I have come to save your day. In fact, I have come to save your days, lunch breaks, prep periods, weekends, holidays and personal days. I have come to give you permission to improve your classroom life. Are you ready?
"I hereby declare that you do not have to grade everything students produce." Mr. Koch
I think I just sounded a bit like Michael Scott declaring bankruptcy. But I am serious. I have watched too many teachers grade too many things with too few benefits for the students. In this brief article, I hope to offer you some alternatives to grading everything.
1. Create a culture of striving. Before you ever set out to collect a paper, give a quiz, or read a lab report, your primary goal must be to create a culture of striving. The kids must know that you are with them through thick and thin. And there are going to be some thin times! On the first day of chemistry I draw the same picture every year. It looks like this (for you chemistry teachers it looks like a titration curve!)
I explain that their science life has been made primarily from the slow accumulation of science facts, little by little. And then this year, we get to experience our first opportunity for exponential growth of learnedness (and then I explain that I actually know that learnedness isn't likely a real word). What an opportunity! We get to do this thing together. And it will be hard. And it will take everything you have got. And you are prepared to do this with me by your side. Throughout the year, I always get that teary-eyed kid asking, "Are we to the plateau yet?" And unfortunately the answer is usually, "no". But we can do it together. Look where we have come from!
2. Collection does not have to equal grade. Feel free to collect items from your students. You should! You are not, however, required to pour over them. You are not required to enter them in the gradebook. You are not even required to tell your students your plans for that stack of papers. Kids catch on quickly in my class. The conversation goes like this:
"Mr. Koch, are you going to grade those quizzes?"
"Haven't decided yet, how did you do?"
"Oh, please don't! I did horribly!"
"Why did you do so bad? What was missing?"
"Well, you see... I didn't get ...."
And all of a sudden, I have had a much more pertinent conversation with a student, than if I just gave them a 0/10 in the gradebook. They have owned up to their performance, I understand their performance, and we have come up with a plan to remedy the issue. Isn't that one of the drives of grading?
3. Only grade selected problems. In all of my classes, I give them their homework assignments at the beginning of the unit. They are required to turn in all of the homework. However, I tell them the exact questions that I will be grading for content. The rest are to be done and will receive a puny amount of points for being done. You must get the graded homework correct! And those graded questions are the questions that most clearly allow the students to demonstrate their comprehension on their ELOs (Essential Learning Outcomes). Now I am grading a fraction of the homework. They are still required to complete enough repetitions to get them ready for the summative assessment. And I am not staying up late at night with a pile of papers on my chest.
4. Use confidence rather than performance as your formative assessment. This sounds weird. But if you read my earlier blog, it will give a little more context. I have the kids keep a notebook of practice problems. We will do practice problems 90% of the days in school. We will score those practice problems ourselves or with our table partner. Then I DO NOT collect their score. Rather, I take a poll on their confidence. I call it the Koch Scale of Confidence. It runs from 0-14 (14 was my high school basketball number. Great, now I sound like Michael Scott and Uncle Rico.) A zero level of confidence is just that. The student is telling me they have no shot of ever replicating that skill. And a 14 is supreme confidence in their ability to complete the skill. The teenage psyche is so strange. The same kids that would just lie to me and their friends if I asked for their score out loud, will be completely honest when analyzing their confidence. I don't understand why they do that. But I know that I can judge my pacing off their confidence as seamlessly as if I collected, graded, and entered scores.
5. Use group-think to reduce scoring. I will frequently have students grade a "quiz" taken by another student. Then at the end, instead of sharing the bad news of the score, the grader must reteach the missed skill. Using this method, students are engaging with each other about their inadequacies, but without the threat of lowering their grade. If you have successfully created a culture of striving, this process will seem so natural. No grades needed. The students have produced the skill, analyzed the skill, and communicated the skill. Consider that graded.
I hope and pray that these simple steps might help you as you reduce the paperwork in your life. My hope is that it will buy you a few more minutes of life that you can share with a student. And trust me, that minute of care will last a lot longer than an 8/10 homework score.
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