From the always astute Alfie Kohn:

But let’s face it: It’s easier to concern yourself with teaching than with learning, just as it’s more convenient to say the fault lies with people other than you when things go wrong. It’s tempting, when students are given some kind of assessment, to assume the results primarily reveal how much progress each kid is, or isn’t, making – rather than noticing that the quality of the teaching is also being assessed.

May is coming to a close and our official school year here at Spartanburg Day is in its last week. Our students are at home sleeping late while we are still here in this post-rapture building packing and grading and packing and writing comments.

However, one of the big takeaways from my experience with our Class of 2015 Griffins is that I’m done with grading my students in the traditional manner. That scheme doesn’t hold water anymore and ended up consuming precious classroom time both literally and metaphorically. I can honestly say that as the year progressed and I became more assured that the real measure of the learning we were doing in our classroom had nothing to do with the marks I was recording in our gradebook. Instead, when grades were forgotten during the launch of our SpaceCam or deployment of Newton Racers, I had a quiet revolution inside of my head that gave me the extended realization that my students were actually taking risks and learning in ways that could never be captured by filled in bubbles or even well written essays.

During the Fall semester I tried a hybrid model of 10 labs/tests that I had used previously and it was a comfortable fit for the students. In the Spring, I narrowed that to the choice of 5 labs (out of a possible ten), but I still didn’t feel comfortable with that form of overall assessment of student learning. Instead, I realize now that in a post-grade classroom, challenges are as valued as “easy A” quizzes by the students and the threat of the grade-carrot only makes the stick of student learning that much more difficult to comfortably hold.

I’m spending a good deal of the summer preparing myself for a post-grade classroom. Narrative and individual attention (rather than across-the-grade blanket objective measures) to real progress of development of the skills and literacies I hope my students gain in our shared time will be the underpinnings of student (and teaching) assessment in my classroom this Fall.

Here’s to the crazy ones!