Pre-GAP Triage: November 5, 2018

Note for the week of November 5: The scoring panels, as always, refer to the calendar for the year.

For Q1A of 2018, students were given a set of exhaustive notes on their progress. For Q1B, they were again given notes on collective and individual progress in English 10, English 11, or AP English.

Those same students will read this post on November 5. Q1C ends on Friday, November 9. Current progress and provisional GAP scores, correct as of November 5, are the end of this instructional post.

This is triage, and it is designed not just to help students, but to give them clarity and agency.

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Why a Spreadsheet

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I want to explain why I am taking such pains to create a spreadsheet instead of using Infinite Campus. As always, this is in addition to the many kinds of feedback we use regularly.

First, a spreadsheet requires each student to do a little more work to see what is missing, what is insufficient, etc., which shakes off the fog of habit. Infinite Campus is part of a routine. Feedback outside of that routine is likely to be processed more mindfully.

Second, this shows each student the entire class. The notes are anonymous, so it’s about the collective learning environment. Every student has a role to play in what kind of classroom we have.

Third, this kind of spreadsheet is somewhere in between scores on individual assignments and narratives. I believe Alfie Kohn is right that “posting grades online is a significant step backward because it enhances the salience of those grades and therefore their destructive effects on learning.” It is also inevitable. We are looking for the line between that toxic salience and a sustainable feedback model.

When I find time, I will rewrite this old clarification of grade abatement, because most of it is prescient about what ends up mattering most¹. Look at this section:

The crux of grade abatement is the idea that we can gather and assess all the information we need to help students learn without resorting to grades on individual assignments. There are a number of points to address, however, before we delve into how that works:

1. Grades aren’t necessarily toxic. The presence of grades does not preclude effective teaching and learning. In fact, the case can be made that grades are useful, that they motivate students, that they provide valuable data, and so on. It also doesn’t do us any good to demonize grades. All we need to do is acknowledge that…

2. Grades do warp learning. Grades change the learning environment. Kohn covers a lot of the research worth studying — research into student engagement, self-esteem, self-efficacy, and so on — but anyone with experience in a classroom knows what grades do. As soon as numbers are introduced, the student’s relationship to the material changes. That’s why the quotation at the start of Kohn’s essay rings so true: When the student, Claire, says, “I remember the first time that a grading rubric was attached to a piece of my writing… Suddenly all the joy was taken away,” we hear our own students. And that’s because…

3. While grades aren’t necessarily toxic, they are vectors for toxicity. Think of them as clouds of mosquitoes in a malaria-ravaged country. Grades can — and often do — lead to gamesmanship, cheating, hyper-competitiveness, disengagement, and almost every other enemy of authentic learning. Students scrap and fight over a hundredth of a point. They define their self-worth in numbers. They’re afraid to take risks. Grades spread this negativity from assignment to assignment and quarter to quarter. Unfortunately…

4. Whatever we believe, grades are unavoidable. It isn’t possible to abolish grades in a public high school. You might as well try exterminating every mosquito in the world. What we can change is the extent to which grades affect learning in our classrooms. We can’t change the entire system, but we can remove grades from most steps in the learning process, chip away at a student’s extrinsic motivations, and build a self-powered kind of learning.

Grades are vectors for toxicity. They spread the habits that hurt authentic learning. That’s the key distinction I keep forgetting: A number itself does nothing until it’s tied to a GPA, the threat of failing, the shadow of college acceptance, and so on.

These spreadsheet numbers are simple. They convey only the most basic kind of feedback about work — again, because more meaningful feedback is given in other ways. But some students truly need to be shown that they aren’t handing in work. Telling them isn’t enough. Showing them in person isn’t enough. Even a GAP score isn’t enough. They need to see a zero next to an assignment.

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What This Means

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We have to recognize that institutionalized students are motivated by certain symbols. These spreadsheets weaponize that through a simple set of annotations and some conditional formatting added to Google Sheets².

Any student work that has the potential to receive feedback gets a 0, 1, or 2. Other work (e.g., bringing in donations for a charity drive, submitting a form) gets checked in for completion only. That’s a stripped-down version of this:

Take that, which is clear enough, and strip it down further, and it’s just 0, 1, or 2. The conditional formatting added to the Google Sheet automatically converts those three choices to a color. A student doing an adequate or better job sees green, as in, “Keep going.” A student not doing work sees a zero in red — probably the two most powerful symbols of error or failure in school.

The zero is not factored into an average in any mathematical way. It indicates only that an assignment wasn’t completed. Some students need the zero in a red box to begin to process and adjust to the reality that they didn’t do the work.

The vexing part of this is that no student should be that unaware when an assignment doesn’t get handed in. The deadline comes and goes. My co-teachers and I give feedback to other, adjacent students. The work is discussed. We use a dozen different techniques to differentiate and reiterate and redirect. Yet we know it is necessary to indicate, again, that the work is missing or insufficient.

What this kind of spreadsheet really does, therefore, is this: It pushes students to take couple of extra steps to engage with numbers that aren’t vectors for traditional toxicity, and it uses red, yellow, and green colors to trigger something basic.

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Note: Functionally Missing

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Some students hand in work that is so insufficient that it is functionally missing. It’s barely there. There’s no there there. The work isn’t missing, but that’s another reason to avoid traditional grades: That area of student quasi-compliance has to be investigated with more nuance. Yes, there was an effort to hand something in, but it doesn’t matter when that something is a non-starter for feedback.

As an example, I’ll use an assignment given to juniors. The prompt asked for a response to a lengthy article. Students were given the article ahead of time, and then they were given a day to write — 40 minutes or so in class, plus the rest of the day and night to finish, as necessary.

The instructions called this response an essay. It didn’t have to be five paragraphs or feature a thesis, but it had to be developed. It was the foundation of in-class work and further reading.

Here’s a “finished” response with significant composition errors (“perposley,” run-on sentence, etc.) and no development:

Humans are addicted to procrastination you can stop hesitating to work by making work the only thing to do like perpoisley be bored like the author of the hunchback of notre dame he locked away all of his clothes and wore a sackcloth so he can stay home and finish his books. Moral of the story it is more important to start work than to get it done.

That’s not an essay, no matter what definition of the word we want to use. In the spreadsheets below (which include this assignment), that response is a 1. This is coded as a 0:

Procrastination is an impulse; it’s buying candy at the checkout.
This quote means that Procrastination never fails to beat someone

It’s functionally missing. There is no feedback to give.

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Note: In-Class Focus

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In-class focus is the first and most important step to successful learning. Spreadsheets like the one below can be used to indicate how focused students have been. In the past, some have argued that they were only off-task for a moment, or that it only looked like they were off-task, or that they finished the work, or some other excuse. But this misses the point.

I am not looking to catch students off-task. Neither are any co-teachers in the makerspace with me. We are looking to help students who are focused. We are looking to help them with their work. We are giving them feedback and redirection. We are building posts and projects and lessons. That takes our focus and attention. We aren’t watching the room for mistakes.

If a student is off-task often enough or significantly enough during a GAP panel for it to affect a profile, it’s a serious lapse. These are students who are doing homework for other classes without permission, who are on social media repeatedly, who are gossiping and chatting. It’s well past the point of semantics, debate, and appeal.

It’s also critical for students not to elide how often they’re told to get back on task. This isn’t a gotcha environment. Any teacher in this space is constantly and kindly pointing out the serious repercussions of not doing work. We’re here to help you to focus, hence entire units built as triage for exactly that purpose.

Therefore, a student with a 0 or a 1 for in-class focus on a spreadsheet has been told, again and again, that they are off task, individually and generally, with opportunities to improve. They have continued not to meet the most basic expectations of the space, despite this feedback. The 0 or 1 is designed to deliver a sort of limbic shock: Yes, you need to work harder.

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Provisional GAP Scores and Assignment Data: November 5, 2018

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Sorted by student number:

• 2018 Q1C: English 10 Data
• 2018 Q1C: English 11 Data
• 2018 Q1C: AP English Data

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1. The scoring scales are wrong, and the skill/trait criteria are less precise than they are now. It’s the philosophical stuff that remains useful. That’s the problem with a one-man show, at least as far as writing the guides goes: I’m running to stand still. ↩

2. In this post from a previous year, the feedback is much lengthier, but it teaches a tremendous amount by being so lengthy. Over time, these old posts become connective threads: links that can be used for the truly motivated and invested students to deepen their learning. The practical work, like the implementation of a spreadsheet, can be more straightforward, as a result. ↩