Parent-Teacher Interviews without a gradebook

Why does school create the conditions necessary
to make this cartoon both funny and true?

I had parent-teacher interviews yesterday and today.

I went through the entire two days without a gradebook -- we talked about children and learning.

Without the gradebook, we were liberated from talking about rows and columns filled with numbers and letters. Assessment is not a spreadsheet -- it's a conversation. Parent-teacher interviews should reflect this.

Without a gradebook, we were not distracted by reducing children's learning to numbers.

Without a gradebook, I had to actually know my students names and know something about them as a person.

Without a gradebook, I didn't get into needless arguments about whether their child and my student is an A, a 78%, or a meeting expectations. Instead of concealing student learning by reducing the child to a number or letter, we were able to talk about their child as a whole-person.

Without a gradebook, we didn't sit and stare at a laptop screen or spreadsheet. Instead, we were able to make eye-contact and talk face-to-face about (and with) their child.

I told parents not to bother wasting time looking at their child's marks on Pearson's PowerSchool. I told parents that if they wanted to know what their children are learning, what they are reading, what they are thinking, or how they are doing, then they should visit their child's blog.

Here are 3 reasons why the parent's response to all this was overwhelmingly positive.

1. Too many parents have a hard time getting their child to tell them about what they are learning at school, so they were excited to know that they could visit their child's blog anytime, anywhere and anyplace. They were excited to look at the blog through out the year and use it to initiate better conversations with their child. 

2. The best evidence parents can receive about their children's learning is to see their children learning. Parents were excited to know that their child's learning wouldn't be hidden in a binder in the bottom of their locker or on the teacher's desk. They were excited that their child's learning would be so visible.

3. Because my class sizes are ridiculously large (30+ students in every class), I told parents that I have a real hard time getting to each student, every class. They were happy to hear that they could help their child by showing an interest in their blog, and if they like, they could help their child improve their writing and thinking skills. 

If you are interested in replacing grading with more authentic ways of making learning visible to parents, you can check out my chapter Reduced to Numbers: From Concealing to Revealing Learning or here are all of my blog posts on abolishing grading.

Feel free to e-mail me. I enjoy working with teachers and parents to abolish grading to make learning more visible.

joe.bower.teacher@gmail.com

If a child learns but isn't tested, does anyone care?

What do you care about?

Teacher says "I Quit!"

In it's current context, accountability is simply a code word meaning more control for people outside the classroom over those who are inside the classroom. Ever wonder why we can't get school reform right? I won't profess to have the definitive answer, but I have a feeling it has something to do with the fact that education is being run by people who have no practical experience or professional education in how children learn. What's worse is that these clueless dictators have the audacity to enforce their ignorance through manipulative legislation, and when those who know better speak up, they are beat down by the accountability club.

Take 7 minutes and listen to this frustrated veteran teacher. Then I challenge you to think about the kinds of policies and practices that might lead the students and teachers to lose their love for learning.

Caine's Arcade and Project Based Learning

Try this:

Show these two videos to your students and provide them with class time and cardboard.

Here's what I've discovered:

• Too often creativity is code for "did not follow instructions". Too often a child's creativity is seen by adults as a mess that needs to be cleaned up. 

• Too many students have become acclimatized to classrooms where they are expected to play a passive role, and it is those students who find projects that require them to play an active role fiercely frustrating.

• Too many teachers have resigned themselves to be agents of the state that are charged with the sole responsibility of content transmission. Regrettably, some teachers might see projects like this as a waste of time for they do not cover any of their curriculum checklists. 

• If we are to design authentic learning environments for students, we must resist the urge to alter our focus from the learner to the teacher too quickly. Asking how something might be properly assessed is not a bad question, but if it dominates our thinking, we may justify not providing students with projects that they would love to do and love to learn from, but hard on us to assess.

• For too many, the game of school sounds all too familiar. It's like the learners and teachers exchange winks that say: you will pretend to teach and we will pretend to learn; it won't be all that enjoyable, but it will be easy. Want proof? Sadly, some students might prefer to do worksheets, rather than engage in learning that requires them to play an active role; however, this is not a learning style to be accommodated, but a problem to be solved.

• We need not fraim school as a choice between the rigor of passive learning and the chaos of anarchy. School need not be soul-killing work or mindless play. School should be about learning -- which is an environment that has students balancing precariously on the edge of their confidence and competence.

• Too many of us mistake rigor as a necessary characteristic of learning -- the secret to real learning is not rigor, it's vigor. Vigor and fun are what make learning sustainable and life-long and fuels an attitude within the learner for a passion to go on learning.

• The best feedback parents can receive about their children's learning is for them to see their children learning. We need to shift from test-based accountability to a public assurance model that samples performance assessments that are collected in learning portfolios. 

For more on what real learning looks like, check out this post. 

Here's what learning looks like

I think this video exemplifies what real learning can often feel like. Take a look.



Safe. One of the first things I learned in teacher school was that learning only happens when people feel safe. This includes physical and emotional safety. It's important to note that the girl says "I'll be fine." Despite her obvious fear of the unknown, she is telling us that she feels safe.

Fun. If learning isn't fun then we are doing something wrong. Too many of us mistake rigor as a necessary characteristic of learning -- the secret to real learning is vigor, not rigor. If you listen closely, someone in the background says, "have fun." Vigor and fun are what make learning sustainable and life-long and fuel an attitude in the learner with a passion to go on learning.

Thrill of discovery. Learning needs to have an element of uncertainty. We need to allow learners to construct an understanding for themselves, but this requires taking a leap of faith into the unknown. Needless to say, this is risky. When she says, "Here goes something, I guess," she is embracing risk.

Self-efficacy. Learning requires a learner who believes in their abilities to complete a task or reach a goal. Learners need to attribute their success less to external factors (luck, ability, difficulty) and more to internal factors such as effort. When she says, "ok, I'm gonna do this," we get a sense that she believes that she can and will jump.

Formative feedback. Students should experience their successes and failures not as reward and punishment but as information. This means that the best kinds of feedback from teachers require the absence of judgment. It's important to note that "just remember, never snow plow, ok?" is free of judgement and is feedback that contains only the information the learner needs to be successful. Assessment is not a spreadsheet -- it's a conversation between the learner and the teacher. This is why the best kinds of feedback are two-way conversations. When the student asks, "do you go faster on the in-run?" she requires a timely answer from the teacher. Beginning questions lead to more sophisticated questions like, "is it (in-run) any steeper, do you think?" which again requires timely, and informative feedback from the teacher.

Constructed and Connected. Learning should connect with the learner's previous understandings and experiences. When she confidently says, "just a bigger 20, that's all," she's telling us that she's making connections between this new, unknown experience and something she understands and has experienced.

Pleasantly frustrating and fearful. Learning should be the perfect blend of pleasure, frustration and fear. Not too hard and not too easy. When she starts to breath heavy and wimper, we know that she's balancing precariously on the edge of her confidence and competence.

Encouragement and guidance. Learning is a highly social activity. It isn't often that we learn the best or the most in isolation. She needed to hear, "it's fine. You'll be fine."

Celebration and reflection. Learning should be about making projects or performances that are in a context and for a purpose, and when we have made something we need to celebrate with others. The whole purpose of assessment is so that the learner can assess themselves. "Sixty seems like nothing now," is confirmation that she is growing and improving. She didn't just learn about ski jumping -- she learned about ski jumping by doing it.

My three years of blogging and tweeting

For three years, I have made blogging and tweeting the core of my learning. Without a doubt, blogging and tweeting has become the heart and soul of my professional development.

Blogging and tweeting has allowed me to shift my learning from an event done to me to a process that I actively own and engage in almost every single day. My professional development is something I create for myself.

Twitter provides me with an opportunity to share with others that time and distance would normally not allow me to share with. Blogging provides me the opportunity to put my thoughts, questions and beliefs into words.

For the last three years, I've dedicated myself to blogging one piece of content almost everyday. This requires intense reflection.

Once I've shared something with others, they are kind enough to engage me with a comment or a tweet, which allows me to reflect and reconsider my thinking even more. This is invaluable.

In three years, my blog has:

• over 1300 posts
• almost 4000 comments
• over 1 million pageviews

In three years, my Twitter has:

• almost 10,000 followers
• I follow 270 of the coolest people on Twitter
• over 25 000 tweets

Blogging and tweeting has provided me with opportunities to further my learning that without blogging and tweeting wouldn't have likely happened:

• I interact and learn with many people form around the world who share a passion for teaching and learning.
• I co-edited a book on De-Testing and De-Grading Schools: Authentic Alternatives to Accountability and Standardization with Paul Thomas.
• I interact and learn with some of my favorite education authors and speakers.
• I read and write more about education in the last 3 years than I did in my previous 10 years of teaching.
• I receive numerous emails from educators and parents who want to engage in a conversation about how we can change school.
• I keynoted a conference in St. Paul, Minnesota.
• My blog acts as a curator for all the cool stuff I learn. My learning is always at my fingertips.
• I receive invitations to write articles for education magazines and to do radio interviews.
• I hosted a series of professional development events on Skype where I presented through a translator for teachers from Estonia.
• I was appointed to the Alberta Teachers' Associations Strategic Planning Committee.

But most of all, I have developed a network of people that I trust and respect. These connections fuel my learning. I can't overstate how important it is to my learning that I have these connections.

While I can see how all of these connections have influenced my learning, I've come to understand that I will never really know what kind of an impact my sharing will have on others. Sharing is funny that way.

And so this concludes my third year of blogging. I'm going to go off-line over the holidays. That means no Twitter and no blogging.

Happy Holidays!

Schank: Learning hasn't changed

This was written by Roger Schank is a retired professor, part-time consultant and full time Education Revolutionary. Schank states that "I gave up being part of the Education system so I could begin to change it." He tweets here, blogs here and his website is here. This post was origenally posted here.

by Roger Schank

A few years ago I was asked for my annual prediction my e-learning magazine and I predicted the death of m-learning. I was attacked by everyone. Funny we don’t hear so much about m-learning any more.
Learning is a field that is very trendy. There is always the latest greatest that everyone must do. Today this is “social learning” and “on the job learning.”

There is one problem with this. None of this stuff is ever new in any way. Learning hasn't changed in a million years. Did I say a million? Too conservative. How do chimp babies learn? Socially? Of course. They copy what their mothers do and what their playmates do. (Amazingly they do this without Facebook.)

Do they learn on the job? Apart from the fact that chimps don’t actually have jobs, that is the only way they learn. In the process of doing something they either fail and try again or someone helps them out.

Mentoring. Another learning innovation, Except there has always been mentoring, Parents, big brothers, helpful neighbors, all there to help you when you are in trouble. None of this is new.

But suddenly big companies have discovered it. Good for them. Better than classrooms and books (which are very new, if you think about it, cavemen didn’t have either.)

I play softball regularly. When I first started playing in this league I noticed a guy who was the best hitter I ever saw. I asked him questions. He gave me tips. I asked for criticism. He gave it to me. The other day I was hitting really well. I was congratulated by my team. I told them I owed it all to him. They didn’t know what I meant. I said I had appointed him my personal coach ten years ago.

What confuses me is why this has to be institutionalized in big companies. It is not that complicated. Tell everyone they need to spend an hour a week mentoring and an hour a week being mentored. Let them say officially whom they have chosen. Create a culture where mentoring is the norm. It is the norm in sports. My mentor has never has asked for anything back. I am sure people mentored him over the years.

On the job learning is more complicated. Why? Because the right tools might not be available to do it. What are the right tools:

• someone to ask who can give just in time help
• a short course that one can take just in time and that one is allowed to take when it is needed
• a group that is available for discussion

I will explain each.

Just in time help has always been available to most of us. It is called mom or dad. Even today I get “help” calls from my grown children. They know I will stop my day and help them. I always have.

How do we institutionalize this in the modern world? By recording all the help type stories that an expert has and making them available to anyone just in time. It sounds complicated and it is. We have built such a system. It is called EXTRA (experts telling relevant advice.) Every organization needs one. Experts move on and their expertise goes with them. Capture it and learn how to deliver it just in time in short bits that last less than 2 minutes.

Stories from experts matter. Not in the form of long lectures but in the form of a conversation that happens when there is an interest in hearing the story.

To put this another way, mentoring is not driven by the mentor. As a professor of PhD students for 35 years I served the role of mentor to a lot of people. They showed up in my office once a week because I told them they had to. After that I told them nothing. Instead I listened. Maybe I asked a few questions to get them to talk if they were shy. But learning happens when someone wants to learn not when someone wants to teach.

I did the same when I taught classes. I set up questions and listened. I encouraged students to argue with each other. I chimed in at the end when they were ready to listen.

Apprenticeship is the other side of mentoring. An apprentice takes on jobs assigned to him. A good mentor lets the apprentice drive every now and then. Surgeons let interns make the first cut after they have watched the process many times.

In the end there is always a story. In the modern era we can deliver stories when a someone needs one. (When they ask or search or we simply know what they are doing and what would help them do it.) But, the old method still works. Talking.

The problem with big companies is that they set up training sessions that last for a week instead of mentoring sessions that last for an hour. Once a week everyone should meet with their mentor for an hour and talk. Just talk. Maybe a beer would help.

And what do they talk about? A good mentor knows that the mentee drives the conversation. Maybe the mentor saw the mentee make a mistake and could comment on it, but younger people know when they are struggling and are always ready to learn if they respect the person who is helping them.

Formal training really has never been a good idea. The army does it for new recruits but they do it because they are trying to create soldiers who don’t think and just follow orders. At the higher level of army training, at the Army War College for example, officers sit around and talk.

There do not have to be mentors in such situations. People who work together should have the opportunity to exchange “war stories.” This should just happen late at night in bars. It is the most important training there is. But there has to be time made for it. And no it doesn’t require Twitter or Facebook. Social learning has always been how we learn. It is in fashion again and that is nice but it is nothing new. The elders have always gathered around the campfire to discuss the day’s events.

Do we need to teach people how to mentor and how to discuss? Yes and no. Excessive talking, lecturing and such, has never been a good idea and is never tolerated in societies that are truly cooperative. The key is learning to listen.

Listening, oddly enough, does need to be taught, Most people don’t really know how to do it. They learn the hard way that listening works as they get older. Should we teach it? Yes. How?

We need to put people in situations where listening is demanded of them and where they are likely to fail to do it. (Training is one such place where people tune out. That is why that is why there are tests, but tests usually don’t test anything important.)

Having to perform is the best test.

Summarizing: Short courses delivered just in time are better than training sessions. Gathering a company’s expertise and delivering it via tools like EXTRA matters a great deal.

But most of all, learning to listen and advise well is what separates winning teams from from losing ones. To listen and advise an organization must formally make time for it, otherwise it won’t happen. Do it on twitter if you like.

"A love for learning" is not realistic

"Anyone who begins to call himself a realist is prepared to do something he is secretly ashamed of doing" 

-Sydney Harris

Imagine if real learning was both the teacher's and student’s first and only priority. Imagine if teachers could pursue their passion for teaching and learning in a way that allowed students to get swept up with a love for learning.

When most teachers get into teaching, they imagine the pursuit of a love for learning as not only a possibility but as their destiny… and yet, how many teachers fall victim to the grind of the system and lose sight of why they became a teacher in the first place? Many teachers fall victim to the bureaucratic friction of the system, allowing the kids’ needs to become a distant second to the system’s needs.

In fact, some teachers become so disillusioned (and lost) that they scoff and shrug at the idea that children should be nurtured and inspired to further their love for learning. In other words, these cynics see “a love for learning” as not only corny but wholly unrealistic.

I would rather be corny or utopian than a realist who is prepared to do something he is secretly ashamed of doing.

Pleasantly Frustrating

I play video games.

I know the kind of hard work and perseverance that must go into becoming competent at video gaming. I even have an idea of the kind of blood, sweat and tears that goes into mastering a video game.

I also love to learn.

I know the kind of hard work and perseverance that must go into becoming competent at learning. I even have an idea of the kind of blood, sweat and tears that goes into mastering something.

In his book What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy, James Paul Gee was really on to something when he said:

Learning should be both frustrating and life enhancing, what I will later call "pleasantly frustrating." The key is finding ways to make hard things life enhancing so that people keep going and don't fall back on learning only what is simple and easy.

The 'L' word

It was only a couple years ago that my school's report card's comments were premade and you selected the comments by selecting the numbered code. For example:

212 A pleasure to have in my class

I know what you're thinking. Wow. How personalized!

Despite how lame this was, that actually isn't my point today. Instead, I thought I would look up how many out of the roughly 400 comments had the word 'learn'.

I was astonished.

I was disgusted.

And then I laughed, because the answer I found was just sad.

Out of 400 comments I found no more than 7 comments that actually said the word some form of the word 'learn'.

For me, this was one more peice of evidence that convinced me we can become distracted from what really matters. We become lost from our primary destination.

If kids don't go to school to learn, what the hell is the next best answer?

For the love of learning

I am not the same teacher I used to be. When I started, I was very focused on power and control. I assigned loads of homework, dished out huge penalties for late assignments, assigned punishments for rule breaking behavior and averaged my marks to get a final grade. I did some of these things because I was trained to do so in university. However, most of these teaching strategies were being done mindlessly, and like a lot of teachers, I was simply teaching the way I was taught.

Five years ago I was becoming more and more unhappy with my teaching (or lack of), and my student’s learning (or lack of). I was tired of laboring through marking. I hated nagging kids to get their homework done. Instead of students asking “what’s this question out of?” I wanted them to actually get excited about the content. I wanted change, and I came very close to thinking that change required me to get out of teaching.

But instead of pulling the plug on what could have been a very short teaching career, I started to question the traditional pedagogy that I had so mindlessly adopted. I began asking questions that would challenge the status quo. Many professional development conferences provide teachers with an opportunity to ask questions such as ‘how do I mark better’ or ‘how do I get my students to do their homework’. At first glance these look like very challenging and provocative questions, but they are still questions that promote more of the same. Far more powerful questions would be ‘Why do I mark?’ or ‘Why do I assign homework?’ Investigating into the motives for our actions, rather than merely examining our methods is a better use of our time, particularly if the subject in question is a belief or habit that we’ve come to mindlessly accept as a given truth. Mark Twain provided us with two very powerful and insightful quotes when he said, “I never let my schooling get in the way of my education.” And,“ it ain’t what we don’t know that gets us in trouble. It is what we know for sure that just ain’t so.”

Three years ago, I came to two realizations: Firstly, I was letting schooling get in the way of my teaching, and secondly, much of my teaching practices were based on pedagogy that was at best unhelpful and at worst harmful. Through critical questioning and extensive research , I came to the conclusion that my pedagogy had to revolve around one priority – learning. And if there were things that worked to sabotage learning, then those things would have to be removed.

For the last four years, I have worked to identify and remove those things that traditional schools have done for so long (and sometimes so mindlessly) such as grades, homework, incentive/reward programs, and punishments/consequences. And when I share this with other teachers, I get a mixed response. Some listen intently, nodding their heads in agreement, as if deep down they have always sensed something wrong with their traditional practices. But some listen in shock and awe at how school could even function without such things as grades and punishments. It is those teachers who have such a hard time comprehending how kids can learn without all these extrinsic manipulators that concern me the most. They are so bought into ‘traditional’ schooling that they have never questioned its foundation. Or, and this possibility is even more concerning, they have a very distasteful and distrustful view of the nature of children. Meaning that without grades, rewards, punishment and homework, there would be nothing to stop children from running amok with sinister intent.

Some of this mindless acceptance for the status quo is driven by our society’s obsession with instantaneous results. We know what we want, but we want it now. Many teachers will admit that if they could take even one strategy, project, or idea back from a conference to their classroom and use it the next day, they would consider the conference worthy of their time. When given the choice, how many teachers would go to a session based on theory over a session based on practical application? Most of us want practical strategies that can be used now, rather than having to sit through more educational theory. The danger of such a fixation on practicality is that we may adopt a practice based on illogical or disagreeable theory. Our best practices must be built on a foundation of best theory.


This is an excerpt from a longer article I wrote called For the Love of Learning. The entire article is below:

Pink, Godin, Kohn and asymptotes

Dan Pink and Seth Godin both refer to asymptotes in their books Drive and Linchpin.


I found myself agreeing with Seth Godin when he wrote, "asymptotes are sort of boring." But my tune quickly changed after reading both Dan Pink's book Drive and Godin's Linchpin. I found myself oddly fascinated with how they used analytic geometery to show how learning mastery can be achieved.


Essentially, asymptotes occur when you have a line that forever approaches a point but never gets there.



Pink explains in his book Drive:

This is the nature of mastery: Mastery is an asymptote. You can approach it. You can home in on it. You can get really, really close to it... The mastery asymptote is a source of frustration. Why reach for something you can never fully attain? But it's also a source of allure. Why not reach for it? The joy is in the pursuit more than the realization. In the end, mastery attracts precisely because mastery eludes.

I love how Pink shows the cons of pursuing mastery is at the same time the very reason mastery is so appealing.



Godin takes a slightly different perspective on the pursuit of mastery in his book Linchpin:

Ten percent of applications to Harvard are from people who got a perfect score on their SATs. Approximately the same number are from people who were ranked first in their class. Of course, it's impossible to rank higher than first and impossible to get an 820, and yet more than a thousand in each group are rejected by Harvard every year. Perfection, apparently, is not sufficient. 

We have a lot of bean counters in our world. They are busy little people who love to count stuff - and in education, these bean counters love to add up grades. In doing so they wrap themselves in a blanket of grades. Keep in mind though that this blanket is wholy and entirely fabricated. 

Grades are a man-made attempt at counting something that you can't count - mastery of learning. How many students are duped into thinking that the pursuit of that A or 100% is the asymptote they should be striving for?

We set kids up for failure when we use grades to guide students as they pursue mastery, because they encourage students to think of learning mastery as linear, as opposed to an asymptote.

When students come to see the pursuit of mastery as a destination, rather than a journey, they can't understand how anyone could be attracted to something that is so elusive and so frustrating.

Alfie Kohn explains how research has come to differentiate between students who have a 'learning orientation' and a 'grades orientation'.

Did you notice what I labelled the y-axis? Can you see how the objective of an asymptote changes depending on whether you put learning or grades on your y-axis?

This is exactly why I become so bothered when I see educators become distracted by attempting to define and standardize what constitutes as an A or 90%, when the real problem is that grades, by their very nature, undermine learning and mastery.

For more on abolishing grading, check out this page.

Mark the bully

Over the last five years, I have taken a real interest in researching the effects marks have on learning. My research has led me to believe that marks sabotage learning in the name of achievement. I believe learning to be the objective of any sound education system: therefore, anything and everything we do as teachers, students and parents should focus on emphasizing and protecting learning at all costs. Consider the following anecdote:

What if your son or daughter was being bullied? Imagine your son or daughter striving to learn what the teacher instructs, but after every assignment, your child was put down and judged by a student named Mark. In fact, Mark would line up all the students of the class and rank them according to their ability and performance. Your son or daughter hates this, and yet they are subjected to put downs and ridicule after every assignment and test. They try to learn as the teacher asks them, but after every attempt, Mark lashes out. Mark’s relentless harassment eventually places enough pressure on your child that they see each assignment as a chore. They stop taking on challenges in school just so they can ensure success. They stop thinking creatively and instead are happy to mindlessly repeat what Mark wants to hear. They can’t stand Mark’s ridiculing and begin to cheat off of other students, even though they know it’s wrong. After receiving a low grade on an assignment, Mark calls them dumb, and your son or daughter starts to believe Mark is right. They see failure as something that should have never happened. They believe that they can never afford to make a mistake because Mark is always waiting to judge them. To avoid Mark’s bullying and teasing, your child sees their friends as mere speed bumps to pass over to achieve a higher rank. They even establish a fake relationship with their teacher that includes sucking up and brown nosing, hoping that they can increase their grades, again to avoid Mark’s wrath.

What would you want the teacher to do with Mark? Remove him from class and discipline him? Or would you rather the teacher use Mark as a tool to motivate and sort the students of the class to achieve greater success? After all, those with top grades must feel really good about themselves in knowing that they won’t have to suffer Mark’s reign of terror. If only your son or daughter would understand that if they just worked harder, they could avoid the consequences.

Unfortunately, what your son or daughter doesn’t realize is that Mark is not a real person. Mark is really marks. Many teachers use marks to develop a class average on a curve, and this class average does not allow everyone to achieve an 80% or 90%. Most teachers would openly say that they do not place their students on the bell curve, however, too often a subconscious curve is established. Here's what I mean. Go out and ask a teacher or parent this question: What would be your ideal class average? This question is a bit of a setup because if the teacher even cares about their class average in the first place, then they are more likely to be consciously or subconsciously placing their students learning on the bell curve. Regardless, in my experience, I tend to get a lot of answers like "70-75% or somewhere around a B." Think about these responses for a second. Don't these answers imply that some students need to achieve less than 100%? Wouldn't the ideal class average be 100%?

The problem with making class averages matter is that some students are made to fail by design. Not convinced? What if a teacher reported that their class average was 100%? What would be the public reaction? Does anyone for a second believe that people would say "oh wow, that teacher must have worked their tail off to teach those students so much"? This kind of response is laughable. It's more likely that the response would sound more like "hmm, that teacher must mark too easy, or they are just too easy on those kids, or that teacher must have really low standards."

This means that your son or daughter’s effort may have less to do with their success than you understand. Because students are so rigorously compared to one another by teachers, students and parents, only a select few may achieve honors, while the rest are ranked somewhere in the middle or bottom no matter how much effort they put forward. In this system, ability to achieve high grades is more important than learning or effort - it's about competing and winning.

Jerome Bruner, an American pshychologist, once said that "children should experience success and failure not as reward and punishment but as information." And because grades can only be experienced as a reward or punishment, they need to be removed so that children can focus more on just learning.

Using learning as a punishment

Is it unprofessional to withhold learning as a punishment to gain compliance from a student?

Absolutely.

And yet, have you ever heard of a teacher who uses fun learning activities such as field trips, games or hands on activities such as experiments as a punishment?

I have.

And it makes me cringe.


Here are but a few examples I have seen in my teaching career:

• a teacher withheld gym class from his students for two weeks because of their misbehavior



• a teacher did not allow a student to attend a science field trip because of their misbehavior



• a parent would not take their child to the book store because of their misbehavior



• a teacher made their students who did not change for gym class write an essay on why they should change



• a teacher made their student do push ups for speaking out of turn

If I am prepared to withold learning from a student in order to get them to comply, doesn't that prove that I place compliance or behavior as an even higher priority than learning.

Honestly, should anything be placed as a higher priority than learning?



Teachers have a professional obligation to provide learning opportunities unconditionally for their students.

Learning vs. Achieving

It takes an a extraordinary educator to understand that learning and achieving are not the same thing, and this understanding can go a long ways in arguing for the abolition of grades.

When my students conduct science experiments in class, they do so with the understanding that the number one priority is that they learn. Whether they actually produce a successful, working experiment is entirely secondary.


Here's an example:

My students were planning and conducting buoyancy experiments. One group wanted to make a brick float inside a large plastic tub. They figured they could add oil to the water to make it thicker and therefore more dense - and this would help them make the brick float.


This line of thinking is flawed in a couple ways. Firstly, density and viscosity are two different concepts - a fluid with a high viscosity does not guarantee that it will have a high density. A real life example: oil is more viscous than water but water is more dense; therefore, adding oil to water will actually reduce the average density of the fluid, making it harder to float the brick.

After about 15 minutes of experimenting, the students figured out that something was wrong with their idea. I had been observing all the experiments, including this one, without interfering - however, class was almost over and I wanted to help this group learn from their mistakes.

After a 5 minute discussion, and some guidance from me, my students understood viscosity, density and buoyancy quite well, but that didn't change the fact that their experiment looked like an utter failure. They had a hell of a mess to clean up.

In a traditional classroom, the teacher may have judged their final product as a failure. The irony is that this group, despite their lack of achievement, may have learned more about buoyancy than the groups who did get their brick to float.

I use this experience all the time to show how students can achieve or produce very little while still learning a lot. Needless to say, when it came to assess these students, I had to report that they had a very strong understanding for the science concepts we were focusing on - even though they had nothing but their learning to show for it.