "didn't believe in" the topic. "You want numbers? I'll give you numbers," his actions seemed to say. Even when he told his teacher and a librarian that he didn't believe what he was arguing, he was advised to stick with it anyway: "Why waste all that work?"</p> <p>Sean's trepidation in my gradeless class was clear from his first email to me just before the first paper was due: "I was wondering if you were able to meet [before school]. I just have a few questions about the writing and some grammar questions." Sean, like many students, wanted to write "correctly," and he was afraid of getting zapped if he didn't. He has learned a useful school survival strategy: have the teacher proofread the paper ahead of time. I was eager to talk as always, but I was not interested in being his personal editor (before being his "judge and jury"). I'm amazed at how frequently teachers accept that sort of request. It feels to me like students are dropping off their essays the way they might their dry cleaning ("Yo, teach, pretty this up for me by tomorrow at eight. Light starch, ok?"). As Avi and I have mentioned, we are also trying to create authentic classroom conditions where students write to audiences other than the teacher. But this seemed new to him as well.</p> <p>After getting the first paper back with comments, Sean said he "really liked the feedback rather than a letter grade because it forced me to actually read the comments" (which he properly read as "suggestions for revision"). Sean was also fearful a month or so later when I invited students to submit their work for anonymous review by the class. With some hesitation, he did it, and seemed happy to have his work looked at. Maybe we really were all in this together.</p> <p>Gradually, Sean took more and more risks—in both form and topic. He shared a college essay about being sensitive—a part of his character he valued but that he was taught to bury in the world of sports and really in the world of men. He also wrote about his work as a homework helper and big brother with an African American student in nearby Evanston and shared a piece about a relative who died and how he and his family struggled with the grief process. In a self-reflection paragraph, Sean wrote, "I definitely had never written about my relatives and family so much which was uncomfortable at start, but I'm really glad that I did so."</p> <p>Formally, Sean was similarly adventurous. He wrote a ski trip story in the form of a concrete poem with the words resembling the slope on which he skied. He knew he was taking a big chance, and he knew he might not be able to pull it off, but he was very excited to write something different from anything he had ever written before. Of this piece, Sean said, "I think I made the ski poem in the shape of a mountain because when I was writing that piece, my mind was racing just like as if I were actually skiing, so any other style would have been a poor representation of how I was feeling." Sean never again asked me if he was "doing it right," even when a later class workshop convinced him to start one piece over completely. More than that: the "racing mind" Sean mentions here—recalling what Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi refers to as the "flow" experience of intrinsic learning—is unlikely ever to occur when the external rewards of grades are the only goal.</p> <p>On the final paper of the year, Sean wrote of how 12 years of schooling had mostly been about playing the grade game. A gradeless classroom allowed him to question a number of core beliefs and to take big risks and sometimes to miss the mark without disastrous consequences. Sean was beginning to prize learning above grade point averages an attitude he hoped to take with him to college.</p> <p>These case studies represent some of the ways in which students see their school work and themselves as learners. We have also seen a profound difference in the conversations we have had with our students, as the following list poem suggests. By not talking about grades, we have shared many more personal conversations.</p> <p>"What We Talk About" (A Partial List Poem Derived from Talks with Students)</p> <p>JR's dad committed suicide last year.</p> <p>Lizzie's best friend has moved out of the country.</p> <p>Robin's parents have advised her to "learn her limitations" since she'll</p> <p>never be as successful as her sister.</p> <p>Carl is worried his writing voice will sound like everyone else.</p> <p>Patty has been hospitalized for cutting twice. She also just came</p> <p>out, saying she was "tired of hiding who she was."</p> <p>Jimmy has severe ADHD and can't get the meds right.</p> <p>Michael says it's nothing personal but all he cares about is his music.</p> <p>Maggie has just found god.</p> <p>Henry says he hopes he gets a scholarship because he can't afford college otherwise.</p> <p>Robert will be the first person in his family to go to college.</p> <p>Joey will be the first person in four generations NOT to go to Dartmouth.</p> <p>Graham says his only goal for senior year is to eat lunch with a friend.</p> <hd id="AN0125838969-9">Refusing to Quantify the Unquantifiable</hd> <p>These human exchanges are a far cry from Shteyngart's grade-obsessed memoir that opened our article. Shteyngart ([<reflink idref="bib6" id="ref11">6</reflink>]) writes that the grade "gives us a taste of what we're to expect the next four years: the College Highest Average Rejected, Lowest Average Accepted Chart, which we will soon know by heart" (<reflink idref="bib212" id="ref12">212</reflink>). These days many of our students obsess over the Naviance computer program, which offers similar data and creates charts and graphs comparing students to their peers within the school and their contemporaries nationwide. It provides historical data going back 5 to 10 years, leading to some ridiculous conclusions. While not every student learns this "data" by heart, as Shteyngart does, they often internalize the data the way he does, letting numbers and class rank define not just how they scored but who they see themselves as. John had a student last year who said bluntly just before graduation, "The purpose of education is to see how high and how far to the right you can get on Naviance. You need to know where you stand." But in our rush to generate and tabulate data, we need to recognize there is a human cost because students tend to take teacher numbers and grades personally. It is not just their work, but the students themselves, who are reduced to labels of their talent, their imagination, their worth.</p> <p>We refuse to quantify the unquantifiable: human relationships and our relationship with learning. Resistance is not easy. Last fall, John opened a parent-teacher conference by telling a mom that her daughter was "a lovely young woman with a generous heart and a strong sense of empathy." The mom replied, "If you think she's so lovely, why did you give her a B?" Only after explaining that the student never revised her work and rarely participated in class did the mother accept the "verdict" of the grade.</p> <p>Avi's father, a philosopher, has pointed out to him that the system of grades is only replicating a larger phenomenon of our either/or, good/bad world: "In that sense, people are grading all of the time. You got divorced? That's bad. You make over $200,000? That means you're good. You survived the Holocaust? That's good [Avi's dad survived the Holocaust]. So does that mean the people who didn't survive were bad? That they were bad at surviving? Of course not! We are obsessed with verdicts." Our decision to give up grades is part of a larger effort to reimagine possibilities rather than to capitulate to the binary, algorithmic thinking that pervades most school—and most societal—thinking.</p> <p>Before making the move to gradeless classrooms, we both consistently saw—and engaged in—this sort of black and white thinking. We recall frequent conversations with students that consisted only of students asking how they were doing and the teachers dutifully giving the up to the minute score. It is the teacher-as-ATM model. Since we have left grades on assignments behind, we have found richer relationships with our students in and out of the classroom. Students have also consistently praised the practice on end-of-year evaluations. What's more, we've discovered that we have lots of things to talk about with our students when we don't talk about grades: namely, our reading, our writing, and ourselves.</p> <ref id="AN0125838969-10"> <title> References </title> <blist> <bibl id="bib1" idref="ref8" type="bt">1</bibl> <bibtext> Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly. 2002. "Motivating People to Learn." Edutopia, April 12. https://<ulink href="http://www.edutopia.org/mihaly-csikszentmihalyi-motivating-people-learn">www.edutopia.org/mihaly-csikszentmihalyi-motivating-people-learn</ulink>.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibl id="bib2" idref="ref7" type="bt">2</bibl> <bibtext> Kohn, Alfie. 1999a. "From Degrading to De-Grading." High School Magazine, March. <ulink href="http://www.alfiekohn.org/article/degrading-de-grading/">http://www.alfiekohn.org/article/degrading-de-grading/</ulink>.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibl id="bib3" idref="ref3" type="bt">3</bibl> <bibtext> Kohn, Alfie. 1999b. Punished by Rewards. New York: Mariner.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibl id="bib4" idref="ref9" type="bt">4</bibl> <bibtext> Lamott, Anne. (1994) 2008. Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life. Melbourne: Scribe.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibl id="bib5" idref="ref6" type="bt">5</bibl> <bibtext> Pack, Thomas. 2014. "Self-Assessment and Its Influence on Intrinsic Motivation." Master's thesis, School of Education and Social Policy, Northwestern University.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibl id="bib6" idref="ref1" type="bt">6</bibl> <bibtext> Shteyngart, Gary. 2014. Little Failure. New York: Random House.</bibtext> </blist> </ref> <aug> <p>By John S. O'Connor and Avi D. Lessing</p> </aug> <nolink nlid="nl1" bibid="bib219" firstref="ref2"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl2" bibid="bib203" firstref="ref4"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl3" bibid="bib54" firstref="ref5"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl4" bibid="bib212" firstref="ref12"></nolink>
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  Data: In this article, John O'Connor and Avi Lessing discuss their decision to create gradeless classrooms. They reached this decision by witnessing the profound cost grades hold for students and teachers alike. Grades threaten to reduce students to mere scores and teachers to bookkeepers, both groups focused more on grades than learning. By eliminating grades, O'Connor and Lessing observe tremendous benefits, including a greater sense of intrinsic motivation, a more robust approach to revision, increased conversations with their students, and more authentic student-teacher relationships.
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