Monthly Archives: January 2014

Supporting Deeper Understanding with a Skimathon Process

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Why did I decide to help students find the books they would use as seeds, or starters, for their research reports? Why did the right starter book matter so much?

Here’s why: with rare exceptions, each student would read the whole of the starter book for her chosen-and-received topic. In fact, most students read the whole book through twice, taking thorough notes in the style the student chose, from those I demonstrated. All that happened before a student went on to use other print or video or online sources more selectively.

The Common Core Standards now recommend much more reading of non-fiction books for younger students, and I’m hoping that they intend this same thing, as often as possible: not browsing, but actual reading, beginning to end. A good non-fiction book has its own shape and strategy, its own way to model the truth of the world. Sampling little bits won’t give you that.

I would rather have a student read the whole of a book written and designed for a child or young adult audience, even if it’s pitched a little below the student’s reading level, than see that same student read little bits of a book written for adults.

Instead of just harvesting specific details here and there, my students (average age, 11) could observe and absorb the way the author / illustrator / editor / publisher of the starter book framed the fundamental concepts and ideas. They could connect with their topics not as collections of facts but as ideas supported by facts. From what the Iceman was carrying when he died, we can learn a lot about the skills of his people. Or: Snakes don’t need legs, because different species have evolved very effective ways of moving for their different environments.

It’s an ambitious goal, to perceive a topic in terms of its big ideas. Still, I found that students could do this, given carefully selected books. I found that whole classes of very diverse students could do this, every single one of them, given the right range of books to start from, and enough support.

books Elephants Calling page croppedThe page above is from Elephants Calling, by Katharine Payne (Crown, 1993.) Following a particular elephant family, this book worked well for students who especially liked non-fiction with a story.

In effect, I enlisted all those authors (and illustrators and editors and publishers) as co-teachers–for free, or almost free–and I got to learn from them, too.

After years of beginning a research report writing process using a skimathon, what would I give as advice, to a teacher reading this and wanting to try it? Maybe, instead, you’re a home-schooling parent, or a home-schooled student setting up your own process–or even an adult with a new interest, figuring out how to learn all about it. Aspects of this process could work in any of these situations, but I’m going to address teachers, because I’m so glad to have been one–and I know that the job is gigantic.

First, I’d suggest that you wait until the students know you and each other. You want students to feel confident asking you for suggestions. “So far, I’ve only found two starter books that feel right to me–can you help me find possibilities for another?”  You want them to give recommendations to each other. “Mike, you have got to look at this book; it’s so gross.”

One way or another, you want to give yourself extra time to work with the book collection in the light of what you know about the particular class.

I’ll admit that I did a lot of summer work to get started with each of my various skimathon lists–but it was some of my favorite work, apart from actually being with kids. We didn’t teach from textbooks and teacher manuals, so preparing a new skimathon book collection played an important role in helping me get ready to explore a body of material with students.

Teaching a multi-aged class in which I almost always worked with some kids a second year, I almost never used the same theme two years in a row. Whenever I came back to the theme, though, our January start for this process gave me time, during the holiday break, to reassess.

You’ll probably want to do the same thing. Every time you return to a given theme, you’ll want to search for better books on any topic for which the book at hand has seemed inadequate or out-of-date. You’ll want to find books that appeal to students’ evolving interests, and books that work with your own evolving sense of the theme–which will change, of course, every time you teach it.

Either making the first collection for a Skimathon, or reassessing and revising our list, I spent time online, searching various topics. A local public library’s collection supplemented what we had at my school, and I got help from the children’s librarian there, Lucy Loveridge, an old friend. She understood the kind of teaching I was doing, and could suggest books not just according to their topics but according to their other qualities. Mary Brochu, at Touchstone, had worked with me as an aide, and could take a new topic and run with it, bringing me the results. (It takes a village to teach a theme.)

Beyond what I could get from the libraries, I used part of my supply budget every year to buy new or used books to support the Skimathon and the report writing process. Even if a book was available from a public library, it often made sense to buy a used copy for our classroom library, so a student could keep it over a span of several months.

For one version of this process, for a theme asking who we are, as humans, about half the students would eventually write reports about archaeological investigations, such as Pompeii or Skara Brae or Stonehenge. The other half wrote about the history of technology, defined very broadly to include things like early human use of fire, or the history of money.

books Taming Fire croppedThe book to the left, from Scholastic, challenged many of the readers most attracted to it, but it repaid their attention fully, and helped produce some really thought-provoking reports.

Through the time when I was teaching, children’s publishers were producing a fabulous explosion of new books on these topics. New didn’t always mean better–but sometimes I could see vast improvement. For example, when I started teaching about animal behavior, very few books emphasized behavior as opposed to physiology (the way the animal’s body works), and even fewer viewed all of this from an evolutionary perspective. I found it exhilarating to watch that change, and harness it in the form of better books for my gang.

At the same time, online sources for used books made it easier to find older books that were still the best of their kind.

books Early InventionsLike all the books I’m featuring this time, this one (Chelsea, 1995) is officially out-of-print, but can still be found–and it’s an extraordinary book, truly focused on ideas supported by details. We used it not as a starter book but as a secondary resource for a number of topics: fire, shelter, agriculture, time-keeping.

One way or another, every time I worked with these topics, I could find better books for the skimathon. In addition, if I knew about special interests of particular kids, I stood a good chance of finding the right starter book: a book about the history of musical instruments, for example, or about the Phoenicians.

Surprisingly often, the child I’d targeted for a particular book would fall in love with something else, and the book would go to another student who had never before heard of the Chinese buried warriors, say, but became instantly spellbound. Overall, the kids’ collective interests, intersecting with our topics, constantly lured me in new directions, enriching the whole enterprise.

Whenever you can, choose books that will support hands-on work. For another version of this process, within a thematic study asking what we can learn from animal behavior, students would observe live animals at zoos and aquariums, connecting both formal and informal observations with what they had read in their books. So I tried to find books that would really support that process of connection-making, books with detailed descriptions and illustrations of behaviors kids would be likely to see when they went watching, behaviors such as locomotion, use of senses, feeding, territorial behavior, or dominance behavior.

I also spent time calling our region’s zoos and aquariums to make sure they still had the animals in question, and removed the books for animals kids wouldn’t be able to find anywhere nearby. With a heavy heart I set aside an excellent book about the colony behaviors of naked mole rats, when the zoo in Providence closed their naked mole rat exhibit.

In these same phone calls, I’d ask the curator, “What animal species do you think are especially rewarding for kids to watch?” Then I’d scour the book sources for books that could work for my students.

In any situation in which you’re counting on a combination of print research and direct experience, you want to check both halves of the deal before you offer it on a list.

Students could use the beautiful, information-rich illustrations in the book below, Homemade Houses: Traditional Homes from Many Lands, by John Nicholson (Allen & Unwin, 1993), to help them build models of many types of indigenous architecture.

books Homemade Houses Dogon

Looking at the book collection as a whole, make sure that you have a good range of reading levels and type sizes, and a good variety of styles of nonfiction presentation. Depending on the age level of your students, you may want some of the starter books to be nonfiction picture books, with much more illustration than text, and limited text volume on each page. All the books should have plenty of illustrations. Every student, no matter what her skills or interests might be, needs plenty of room for choice–especially since you’ll be asking all the students to make multiple choices.

In my groups, I knew that some students could handle the Dorling Kindersley Eyewitness books, or the Usborne books, which have excellent information, well-organized conceptually, but very dense text and illustration layouts on every page. Still, I tried to save those for back-up resources, not starter books.

One last piece of advice:

Once you’ve worked with the kids’ choices to assign the topics–I could write a whole post just about that, of course–have the kids help you decide which topic you’ll use, from the ones that wind up not being assigned to any student.

You won’t really write a full report on your topic. You’ll be busy helping them. Still, you’ll do just enough to serve as a model: take some notes and share them; make your own table-top book show when it’s time for them to do theirs; make a web to begin thinking about the structure of your report; write and revise a couple of passages; draw some illustrations,

Collectively, your students will know all the books, at that point, and they’ll get a huge kick out of suggesting topics for you. If you have an aide, he or she should get a topic too.

It could change your lives, after all. I’ve never thought of elephants the same way, after reading about them, watching them at the Roger Williams Zoo in Providence, and taking detailed notes on one elephant’s every move for half an hour. I still follow the work of Katharine Payne’s Elephant Listening Project.

books who came firstI also seem to be permanently hooked on the earliest settlement of the Americas, a topic full of controversy and even invective between the various experts–with a great book for kids that gives them a sample of competing sources of evidence.

Whatever way you might incorporate some of these ideas, good luck! If you’d like some cheering on, get in touch with me by leaving a comment.

The Seasonal Feast of the Skimathon

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It was a moment of high suspense: the moment somewhere in mid-January when I announced the results of the Skimathon.

The Skimathon, lasting from one to two weeks, staged a grand meet-up between all the students in the class, usually about 15, and a collection of books, usually at least 30, all related to our theme for the next several months. These were called starter books, because they would eventually serve as the seeds, the starters, of the students’ individual research reports connected with our theme.

Early in my teaching life, when I first asked 11 and 12-year-old students to write extended research reports, they found their own books–or tried to. Unfortunately, things like this happened: a child who wanted to observe, read and write about the behavior of chickens found only a technical manual written by someone at Tufts Veterinary School. Maybe a good book, but not very effective for that kid.

I invented the Skimathon as a way to give students support and a head start, while still honoring and working with their individual preferences. Over time, as it evolved, the Skimathon became a structure for combining our energies toward their success.

Although the Skimathon temporarily interrupted well-loved ordinary reading activities, it felt like a feast. During the Skimathon, students spent each silent reading time skimming and assessing several books, and then took home several more to look through that night.

Students weren’t required to skim all the books, but I usually set a minimum to ensure that an open-minded student wouldn’t be smitten with the first three books and quit. Within each class, always, a couple of kids tried to read (not just skim) all the books that interested them–or even every single book in the bins! Some parents acknowledged that they had read quite a few of the books that came home.

The students recorded their reactions to the books using codes of their own invention, in a special Skimathon packet. Here’s a sample page:

skimathon mimi2 sample

The next day the skimmed books came back to be swapped for new ones. I heard a lot of “Did you know?” as kids wowed each other with amazing new information. Did you know that the Iceman was found by random hikers? Did you know that some bats really do suck blood? Etc.

The goals of the Skimathon evolved along with the process. At first, I just wanted kids to experience less frustration finding books. Gradually I realized how much this activity could do for us.

Partly it was about getting good at skimming–sampling the informational content and the presentation style of each of many books, fairly quickly, in order to make choices. I supported this with mini-lessons about particular techniques for skimming non-fiction books, and about the use of specialized book parts, like the glossary or table of contents.

(In all work of this sort, I’ve thought often of Karen Kuelthau Allan, my content area reading professor at Lesley University. She modeled, so beautifully, a collection of effective strategies for getting the most from nonfiction reading, and I’ve wished again and again that I had encountered her much earlier in my own student years.)

On Time by Gloria SkurzynskiThe Skimathon process also helped students begin or continue to notice a wide variety of non-fiction approaches–the different ways authors, illustrators, designers and publishers have found to organize information and ideas into the form of a book. (To the left, a fascinating book by Gloria Skurzynski, about the history of time keeping, organized by the length of time being measured or designated.)

At the end of a Skimathon reading time, we showed sample pages, sharing different reactions to the same book, or different books about similar topics. Many kids issued recommendations to the full group, sometimes based on content, sometimes based on book style: especially gripping photographs, or helpful maps, or funny little cartoon characters reappearing, like Waldo, in the illustrations.

Ultimately each student would be matched up with one of those starter books as the seed for individual research, report writing, and display making. So the Skimathon was an exercise, for each student, in learning to judge what would work, what would sustain his or her own engagement.

jellyfish steve parkerThe process of skimming this many books also gave students a really wide-angle overview of our theme.

(Here, to the right, one of a set of books about animal behavior. This one helped students think beyond vertebrates.)

For some students, the overview helped them be more receptive to their classmates’ teaching about individual topics, later on. For some especially omnivorous students, casting such a wide net at the beginning helped them accept the necessity of narrowing down later.

For the opposite kind of kid, the one who started out thinking that she would die if she couldn’t do her report about x, the Skimathon could stretch horizons, build flexibility, open up new connections. The last seven or eight years of this process, I asked students to come up with at least three good strong personally-appropriate choices, no longer ranked in any way visible to me. (No, I explained, it wasn’t fair to write PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE next to a particular topic, or to offer bribes designed to appeal to their teacher’s weakness for chocolate.) Each student had an important job: to come up with multiple choices that could all work. Not just one favorite path, but several highly promising paths.

Every year, at least one or two students found it impossible to choose, and listed the maximum number of choices–five, or six, or whatever I’d set as a max. That was sort of wonderful, of course, but I always felt that I should think particularly carefully about those kids. I know that condition of almost pathological over-enthusiasm. Those of us who are prone to it need help being more discriminating, making distinctions, thinking through our own needs more carefully.

Meanwhile, I had the important job of making sure that every student wound up with one of his or her choices, a really engaging and effective topic for that person, without any overlap within the group as a whole. That way, the full collection of individual topics would offer rich opportunities for peer education. Each student would have unique responsibility for some part of our big picture–a responsibility to which every student could rise, regardless of reading or writing levels or rates.

I knew, though, that the peer teaching would be lively and whole-hearted only if each student got a combination of the right topic and the right style of starter book. I looked at their choices for themselves through my own perspective about their capacities. Would a person who read thoroughly (but slowly) be swamped by too much reading material in this first resource? Would a person who thrived on narrative excitement, even within nonfiction learning, find enough of that? Would the structure of his book help a person who needed lots of help connecting details with larger concepts?

The Skimathon worked remarkably well as a way to launch a research report process. The world is fascinating; kids have an inborn desire to understand it; publishers for children have been producing increasingly engaging, thoughtful, and well-illustrated nonfiction books. Finally, the Skimathon worked because it gave me some room to provide support, but honored the vision and choice of each individual child–thereby strengthening their capacity for both vision and choice.

And here’s how I knew it worked: students in my mixed-age class for a second year asked immediately and impatiently, at the beginning of January, “When are we going to do the Skimathon?” With any luck, the bins were full and nearby, the lists were ready, and I could answer, “Soon!” or even better, “Today!”

In the next post, I’m going to answer the question, “What would I give as advice to a teacher starting out with a skimathon process?”

Absence and presence

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In the end, it’s not really the topic of grades that’s so huge for me— It’s the topic of no grades: what can happen, what I’ve seen happen, in their absence.

graduation JuliaThis is Julia Miller, who graduated from Touchstone long enough ago that she’s about to graduate again, from high school. Behind her, draped on the greenhouse, you can see the flag her Older Student Program group made the previous fall, just before going on their fall hiking trip. If you look closely, behind Julia’s right elbow, you can see the word CREATIVITY and the beginning of the word RESPONSIBILITY—two of the values that group chose as their watchwords for the year. She’s about to dance–

graduation julia dance cropped–mostly as a joke, but I love the way this photograph shows her blooming along with the petunias, and reaching for the literal and figurative skies.

As they go through their experience, students in an ungraded situation aren’t thinking, “no grades no grades no grades.” They’re making connections from topic to topic and theme to theme and school to home (and vice versa); they’re trying out different voices and different genres and new strategies for understanding the world; they’re thinking a lot about the community of each other.

Teachers who aren’t giving grades aren’t thinking “no grades no grades no grades.” They’re making connections themselves, learning about their topics, watching and planning for ways to include other adults and experiences outside the classroom; imagining the world of each student from inside that student’s perspective; nourishing the community that can do more for each individual than any teacher’s plans.

As we went along, the missing grades barely figured in what I said about the teaching and learning I shared with each year’s class. At parent meetings, I never said, “First, I want you to know that I’m not giving grades.” It was taken for granted, invisible.

Still, that absence of grades was constantly at work in the presence of other energies and outcomes.

I saw the benefits: for kids whose learning experience had never been assessed with grades; but also for kids who had come to my school after experience with grades elsewhere.

Now and then, a transplant–or his parents–couldn’t make that transition. Most were like people woken from a long and troubled sleep. They stretched; they looked around; slowly, or quickly, they became active, in a new way, in the scene of their lives.

Still, I don’t have available the experimental control, in which the same teachers worked with similar kids and gave grades. I don’t know how that would have worked for any of us.

Close friends have said that I would probably have blown all my fuses and quit; that I would have left teaching very early in the game, if I’d been forced to translate my students’ growth and learning into graded assessments.

I wonder: how many teachers have been driven out of teaching by the necessity of an activity ultimately so alien to their original hopes and intentions? How many others, not questioning grades, have nonetheless abandoned teaching out of disappointment with the state of mind grading has induced in their students? What have we lost with this attrition, these departures?

My own history meant that I didn’t take the absence of grades for granted. I first started questioning the effectiveness of grading long before I was a teacher, long before my husband and I went looking for schools for our children. I became skeptical of grades at a time when I was being graded myself, and getting good grades. Not always, but sometimes, I could feel how addictive that was; I could glimpse how few risks I was taking; I felt, often, the price of that labeling.

Beyond that, I remember watching the effects of grades on some of my friends. I knew their talents and strengths, and wondered why their grades didn’t represent them more accurately. In fact, there didn’t seem to be any way for some of my friends to live in their strengths, in the classrooms we were encountering. Looking back I can see how the learning was often shaped to be easily measurable, easily graded.

If you’ve read previous posts, you know that I had some wonderful teachers. I don’t blame them individually. I was in the first wave of the post-war baby boom, and our classes were large. To some degree, increased testing and grading pressure attempted to manage that suddenly increased demand.

Like them, still, many teachers don’t have a choice of not assigning grades. Some give the grades they have to give, but play down the importance of those grades in any way they can, putting their energy into those other products and outcomes I tried to describe in the previous post:

  • Teacher support, and student goal-setting, guided by targeted, individualized, meaningful assessments
  • Learners who know and understand and respect themselves as learners
  • Authentic and rewarding group learning
  • Deep meanings held in community
  • Powerful connections with significant content

One of those “teachers without a choice” lives under the same roof with me, and his frustrations were part of what finally goaded me into writing about not giving grades. So I want to end this series of posts, at least for the time being, with a nod to him and to all those teachers past and present, saddled with the obstacle of grades and making the best of it, for their students’ sake.

I think I’ve said this before, and I never forget it for a minute: I was lucky.

But that’s enough (finally, or at least for now) about no grades. Next time, I want to start thinking about structures to help teachers and students meet each other halfway, beginning, I think, with the seasonal feast of the Skimathon!

Five More Thoughts About Grading

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The story so far: If the product of a learning experience takes the form of a grade, other possible products and outcomes have less reality and less power for the learner.

Voices speaking out against grades want to shift the focus of learners and teachers, to give priority to those other products and outcomes. I’m going to focus on just a few.

# 1  Teacher support, and student goal-setting, guided by targeted, individualized, meaningful assessments

Focused effort matters, and thoughtful assessment can support that. Very briefly, here are some of the kinds of feedback individual kids could come to expect in my classroom, in place of grades:

  • one-on-one working conferences to look at pieces of writing, reading comprehension progress, math quiz outcomes, etc.;
  • group mini-lessons based on common confusions or not-quite-there efforts or emerging possibilities or spontaneous break-throughs, acknowledging and moving forward from all those;
  • quick skills checks in the form of miniboard warm-ups;
  • written responses to specific assignments;
  • long narrative progress reports twice a year;
  • conversations in preparation for portfolio sharing, and the portfolio conferences themselves;
  • feedback from classmates, students in the wider school community, parents, and other adult audiences.

The previous post has examples of some of these. The feedback for students in younger classes varied from this in developmentally appropriate ways, but always with the same goals: not judgment, but celebration and support.

Each of these activities provided an opportunity for student and teacher to observe patterns in comprehension and skill, or difficulty, and to set goals both short-term and long-term. At the same time, each of these assessment activities was an opportunity to revisit, share, and reconsider the important questions inherent in our content.

#2  Learners who belong to themselves

I remember a conversation with the high-school-aged daughter of a friend. She told me about her classes for that year by telling me her grades. She couldn’t tell me what was interesting to her; couldn’t say what she wanted to learn next; couldn’t describe anything about her learning process. Her grades were high overall, and she assumed that the subject in which she was getting the highest grades should be her major in college.

This young woman didn’t belong to herself as a learner; she belonged to her grades, and to the people who were giving her those grades–even the people who were celebrating those grades.

Especially once we were able to keep students until they were ready for high school, people observing the graduates of my school have been struck by the way graduating 14-year-old kids belong to themselves–how clearly they know and understand and respect themselves as learners.

fall projects NateInstead of pinning their student identities on their GPA, students in ungraded situations learn how to work with their real identities as learners. They learn how to choose meaningful and sustainable challenges for themselves. They know how to manage their own attention, and what to do to sharpen their memories. There may be passages through which they struggle, but a lot of the time they’re having a blast. Above all, they know, for themselves, why it matters. To the left, checking and graphing temperatures.

#3  Authentic and rewarding group learning

Teamwork flourishes best when grades are out of the picture. When I’ve talked about the amount of group work happening in my class, people have often asked, “Don’t kids get distracted by working together? How can you tell who did what?”

I’d have to be crazy to deny that distraction happens sometimes, or that timid students can become dependent on others. Still, young adolescents are ready and eager to learn how to be teams.

as Tsongas 3At Tsongas Industrial History Center, these girls are constructing a working canal system model. As usual, museum educators  commented on how well students worked together–incorporating everyone’s ideas, sharing the dirty work on the floor.

At any age, effective group work doesn’t happen automatically. In order to get the huge benefits of several minds focused on the same task, complementing and helping and challenging each other, kids have to learn how to be task-focused and team-focused both at once; how to do the social work, the intellectual work, the creative work, and the procedural work all woven together.

Kids exposed to plenty of group projects in an ungraded situation get a terrific head start. Without grading to tell them they’re competing instead of collaborating, they learn how to stay balanced within the group process, and how to help the group stay balanced so it keeps on working for everyone.

If you want an argument against grades, focused on future success, you could start with that.

tracing watershed pathway croppedAbove: Working with a parent volunteer, students help each other figure out which direction the rivers are flowing on topographic maps.

Meanwhile, freed from generating grades, I could put time into helping groups design and choose tasks that would engage them, with topics and audiences that mattered to them. The resulting energy helped their bicycle built for two (or three or four) keep momentum.

Often, when sharing work in a portfolio conference, students mentioned their partners and teammates, and told about what each of them had contributed, as I set off quiet internal fireworks of celebration. Yes!

# 4  Deep meanings held in community

As humans, we seem to have evolved to construct meaning, and experience meaning, collectively.

Stonehenge.arp.croppedMany groups of students have been inspired by the collective power of the communities that built Stonehenge, and archaeologists’ ideas about the community events held there.

Archaeologists and paleo-anthropologists have found evidence of the power and importance of community life and community understanding, deep in the past history of our species–and even for the other hominin species before us.

Young adolescents work hard to begin to understand huge things: life and death, economic reality as they observe it, the concept of scale, the notion of one image symbolizing whole realms of experience. Whenever I asked groups of students what they’d like to understand better about the world, I was astonished anew at the ambition of their questions, knowing this at the same time: the really heavy lifting they can’t do alone, any more than adults can.

Lizzie Bright croppedIn my own most emblematic image of this, a group of learners listens to a challenging novel read aloud. As I write, I realize that I’m thinking particularly of Lizzie Bright and the Buckminster Boy, a novel about racial prejudice in early 20th century New England, beautifully written by Gary Schmidt. Sharing a novel like this, the students build understanding together through their various comments and questions. Sometimes I sense their collective bravery in their silence for a tricky passage, or just after.

If somebody out there knows a way to assign grades to the quality of a shared group silence, let me know.

Now hold that in contrast to this: When individual achievement is the only test of an experience; when shared learning is considered cheating; when it’s constrained by the “level-playing-field” concept that requires teachers to do exactly the same things for every student; when teachers face such large classes that they have no way of knowing who’s doing what without completely isolated graded assessment–the deepest and truest parts of learning are hobbled, compromised, or outright lost.

It’s not impossible to nurture community, and the deep meanings community can hold, in the presence of a grading system–just harder. In fact, in my experience, over-emphasis on individual outcomes in any form–either grades or some supposedly benign substitute–works against the development of community, and the construction of shared meaning.

#5 Powerful connections with content

When grades aren’t the focus, content itself–the world!–gets more attention. The world is alarming to young adolescents–and to all of us–but also fascinating. Grades wind up being a smokescreen in the way of that fascination.

That’s what broke my heart about my friend’s daughter, mentioned earlier. She was experiencing very little actual engagement with the world and how it works and what we make of it. Her grades were like junk food, no fit substitute for actual encounters with the depth of time, or the mysteries of prime numbers, or the relationship between surface area and heat loss, or the way human history offers such contradictory evidence of both altruism and cruelty.

I think of a student long ago who wanted to read novels about the Holocaust. She had no assignment. She just kept coming back to me for more books, and talking about them to her classmates and parents. She was choosing her own path to a deeper understanding of the world.

Or I think of a student, now grown to a man, who used his sketchbook, during morning sketching time (which was completely open, unassigned), to make a very long narrative map, which continued from one two-page spread to the next, and the next, for months. The map as a whole incorporated everything that kid was noticing about the world through which he traveled: about geography, transportation, and the designs of buildings and other systems; about humor; about continuity and discontinuity.

Looking back, I remember now that this student’s family had just gone through an unusually messy divorce. His rehearsal of continuity in the built and natural worlds, page by turned-over page, feels tremendously poignant to me now. At the time, I was focused on his thinking and processing and creativity. But it seems likely, now, that the mapping was working for him on levels I couldn’t even guess. He gave himself the assignment that let him live in his intellectual strengths, and use those strengths to help him live through his family’s troubles.

Although he made me copies of some of the pages, I have no idea where they are. Hooray for memory so vivid and dear that it doesn’t need props. Hooray for learning so rich that no grade could encompass it. Hooray for the safe haven, also a highly effective launching pad, in which such work could happen.

I have a feeling I’m still not done with this topic…

Never, Nada, Zip, Zilch: No Grades

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In the teaching and learning I’ve written about for this blog, some things never happened–things taken for granted in most schools. I was lucky.

For starters: because my school didn’t require me to, I never summarized my assessments of students’ work using grades. No number grades; no letter grades; none of the judgments about mastery (not as clear a concept as you might think) summed up in terms that are just grades thinly disguised. None, never, nada.

Alhambra Caroline and Isy croppedLike all my colleagues, I gave plenty of careful attention to student work. The students received many kinds of feedback, and even more kinds of support. Above all, in ways small and large, we celebrated the culmination of authentic learning.  But not with grades.

I was still a kid myself (and getting A’s) when I decided that grades were meaningless and dangerous. As an adult, I’ve been known to refer to grading as institutionalized child abuse.

Still, I’m used to the fact that people I respect may disagree. Occasionally, Touchstone families have decided they wanted grades, going somewhere else to get them. Other families have wished for the crispness of grades, but stayed for the quality of their children’s learning. Almost all our graduates have gone on to schools that use grades, and almost all of them have continued to belong to themselves and care most about meaning.

If you want to read essays about the uselessness (or outright harmfulness) of grades, track down the writings of Alfie Kohn. I think often of a less famous heroine, Meghan Southworth, a working math teacher and trainer for the Maine Mathematics and Science Alliance. She wasn’t able to eliminate all grades, because her school required them at the end of every quarter. In order to have some basis for those grades, she had to administer tests and other graded assessments, and record the results.

Here’s the kicker: she had stopped showing her students the grades they received through the term.

Instead, she continued to give her students written comments. I didn’t see hers, but I’m guessing they were a lot like mine: suggestions for ways to rethink problems, ways to improve quality control, ways to balance carefulness and momentum–along with acknowledgement of the kinds of engagement and effort, no matter how tentative, that can help a student move forward. Here’s a small sample of comments on a test:

math quiz comments croppedThis student was working to overcome test-taking anxiety,  and needed to focus on how close she was to the full answer. Thus “almost” instead of an X.

Like most teachers everywhere, Southworth wanted her students to improve, not just stay at the level of achievement they arrived with. She had noticed that they wouldn’t really absorb or use the support embedded in her comments, as long as the shortcut of a grade was available. She quoted a student who caught on to her new system very quickly: “Oh, you want us to read the comments instead of just looking at the grades!”

Southworth also cited research describing most students’ response to grades: “Is this what I’m used to getting?” If the student is used to getting A’s, and this is an A, no need to stretch. If the student is used to getting C’s, and this is a C, no need to worry.

To put this as harshly as I’ve sometimes felt it: If it’s a teacher’s job to sort kids into levels, grades make sense. If a teacher is meant to be a gatekeeper restricting access to future opportunities, ensuring a scarcity of qualified applicants for those opportunities, then grades make sense.

But if a teacher’s job involves paying attention to learners, understanding them, and working with them to help them grow, then grades aren’t worth much, and can actually get in the way.

Think about what freedom from grading meant for me and my students, as we worked together:

  • math work and progress croppedFreed from grading, I could put much of my energy into assessing what each child needed in order to make the best possible progress. I took lots of notes, and reviewed them less often than I thought I should, but often enough to keep my concerns and hopes for each student fresh.
  • We could make frequent and thoughtful use of student self-assessment. That’s awkward to incorporate into a grading system, but really important in helping students move forward.

math self-assess and my response croppedWritten quickly on the back of a math quiz, this is part of a student’s routine reflection on test-taking strategies and skills, with reading self-assessment croppedmy response.

Here are some of the sentence starters for a reading journal self-assessment, leading up to a portfolio conference.

  • My students and I weren’t in the more-or-less adversarial relationship that grading so easily encourages. Kids treading line-up cropped with Colin and Samended to be fully invested in the goals we had set together. So I got to hear them say things like this: “Something in me just rushes right through instructions, because I want to get started on the answers. So I’m trying to build the habit of stopping myself and reading the instructions again.” Or: “Now I can really understand what I’m reading, I get involved in what’s happening, and hate it when you say that reading time is over.” These are kids realizing what they need–habits of rechecking, reachable books–and figuring out that they can provide that for themselves.
  • Freed from grading that would imply class standing, we didn’t have to worry about an “even playing field.” I could help kids make individual choices of topics and materials comfortable enough to encourage confidence, interesting enough to inspire excitement, and challenging enough to nurture flexibility and pride. Like our physical education teacher, I aimed for “challenge by choice”–and I found that well-supported students motivated by genuine interest almost always aimed high.

nate with tube and vortex croppedThere had been a rage for home-made marble chutes, in a run of rainy-day recesses. This student worked on his own to explore a new idea, incorporating a toy vortex.

At a professional conference, another teacher asked me, “But why do kids work, if there’s no grade as a reward?” I didn’t actually burst into tears, but I felt some despair. We are in real trouble when teachers themselves have been conditioned to forget the intrinsic rewards of learning, the joy of feeling powerful as a learner, the genuine appetite kids bring to talhambra mattheir mutual effort to understand the world.

What about my own reward? Immeasurable. My students grew like weeds, not just physically but intellectually. They bloomed! That was the real delight, for me, in teaching at a school that disavowed grades: I got to watch kids learning like mad, bright-eyed and working tirelessly, full of the meanings in their learning and full of themselves, taking off and flying for their own reasons.

I wouldn’t trade that for nothin’. (Nada. Zip.)

I could not fit this topic into anything resembling my 1000 word target. So I’ve saved some aspects for another post: the relationship between grading (or not) and group work; ditto the development of class community. Also: in the absence of grading, kinds of feedback students could come to expect–and my continuing fascination with learning that happened in odd little corners (like rainy-day recess) where feedback wasn’t a factor.