In the essay below, collegiality and empathy are the backdrop for a discussion of low-information sepsis and herd immunity — extended metaphors about the responsibilities you have to each other. How do we combat ignorance together? What should you do with a peer who “join[s] in on a conversation in a language he has no interest in learning”? Does anyone have the right to refuse to learn?
This writing frames your shared responsibility in a different light. Read the essay carefully, and consider how its message applies to you. Then ask questions and start discussions in the comments.
Read the following quotation from the first guide to grade abatement. Consider its message about the impact of the choices you make every day, and then use the comment section to ask questions and start discussions about the kind of person you are building through your choices. Are you developing resilience and self-awareness? Are you becoming cynical or hopeful? Are you learning how to game the system? What are you becoming?
The Stuff that Sticks with You
When you blow off your responsibility, you are likely to fail; and without traditional grades attached, the word “fail” takes on a much more troubling connotation. You’ve heard (or said yourself) the excuses for failure: This assignment doesn’t count; this won’t be on an exam; you’re really busy right now; it’s too cold outside; it’s too nice outside; you’re a senior; you will be a senior; you’re not going to use this in your real life; your teacher is a soulless monster; who cares if other students are doing this; none of this really matters, anyway.
The simplest response to all these excuses is to point out what you’re ostensibly here to do. You are here to think, read, and write more effectively, and you are here to be exposed to good thinkers, readers, and writers. Perhaps you don’t want that, but it’s likely that learning to think, read, and write will be useful in whatever field you plan on entering. These skills make up the machinery of thought. They are the skills of life, and that makes this course fundamental to you. It doesn’t matter what kind of identity you’ve carved for yourself so far; it doesn’t matter how you’ve fared in English before now; it doesn’t even matter to this initial discussion what you hope to become in the future. Only by becoming a hermit could you hope to avoid the benefits of this course… and even as a hermit, you’d likely end up wanting to articulate your experience in some way. Henry David Thoreau, Miyamoto Musashi, and Ted Kaczynski, for instance, are all famous (or infamous) recluses who became famous only after what they wrote while secluded was published.
But the real warning isn’t about what you’ll end up lacking. It’s about what you’ll create in yourself. The ugly parts of us don’t operate on a switch. Apathy, disrespect, entitlement—these aren’t sweaters or jackets you can shrug off and cast aside when you’re tired of wearing them. That stuff will stick to you, stay with you, for a long time. When you choose not to work, you are breeding future selves, developing right now the habits that will poison or empower you in every aspect of your life. Your daily life is inculcation in its purest form: the linking together of a chain of decisions that will protect you or drag you down.
This is not some dire jeremiad, either, about your generation. You are probably—hopefully—never going to experience the effects of a sudden and obliterating choice. You should be much more concerned with the small, insidious, and irrevocable ones that you make each day, each period, and each moment. In fact, we could sum this up with a borrowed Orwellian metaphor:
Do you truly believe that disrespect, disengagement, or failure now will pass through you like a grain of corn through the body of a bird, undigested and harmless?
We are all wired to react to immediate gratification. It’s human nature. Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending), a person’s ability to delay gratification early in life is strongly linked to success later in life. That study was published in 2018, but similar studies exist going back decades. The most famous one is probably the “marshmallow test” first conducted in 1972.
Watch the video below. Then use the comment section to ask questions about how delayed and immediate gratification factor into our learning, especially our use of grade abatement profiles every three weeks.
Discrepancies between a student’s self-assessment and their actual performance are common. It’s human nature to struggle with uncomfortable truths, and perhaps the most uncomfortable kind of truth is that we are not as skilled or knowledgeable as we thought. In fact, this phenomenon, known as the Dunning-Kruger effect, happens for almost all of us at some point in our lives.
In our makerspace, the battle between this effect and its opposite, imposter syndrome, happens in this section of the universal skills and traits:
Watch the two videos below, and then use the comment section to relate what you learn to yourselves, your learning environment, and your academic goals.
The Dunning-Kruger Effect: Why Incompetent People Think They’re Amazing
What Is Imposter Syndrome, and How Can You Combat It?
Students who attend class regularly, complete their assignments, and listen to feedback can use that document for an evidentiary evaluation of their work. One of the only additional lectures or texts that is emphasized is this clarification of the process:
The rest of this post more thoroughly explores grade abatement, offering the history and reasoning behind the shift. There is a Guide to Stakeholder Involvement that covers feedback and instruction; this post is more specifically about assessment, although every aspect of the learning environment is involved.
This is an attempt to explain how we accomplish the “collective human judgment informed by evidence“ that Tony Wagner has described as fundamental to 21st-century learning. It’s an explanation of how we can transform assessment so totally that the toxic effects of grades are almost entirely gone1.
You can learn more about what a Humanities makerspace is, and how it helps prepare students for their futures, through any of the menus and pages on this site, Sisyphean High. Most of what you’ll find is ramiform or branch-like, too, by design; so you will see the same links and materials repeated.
The primary inspiration for grade abatement, again, is Alfie Kohn’s “The Case Against Grades,” which can be read here. Dozens of other folks much smarter than me further inspired it, but it was that 2011 article that started the shift.
Early iterations of grade abatement discuss the impossibility of eliminating grades. Over time, the process has evolved from using one profile to reflect an entire quarter to using a metaphorical triptych, or three-panel picture, of the student:
Each “panel” corresponds to three weeks of a nine-week quarter, which is roughly 15 class meetings. The assessment process used every three weeks is outlined here:
This is, in essence, another TL;DR. That step-by-step guide includes the skills and traits we evaluate, the profiles that collect evidence into a picture of each student’s growth and progress, and directions for evaluating the evidence we collect. A lengthier breakdown is below (including even more copies of that document).
The GAP Assessment Process
All profile-based, grade-abated assessment starts with self-assessment. Students complete a form that guides them through an evaluation of the evidence they have produced in the indicated time frame. That self-assessment is then checked against the teacher’s observations and the evidence gathered through normal assignments. Then the teacher and student collaborate on selecting the appropriate profile.
The process is evidentiary and precise, because the profiles, skills, and traits are evidentiary and precise. It is about fact-finding and analysis, not “giving” a grade, as one of the earlier clarifications of the method explains. There is an objective reality to a student’s work. We can find it, if we are honest and collegial enough, and sometimes the process of becoming honest and collegial enough is just as important as the accuracy of that profile.
When a form is posted at the end of an assessment panel to Google Classroom, it can be completed by the students in or out of class. The necessary knowledge and understanding (e.g., the profiles, skills, and traits) are included as links or images within that form itself. In addition, the most important handouts are always posted alongside the self-assessment assignment and photocopied in class:
Those three are the crux of ongoing self-assessment and self-understanding. The middle one (which is helpfully bolded) is, again, the step-by-step process, and it is nearly enough by itself. If I had to add any more documents to the list of what is absolutely necessary, it would be these:
Those are interactive or instructional guides to how students should spend the class period. Face-to-face time is strongly correlated with whichever profile is eventually correct. To a sometimes surprising extent, staying actively engaged in class is all it takes; the rest of the learning process is almost a logical consequent of that investment and focus.
The guides and posts that follow are most useful to stakeholders who want an even better understanding of how this all works and why it is so important. All students need an understanding of at least what precedes this sentence to be successful; what follows will only deepen that success, as all investment in the learning environment does.
Skinner Unboxing
For most students, the greatest difficulty is controlling the Skinner-box part of the brain:
That post is from 2017, but it applies, still, to all students. There is no judgment here. We are all wired to react to immediate gratification. It’s human nature. Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending), a person’s ability to delay gratification early in life is strongly linked to success later in life.
That last link is to a study published in 2018. Similar studies are done each year. The most famous exploration of this theory is probably the “marshmallow test” first conducted in 1972:
That video documents a recreation of the original experiment, and it makes the conclusions obvious. We all feel like those children, to some extent, every time we face a test of our self-control.
Of course, the marshmallow test isn’t a perfect study. It’s more useful as a metaphor: We all struggle with delayed gratification, and we all benefit from self-control. That might be no more obvious than in school, where traditional grading doles out a reward or punishment almost immediately. School weaponizes that desire for immediate gratification. Students are trained early on to motivate themselves in reaction to threats and prizes, so to speak.
Experimentation and risk are more difficult habits to develop in that kind of Skinner box. And it seems that what students learn most in the system is how to game that system:
Her story is common in a system built on instant gratification. What’s less common is how honest and self-aware Elif Koc is in detailing how the pursuit of grades — of instant gratification — forced her to be dishonest and insincere about her learning.
What does grade abatement do to combat this? First, it delays the score enough that students need perspective and self-awareness to make sense of the number. Second, it bases that score on profiles, and the profiles on objective evidence of universal skills and traits. Third, it lets students make their learning choices in an environment of ongoing, collaborative feedback. The elimination of the immediate grade moves all stakeholders into a better state of mind, psychologically and academically.
New Numbers
It’s also very much about using the traditional, 100-point number system in a new way. Those scores can’t be eliminated from public education, which means we’re always going to end the assessment process with a number.
I recognize, by the way, that there needs to be systemic change, but it’s nearly impossible to believe there will be systemic change. The system is too bloated with mandates and political money, and that all happens far away from the frontlines. So it’s about using the lingua franca here — 100-point grades — and forcing those numbers to mean something different. We can abate the toxic effect of grades by gutting them and building in more authentic and meaningful machinery.
And we can do that because the surface-level heuristic can stay. High scores indicate success in ways we all agree matter; low scores indicate failure in ways we all agree matter. What changes is the specific feedback the number conveys to folks willing to invest in unpacking it. Low-information stakeholders still receive useful feedback, but high-information users are able to unpack a GAP score precisely and consistently. That’s what even this early guide explains. There is no black-box logic.
What’s most interesting, actually, is that the guide hyperlinked in that last paragraph makes the mistake of leaning too much into the heuristic. The profile indicated for a GAP score of 10, for instance, which was converted into a gradebook score of 100, isn’t clear or actionable. It indicates only that a 100 is perfection, which makes the pursuit of a 100 the pursuit of perfection. The sixth section of notes from this update talk about why that had to change.
We can’t base our reasoning and feedback on the number. The final number is, instead, code for the more meaningful and consistent profile. That’s the most important thing: The score is what unlocks other, more useful feedback. The score can be unpacked into a profile, and the language of that profile is precise enough to be unpacked and connected directly to the universal skills and traits we value.
Then it’s a simple matter of going over the formal work that was assigned, the informal steps taken to finish that work, and the collaborative, metacognitive, and individualized efforts we can identify and corroborate. All of that evidence-gathering is made 100% transparent through Google Classroom, the instructional website, and many other online and interstitial mechanisms.
Which means that a student’s accurate GAP score every few weeks provides actionable feedback all by itself. There is other feedback, of course, but the number is now useful. To an extent, we’ve turned the system against itself; the number now tells us something consistent and actionable, which means it should lose most of its Skinner-box shock.
Moreover, any stakeholder can use that number to enter the learning environment, because there is no weighting, no shifting percentages, no question of how many points were lost here or there. The number tells us exactly how to decode the experience.
What’s It Take?
What’s it take to implement grade abatement? For students, it really only requires accepting the idea that the score is based on evidence. There is nothing subjective about it. Errors in collecting or reporting evidence will occur, but those can be fixed; this is a fact-finding mission, not an argumentative one.
Each profile corresponds to a period of time, and we want a clear, collaborative assessment of that period. It takes self-awareness and amenability to do that:
Discrepancies between a student’s self-assessment and their actual profile happen because of human nature. It is human nature to avoid uncomfortable truths. The Dunning-Kruger effect happens for almost all of us at some point in our lives:
For others, it’s a constant battle against imposter syndrome:
That’s why grade abatement leans on Tony Wagner’s idea of “collective human judgment informed by evidence.” We are after truth, nothing else. The profile and its attached number have to tell us that truth, because that is the only way we can continue to grow and learn. If we could eliminate numbers entirely from the equation, that would be perfect; because we can’t, we have to weaponize those numbers as another way of confronting our assumptions, our expectations, our egos, and our fears.
This is also why the delay between the work students do and a score is such a critical delay. It’s no longer about immediate reward or punishment. Learning is now about each choice, the context of that choice, and the student’s ability to understand and react to that choice. This quotation, from the first guide to grade abatement, puts it like so:
The ugly parts of us don’t operate on a switch. Apathy, disrespect, entitlement—these aren’t sweaters or jackets you can shrug off and cast aside when you’re tired of wearing them. That stuff will stick to you, stay with you, for a long time. When you choose not to work, you are breeding future selves, developing right now the habits that will poison or empower you in every aspect of your life. Your daily life is inculcation in its purest form: the linking together of a chain of decisions that will protect you or drag you down.
This is not some dire jeremiad, either, about your generation. You are probably—hopefully—never going to experience the effects of a sudden and obliterating choice. You should be much more concerned with the small, insidious, and irrevocable ones that you make each day, each period, and each moment. In fact, we could sum this up
with a borrowed Orwellian metaphor:
Do you truly believe that disrespect, disengagement, or failure now will pass through you like a grain of corn
through the body of a bird, undigested and harmless?
That’s from Part III of that guide, which is worth reading in full, and not just because it’s the first attempt at codifying grade abatement. It’s also worth seeing that the early guides were written for college-level classes, which makes them somewhat less accessible to all levels now. There is also a more negative tone at work in the writing. Because it’s not just about “disrespect, disengagement, or failure”; the good choices we make build up over time, too, and make us into better versions of ourselves. Those good choices matter. The true purpose of a Humanities makerspace is to build ourselves into better people.
Old Ones
I’ve mentioned “old” guides to grade abatement a few times. This process started with what Alfie Kohn calls “de-grading” back in 2010, so there are hundreds of essays, handouts, posts, etc., about grade abatement. Every iteration is instructive, and most of the philosophical and even practical components have stayed the same over time. This is, to a large extent, about the evolution of the idea, not just its current form.
This history is probably most useful as a guide for how to shift away from traditional assessment. It contains attempts to counter misinformation, for instance, like this early explainer that was written for interested stakeholders. I don’t know that it’s necessary for every stakeholder to invest their time into reading all of it, but there’s value in the process. With that in mind, the materials below weave together a picture of what grade abatement does and doesn’t do.
These three guides are somewhat outdated, but they’re also foundationally important:
The following two posts are examples of iterative assessment and changes over time — i.e., of how grade abatement has changed in response to feedback and student needs:
That last one is a likely candidate for a complete rewrite. We need a static place for questions about grade abatement.
Here is another post that, while locked in time to a particular set of expectations and a particular set of students, provides a good example of what we continue to do:
We could continue for a while, unearthing old posts and essays, but we’ll end here, with a particular detailed look at how much evidence goes into every profile:
That post has a wealth of data — really, just an ungodly amount of it — as an example of how deep the assessment process can and often does go. That’s also the post to read for a sense of the potential for responsive feedback. When a student asks for it or needs it, that’s the level of feedback available; and as this post carefully details, that kind of student investment and student responsibility is critical
In fact, responsiveness might be the operative word for grade abatement. A stakeholder who reads only the TL;DR at the top of this post would still be able to suss out a student’s performance, especially with the importance placed on in-class focus and feedback. But the more any stakeholder invests in learning about the process, the more the learning environment will open up. That goes for students, of course, but also for parents and other stakeholders.
This is precisely why an older version of this website used the term umwelt in its URL: Each individual experiences the same environment in different ways, and that is by design. (Read more about the concept of umwelt here, through the medium of a particular smart webcomic: 1037: Umwelt – explain xkcd.) The folks who push themselves to learn more do learn more. Grade abatement honors that without requiring it of all students.
And since I always link to Alfie Kohn in these explanations, here is another article on the subject. Head to Google for more. There are plenty, because the toxicity of grades is among the most obvious problems in public education. ↩
Screenshot from the full RSA Animate poster. Click for the whole thing.
In Ken Robinson’s TED Talk on education, he gives this definition of divergent thinking1:
Divergent thinking isn’t the same thing as creativity. I define creativity as the process of having original ideas that have value. Divergent thinking isn’t a synonym; it’s an essential capacity for creativity. It’s the ability to see lots of possible answers to a question, lots of possible ways of interpreting a question, to think laterally, to think not just in linear or convergent ways, to see multiple answers, not one…
There are tests for this. One cod example would be, “How many uses can you think of for a paper clip?” Most people might be able to come up with ten or fifteen. People who are good at this might come up with two hundred. And they do that by saying, “Well, could the paper clip be two hundred feet tall and made out of foam rubber?”
Our makerspace treats reading and writing as acts that require divergent thinking. Literature is, as this video puts it, “a tool to help us live and die with a little more wisdom, goodness, and sanity,” something we “prescribe in response to a range of ailments and classify according to the problems it might be best suited to addressing.” Writing, as probably best expressed by Paul Graham, is our tool for discovering truth and investigating what’s interesting about ourselves and the world around us. Our reading and writing makes up the vast majority of the divergent work we do.
The other kind of thinking that matters (in our classroom and in life) is convergent thinking, which is about finding the right answer to a problem that has only one or two right answers. You’ll find that some of the problems we attempt to solve, whether they come up in class or elsewhere, have a limited set of solutions. There might be a fairly strict set of boundaries, and it’s within those boundaries that you must think creatively and divergently. It’s also within the necessary step of metacognition that you must think creatively and divergently.
The Exercises: Ordeals and Ditloids
This is a two-day exercise in divergent and convergent thinking. It is also a two-day exercise in the following:
Reading flipped instruction in preparation for in-class work
Collaborating effectively during the class period
Analyzing an activity metacognitively
Using the resources of the Internet effectively
The last one is interesting. You could use Google (or Bing, bless its heart) to find the solutions to each of these exercises. You could find a dozen more examples of this kind of exercise, and for each of those, you could find the answers.
That’s entirely by design. At some point, you will always need to rely on someone to give you feedback — to help you when you’re stuck, to verify a correct answer, etc. — and the Internet is usually the proxy for that someone. That device you have gives you access to nearly limitless information, including the responses of any other teacher or student who has done this work.
That makes the divergent question metacognitive: When and why do you look for help? How much time do you give yourself to be frustrated? What are the best solutions to managing these resources, including your peers? How do you process this kind of exercise?
The assignment that will be posted to Google Classroom is straightforward: Submit a copy of some of that metacognitive writing. This is evidence of the most important GAP criteria, of course, but it also helps build the habit of always unpacking your experiences. You should always take a bit of time to reflect on what you’ve learned and to be metacognitive about your choices. As Neil Postman wrote, “[T]he most important thing one learns is always something about how one learns.”
You can do these exercises in any order. That, too, is part of the divergent decision-making process.
The first exercise: “Ordeal by Cheque”
The first exercise is about deductive reasoning. You must piece together a narrative from nothing but a series of scanned checks:
Crue’s story was first published in 1932 in Vanity Fair. It’s interesting that this edition comes from a teaching textbook, since that underscores how many answers you’re going to find online when you get to that step.
You’ll have a hard copy of these pages, and that’s actually where the deductive reasoning will begin. You will be strongly encouraged not to head online until you’ve worked collaboratively, with deductive tools like whiteboards and markers, on a solution. What can you accomplish with just your collaborative reasoning ability?
You won’t be satisfied with just telling the story to each other as you work. You’ll need to write it down. When you search online for other theories, you’ll find fully developed narratives. You’ll want your own for comparison.
The second exercise: 24 Hours in a Day
The second exercise is a ditloid, which is a type of word puzzle that relies on deductive reasoning. From a set of abbreviations, you must determine what common phrase or idiom fits. These exercises are commonly associated with Mensa, the high-IQ society, which I mention only to tell you that IQ scores are overrated in education. You can find many examples of ditloids on a wide variety of subjects. Here is one:
Again, the divergent questions are metacognitive in nature: Will you wait to look up the answers? Will you tackle these alone, or in groups? What are you learning about how you solve problems like these? At what point does your pattern recognition stall or speed up?
Use the comment section here to ask questions about the metacognitive component of this work, to share insights into what you and your peers have accomplished, or to post links to the answers you’ve found online. You can even share other ditloids or atypical narratives that were inspired by Crue’s “Ordeal,” if you find them.
Remember, too, that this is part of most student’s introduction to our makerspace, which means you might find yourself interacting well outside of your normal peer group — and that’s a very good thing.
Note: The language has been edited a bit for readability. ↩
Papercraft Sisyphus by Karakuri Workshop. Available for purchase here.
Makerspaces, Paper, and the Reading Process
The following quotation informs a lot of what we do, especially through the sentence I’ve bolded:
We may take as our guide here John Dewey’s observation that the content of a lesson is the least important thing about learning. As he wrote in Experience and Education: “Perhaps the greatest of all pedagogical fallacies is the notion that a person learns only what he is studying at the time. Collateral learning in the way of formation of enduring attitudes… may be and often is more important than the spelling lesson or lesson in geography or history… For these attitudes are fundamentally what count in the future.” In other words, the most important thing one learns is always something about how one learns. As Dewey wrote in another place, we learn what we do.
~Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death
We’re as interested in metacognition as critical thinking. We’re as interested in why we do what we do as our actual actions. Explanatory posts like this are part of that philosophy. It’s also why we preface everything we read — every novel, essay, poem, etc. — with these:
Fittingly, these prefatory texts also let us talk about why we are a “paperless” classroom. The operative word, paperless, is in quotation marks because it isn’t a strict rule: The intention is to lessen the amount of paper we use and to make much more deliberate use of that resource, not to eliminate paper entirely.
For instance, we need printed copies of Holt’s essay, “How Teachers Make Children Hate Reading,” because we’ll use it to practice close reading. That is once again about how we learn — the kinesthetic aspect of annotating and interacting — as much as the subject matter. With only a few exceptions, this is also true of all of our central essays, short stories, novels, etc., because of the need to practice close reading.
The video on the importance of literature can’t be printed, of course. The Lifehacker post introducing it could be printed, but there isn’t much benefit to that; watching the video is a screen-dependent activity, and even annotation would start with what we see online.
The idea of going paperless helps us most with instructional posts, like the organizational one for the reading process and, more critically, the post on adopting a new approach to reading. Printing either of those would require you to go back online to click links and fill in the required contextual information while reading. That isn’t to say that there’s no point in printing. I almost always need a printed copy of what I read to mark up. That’s the habit I’ve developed. Anyone who benefits from a physical copy should print whatever they want to print. As a rule for the general student, however, printing an instructional post is unnecessary. These are interstitial and interactive posts.
It would be like printing the New York Times article included in “Well, Why Read?” That article has a half-dozen necessary hyperlinks. You’ll get the central idea of the article, of course, and be able to respond to it just fine; but you will be missing critical information, and you will have created a series of extra steps. You’ll have to go back online to click on those links. That can be done, but it needs to be done deliberately, not as our default.
As another example, consider the course syllabi. As of 2018, instead of a paper document, each syllabus is an interstitial and interactive post that invites students to revisit its ideas throughout the first few weeks and even months of the course. Printing those syllabi would require us either to strip out a lot of important information, print dozens of extra pages from those hyperlinks, or require students to go online, anyway, to click on related links and videos and so on.
The most important reason to go paperless is to allow us to update documents quickly and easily. Changes to a calendar, for instance, can create confusion if there is a printed version out there already, which is what happened in the first few weeks of 2018. I printed the calendars for all students to give them something to put in their notebooks. Less than 24 hours later, an opportunity arose that required us to begin our first novel in 10th grade two weeks early. My co-teacher and I shifted a couple of units around, but that printed calendar was made immediately irrelevant.
A paperless approach encourages students to keep their own calendars. It encourages planners and digital to-do lists and all sorts of other techniques for personalized organization. That independence is a necessary step, too.
Another example of the need to keep online content flexible takes us back to that post on the reading process:
That is meant to be used repeatedly in the future, but its first posted iteration was on September 18. I made photocopies then to help students transition to paperless instruction. By September 20, I saw the need to add an entire section to the post — the third section, “What to Read,” which details the value of Medium’s curated reading lists and the power of the network of sites in Gizmodo Media Group. That was a quick edit online; it would take a few days to reprint updated copies.
Going paperless has been a journey of sorts for me, and I would invite anyone interested in that to read here:
This is the way of the world, and it isn’t a step backward. There’s no need for a dire jeremiad. Online and offline reading create a balance, if we approach both metacognitively and purposefully. Nothing will ever replace the feeling and experience of flipping through a novel, and there isn’t anything quite like printing out an essay and interacting with it; the world now talks to itself, however, in interstitial and online ways. Students have to learn to engage with that world.
And, of course, it’s a process. I’ve been working toward a “paperless” classroom for years now, and I still have entire bookcases filled with handouts. I find a half-dozen copies left behind every day by students. I recycle reams of the stuff every quarter. The hope is that the need for a bit of conservation continues to dovetail with the 21st-century skills we know matter most. If that remains true, going paperless – or “paperless,“ with liberal use of air quotes – is a necessity.
First of all, you should have a lot of stuff to work with — notes, drafts, final copies, reflections, metacognitive responses, etc., all related to the prompt.
Here is an example from a Google Classroom unit in September of 2018:
This was a two-week writing process that started in class with handwritten responses to a pair of prompts. Then there were two typed revision steps, some optional metacognitive writing, and plenty of notes and feedback. The goal was a second revision that combined the original two responses into a coherent essay.
This process applies to any work of literature or nonfiction. It’s also a universal process that can be used every time you’re asked to read. Note that there are levels to this: Everyone can watch the central video and discuss it; it takes a little longer to read and discuss optional readings, like the School of Life article or the excerpt from John Holt’s writing; and it will take significant time to read everything in the instructional post below. Make the time for as many levels as possible.
Fri, Sep 14, 2018 at 3:06 PM
To: Marcus Eure <meure@brewsterschools.org>
Mr. Eure I remember you said on the first day of school that there’s not really a “grade” put on assignments but in a lot of your posts and resources it talks about growth and improvement. I’m just confused as to how, objectively, I’ll know if my writing has improved without any grade. Like how can I gauge if I’m getting better because I don’t know if I’ll be able to just self evaluate that. I don’t have a problem with no grade (haha) but I’m just curious as to how you’ve explained this growth process in previous years to students. Thank you
My reply:
Mon, Sep 17, 2018 at 7:20 AM
To: [REDACTED]@brewsterschools.org
Thank you for the email. The short answer is that you never have to just self-evaluate; you always need expert feedback, and it needs to be clear and actionable. Grades don’t convey how to improve. (They convey a general sense of good/bad performance, but even that is so subjectively rendered that it often isn’t helpful.) Feedback does tell you how to improve, but there are issues to getting the right amount of feedback to all students at all stages of the writing process. The solution is to reimagine what feedback looks like and the role each student plays in creating that feedback.
Your initiative in sending an email lets me illustrate this through you. You have the opportunity now, because you’ve taken that initiative, to teach others. Start here:
If you read all of that, two things will absolutely happen:
1) You’ll understand more — if not all — about how you can improve without a grade.
2) You’ll have read a lot of writing designed to show you how to write well.
Talk to me in class about how you might be able to take this and use it to teach your peers the answer to your original question. Teaching others, online or in class, is the best way for you to strengthen your own knowledge, and it generates evidence of the best kind of learning — i.e., the highest profiles.
This is closest to a style of makerspace learning called an atelier, in which an expert trains others to create art. The teaching is centralized, but it spreads out from that central point. As you become skilled, you teach those skills to others. As you gain knowledge, you spread that knowledge to others.
It works because of student initiative — the kind shown in that email. Initiative invites feedback. That builds knowledge and skill. Then the student can decide whether or not to help others by sharing what they’ve learned.
Two phenomena helps us here. The first is the protégé effect. The second is herd immunity:
