Category: Space Explainers

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For Honors Students: Sufficient vs. Insufficient Work

  By Space Explainers

This posts grapples with sufficient and insufficient writing in Honors classes, which means it is built adjacent to another post:

Insufficient vs. Sufficient Work

Start there, and keep all of that feedback in mind. This post was originally written for an AP English Language and Composition course, but it should work for any course with Honors- or college-level expectations.

General Feedback: “The Age of the Essay”

This is a common text in our course, both for practical and philosophical applications. The prompt for a response usually looks like this:

Read and respond to “The Age of the Essay.” The instructional post is here, with links to the essay in a few different formats; you can also find the materials you need under the “Education” unit in Google Classroom. Your response should probably not be an essay itself. It is more likely that you will have notes, annotations, short responses, etc., to copy and attach here. Ask questions about this in class and online.

Meanwhile, you should look to publish some of your writing. You can collaborate with me and your peers to apply Graham’s practical advice. Hopefully, you will be able to find the river in some of your observations and insights, and that will give you an essay that deserves to be shared. Copy any links to these Medium posts (or to any other social media publishing platform) in a comment here or on the instructional website.

The examples of student writing below were written around Halloween in 2018, and the focal point of our discussions that week was the last sentence of the first paragraph. Those notes, annotations, short responses, etc., should always shift us toward an essay response. The “probably not” in the third instructional sentence changed.

The notes, etc., are still critical, of course. Here’s what it looks like on my end when students submit digital annotations:

Know that any comments left no an essay in Google Docs also appear on my end when sorting evidence. I can see any attachments to an assignment, too, and click easily between them.

This example will earn credit, sure, but there’s not much feedback to give. During class, I can help you annotate. Before the deadline, I can give you feedback on annotations. Otherwise, again, it earns credit, in the sense that it fulfills a requirement, but it doesn’t propel us toward authentic writing.

As AP students, you need to push more. Ask questions, seek clarification, and write as much as you can. You can all produce essays like this in the amount of time you’re given:

You aren’t seeing the whole thing, of course, but the point is to share the feedback with everyone. I’m able to give that kind of feedback because the work pretty much demands it. It’s thorough and insightful enough to help in a number of ways, as my comment indicates.

Here’s another response that works:

Why is it that we have been taught to do what we’ve been told since we were small toddlers and now out of nowhere, this guy named Paul Graham tells us to not write the way we were told in school? Graham tells us to question things that seem wrong, but to me, Graham’s philosophy on how to write an essay seems wrong. He is telling us how to write a “real” essay, but at what point do school essays turn into real essays? If I wrote a “real” essay instead of a “school” essay and turned it in as a high school assignment, would I get a good grade still? If Graham is correct in his philosophy about essays, why have I never heard of it before? Is it because not enough people question everyday things? At what point do you stop questioning? If Graham tells us to question things that seem wrong, how do you know what seems wrong?

So much of this is great! It’s not an essay, but it accompanies a lot of notes and annotations. The most interesting thing to me is that grades are underpinning the central question about what a student is allowed to do in school. That’s important. But I’d rather talk about this: “If Graham is correct in his philosophy about essays, why have I never heard of it before? Is it because not enough people question everyday things?”

Yes, that’s exactly it. The point of innovation is to break a paradigm in a way that leads to success. Success in school is becoming who you’re meant to be — hokey, still absolutely true — and in being skilled enough to live a good life. Remind yourself of our purpose in here by reading this again, start to finish:

AP English Language & Composition Syllabus: 2018-2019

Graham’s not the only person to suggest that school might not have evolved to reflect what truly helps students. The history of anti-establishment rhetoric in education is long and storied1. And the only way to change an establishment is to question it.

Here is another screenshot of feedback, this time for a student who wondered in their first sentence if the essay was “rambling”:

This is why it is often so critical to write more, even if it feels unfocused in the moment. You can stumble across a a line like that one: “That’s math with words.” An essay could shape itself almost entirely around that line.

Here’s another screenshot of feedback, attached to a student’s work:

I’m going to embed a lot more screenshots, because you need to learn from each other, not just me. You can do that interstitially. If you start to ask questions and engage each other this way, you’ll see results almost immediately.

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

 

General Feedback: Short Essays

It’s important, obviously, for you to start using the space differently, and not just to work harder from bell to bell. You must be more efficient and effective with each other. For instance, you were asked to read this instructional post, which was assigned as part of the original Paul Graham post. Here’s how it looked in your browser:

Not enough of you clicked through to read that. At least one person did, however, and wrote about it:

Splitting the atom refers to breaking apart a community. This meaning in learning and collaborating with other people. Ken Robinson is advising against splitting up. Collaborating and working with others is so important, and reading about it this year I have realized that. In the video we watched earlier in class, he explained why. Maybe you don’t have the right idea or you need help. Sometimes, you need another person’s opinion. The table I sit at has recently gotten bigger, and I have learned more about these people. [One] helps me a lot with my writing because we are very similar and use a lot of the same techniques. Collaboration is very important in learning about yourself, helping others, and improving your writing. Having a plan and putting in effort into the class makes it easier to collaborate with people and help them realize the purpose of these assignments or even the purpose of smaller things like reading. By putting in effort in my own work I can them help others.

Analysis can be confusing, because you don’t want to over-analyze something and read too much into it. You can improve by studying others, and reading their writing and even the analysis of that. “You need to walk a sometimes fine line between refining what you do and overthinking it, between having knowledge of the discrete elements of, e.g., writing or collegiality, and obsessing over minutiae.” Overthinking is something that I suffer from a lot. I tend to overthink things and then I over-analyze my writing. I get nervous that it isn’t as good as I think it is or that I won’t make sense. I need to be careful about reading too much into my own writing and overthinking what I know sounds good or is right.

That’s one of the strongest students in the space this year, and someone who, at their current pace, will earn a profile score of 9 all year. That’s an average of 100 in a college-level course. Why? Because they are writing about collaboration and doubt and overthinking in response to an instructional post that is making them better at tackling all of those things. They are actively looking for the branching pathways. They are writing constantly.

As another example, again in concert with that post on maximizing your time, here is what one of you wrote around 10/24/18:

[pdfjs-viewer url=”http%3A%2F%2Fsisypheanhigh.com%2Fmalachite%2Fwp-content%2Fuploads%2F2018%2F11%2F48-Hour-Essay-AP-Example.pdf” viewer_width=100% viewer_height=600px fullscreen=true download=true print=true]

That’s a 48-hour essay, more or less. If you read when you’re asked to read and write when you’re asked to write, you will be able to produce thoughtful and meaningful responses at this pace. It will feel like you are exploring authentic ideas that affect you personally because that’s exactly what you are doing.

That same student also wrote this, which highlights what I mean:

Psychonaut: Greek, meaning “a sailor of the soul.” Quite obviously a lofty description, but it is Greek, so it’s neither surprising or entirely inaccurate. To avoid the Greek’s love of a good drama, psychonautics can better be described as, “the means to study and explore consciousness (including the unconscious) and altered states of consciousness; it rests on the realization that to study consciousness is to transform it.” The most important part of the quote is the last part, stating that to transform or alter your consciousness you must first understand it, and this is what capable psychonauts do so well. Before the video and the research on psychonauts, I was under the impression that I would be a capable psychonaut, because I spend so much time in my own head and in made up worlds. However, after watching the video and doing more research, I have realized that I am a psychonaut, but simply a poor one. I think a good metaphor for this ties back to the etymology: “A sailor of the soul.” A capable psychonaut would be a captain of a ship floating in the mind, that would never get lost or lose its way, and always be where the captain needed it. In the sense of procrastination, the captain would position the ship in a place that would benefit the work environment, and thus the work would be done in a timely fashion. I, however, would classify myself as incapable psychonaut. I am captain of a ship that usually has no intention or placement. My boat is an exploration vessel on the infinite waves of my imagination, and it never has direction. While this is great for daydreaming and for having a good imagination, it is a poor system for procrastination, as the boat has no predetermined position. So as the deadline is approaching and the brain needs to be in the right position, the boat is not and thus it is harder to do the work. I think the key for me and for others to break the habit of procrastination it so simply give our captains a map. If we can break the habits or hack the system we have, then we can at least beat procrastination, because it cannot be erased or destroyed. Like the definition states, to understand the consciousness is to transform it. So, I and whoever else has the issue of procrastination, really needs to just think about our ships and our captains: and what they’re doing wrong.

The metaphor work here is effective because it becomes actionable. It’s an insight that leads somewhere. It’s also clever and curious, investigating etymologies and grappling with the true meaning of “capable psychonaut.”

Right now, you can check your own investment in this process. Are you skimming these excerpts? Or are you reading them carefully, looking for why these students are featured? Are you learning from them or passing them by? In that second excerpt is a lot of what you should be capable of already: to work in metaphors; to explore your own insight; to grapple with what you’ve read, specifically and repeatedly; to make the connections between what you read and write; and to learn more about yourself, purposefully and honestly, again and again.

Here’s another essay, this one from 10/25/18, from a student who regularly receives feedback because of how hard they work:

I’m responding to them here, not through Google, because this student will read this post. They’ll see their work being celebrated, and they’ll feel validated. Then I can say this:

They are successful because they see the connections between all three short essays, the overall goal of the work you’re doing, and the need to distinguish between each step. There’s even a link to a previous essay. But the real strength is the insight, which comes from open-mindedness and assiduousness. The idea of being a “selective psychonaut” is clever and original. It’s a perfect qualifier for metacognitive habits.

They even move toward a plan in the final paragraph, noting that this is the real purpose of writing three times on what is ostensibly the same subject. That, too, speaks to a careful consideration of what we’re studying and why.

The Takeaway: Teach Each Other

One reason to compile all these examples of sufficient writing, on top of a previous all-purpose post on the same subject, is to give some of you the models you need. You can emulate what you read here from your peers. In that way, those peers are teaching you. They’re providing an emulative guide.

What you must all endeavor to do now, however, is to teach each other more actively, and to ask for help more regularly. Seek out students who seem to be successful. Look at their feedback. What have they been told to do? What comments have been left on their writing? Use them as proxies for your own work.

Remember that feedback in here works differently. At its peak, it will be as effective and efficient as anything else, but your investment determines that peak.

  1. Try this one by John Taylor Gatto, if you have a few minutes. It’s good. ↩

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Bell to Bell

  By Grade Abatement, Space Explainers, Triage

On In-Class Focus and Vigilance

If you are reading this, you have a reason to refocus or to reconsider your in-class efforts. Perhaps you’ve been ordered to do so. Begin with this:

“Just say, how will you walk?”

If this is not the first time you’ve read that instructional post, read it again. Notice that reading it carefully takes a while, even though it is relatively short. There are hyperlinks, handouts, reviews of course fundamentals, and so on. If you’re reading it during class, that post alone might take you half the period.

That’s the point. In fact, that’s always the point: This takes time. And I’m going to keep saying and writing this, because no theory developed in this space has ever been more solid and more substantiated:

If you work from the moment you enter the room until the moment the bell rings to send you somewhere else, you will be successful.

First Reason: Your GAP Score

The most obvious reason for this is that you are assessed every three weeks or so on on how well you focus. That expectation is all over the profiles and skills and traits we use, and it’s been made even more transparent in the GAP scoring guides updated each year . The first thing you self-assess is your in-class focus.

In fact, every aspect of the GAP scoring process is simple and straightforward, and it all ties back to using your class time effectively. It is not a complicated idea, and it cannot be made any more straightforward for you. It’s also not a particularly unique request. You should be working hard when you’re in every classroom.

That said, let’s be clear that I am not saying that you must have perfect focus. No one is asking you to work so hard that you collapse. What we’re talking about is the really obvious foray into being off task. Not for a moment, but for a lot of moments. Significantly. Obviously.

You have control over this. It’s not a matter for debate, either. There is an entire unit built around understanding and grappling with self-control and focus. I recognize that it’s human nature. You must recognize that it’s your job to master that part of human nature.

And if you can’t do your job on a particular day, you need to advocate for yourself immediately so that accommodations can be made. That’s the other thing. If there’s some reason you’re not able to do the work required of you for these 40 minutes, that’s okay. All it takes is a little transparency and respect. You just have to ask.

Second Reason: A Self-Fulfilling Loop

Now let’s talk about the deeper purpose behind telling you to work from bell to bell. If you know that you have to keep working, you’re going to have to find something to keep working on. You’re going to have to fill the time productively. The quest to fill the time will lead to success.

Example: You’ve started an in-class writing response that should take the entire period and probably some time at home. You finish after 10 minutes. You wrote something. You submitted it. You’re done.

But you’re not done. You know that, because you know you have to keep working for the entire class period, no matter what. If you don’t know what else to write, ask for help. Solicit feedback from your peers. Print a copy of your writing and edit its grammar and mechanics.

It’s a simple but profound shift at how you look at “finishing“ an assignment. With the same example: It takes you 37 minutes to finish writing, and you have only three minutes left. You decide to pack up, because you just wrote for 37 minutes. You check social media and load a game, because you’ve worked hard enough.

Instead, you should spend the last three minutes looking over your work for typos. You could do a cursory edit of the piece in 60 seconds. Or you could plan out the evening. You might spend three minutes organizing what you want to look at that night. You keep working, because you have to keep working for the entire class period, no matter what.

However long you think you’ve needed to finish, you must fill the rest of the time productively. The second you disengage from the class and do literally anything else, you have failed the most basic requirement of the room.

Again, and I say this with empathy, it’s not open for debate. You have such extraordinary freedom to navigate the requirements of this course that — including the ability to advocate for a break! — that you have to keep working for the entire class period, no matter what.

If you remind yourself as you walk in that you have to be productive for the entire 40 minutes, you will be more vigilant. Your focus will follow, and your work will improve exponentially. You’ll be asking more questions, working with more peers, writing more, reading more, constantly seeking the next step.

This is how you fit the top profiles. In fact, the default action when you truly have no idea what else to do with yourself is to reflect and be metacognitive. You could do that with any assignment, any bit of feedback, any post, any central text — anything, at any time, is open to that kind of writing.

What Else You Could Do

An entire section of the post on the GAP process covers this:

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.

These correspond to posters on the walls and handouts available throughout the room. If your question is, “What should I do next?” there is a way to answer it for yourself. You could also use the explicit, still-relevant outlines in this instructional essay.

There’s always more to read, something to re-read, and a chance to learn. What I will add now is an answer to the question of what to do next that focuses solely on what is available online. What to do:

  1. Read any and all recent instructional posts again and again, looking for something new to learn each time.
  2. Ask questions about those instructional posts online, in a way that will bring other students back to see the answers.
  3. Do the same things — read carefully and repeatedly, ask questions — with our ongoing discussion posts.

The point of all this interstitial content is to invite you into an ongoing interaction with your overall learning habits, not just the content of this course. That’s why the third option in that list — a list that is just a fraction of what you can do to fill your time — refers to these posts:

Overview: Discussion Hubs

When in doubt, go back to those discussions. They are ongoing. They should bridge courses, grade levels, even entire school years. Those are the discussion we need to have, repeatedly, to understand ourselves and our learning environment.

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Pre-GAP Triage: November 5, 2018

  By All Classes (2018-2019), AP English Language & Composition (2018-2019), English 10 Regents (2018-2019), English 11 Regents (2018-2019), Space Explainers

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.

Why a Spreadsheet

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.

What This Means

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.

Note: Functionally Missing

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.

Note: In-Class Focus

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.

Provisional GAP Scores and Assignment Data: November 5, 2018

Sorted by student number:

  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. ↩

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Choosing to Read [2018]

  By Space Explainers

Note: This protocol is for longer works of fiction and nonfiction. Essays, poems, and short fiction and nonfiction are required to be read in full.

The Invitation

In his essay, “How Teachers Make Children Hate Reading,” John Holt explains his approach to reading as follows:

I don’t want you to feel that just because you start a book, you have to finish it. Give an author thirty or forty pages or so to get his story going. Then if you don’t like the characters and don’t care what happens to them, close the book, put it away, and get another. I don’t care whether the books are easy or hard, short or long, as long as you enjoy them.

We can use aspects of this idea to navigate the first 30-40 pages of any novel or longer work we read in our makerspace. Each time, we can use a specific protocol to learn more about how you read, what that means for your learning, and where the threshold lies between forcing and inviting you to read.

Ultimately, you will decide to continue any longer text that is assigned to you, or you will decide to choose another work of equal literary merit. You must read, but what you read will be your choice.

Making an Informed Choice

After the first 30-40 pages of an assigned text, you must answer these three questions, which will posed to you most often through discussion and writing prompts:

  1. What does it mean “to get [a] story going,” and how has that happened here?
  2. What does it mean to care about what happens to a character, and which character(s) do you care about so far?
  3. What does it mean to enjoy a story, and to what extent are you enjoying this one?

These questions center you, the reader, and invite us to discuss the assigned text as a group. You can see an example of how this looks in the 2018 unit for A Long Way Gone in English 10.

After answering these questions, you must then carefully consider how the assigned text meets the criteria of a work of literary merit. To do this, you must work or have worked your way through the following post in its entirety:

As You Read: Works of Literary Merit

Any assigned text will meet these criteria in full. That is why it is assigned: It will do all of these things for you, and it has been vetted by teachers and students repeatedly. An assigned text will be a good text.

That does not mean it is the right text for you. This is the choice you have been given.

To make that determination takes tremendous self-awareness and careful thinking, however, starting with a clear sense of why we read. Your choice must be deliberate, either way. You must study or have studied this:

The Reading Process

Then you can begin to go through the criteria for literary merit. You can load the post or use this printable, two-sided PDF:

In brief, your choice must

  1. teach you something about how you read;
  2. serve as “a tool to help us live and die with a little more wisdom, goodness, and sanity,” using most or all of the ideas under that aegis; and
  3. be well-written enough to teach you how to write.

If you are able to find, through your own search or with the help of your teachers and peers, a suitable and more interesting alternative to the assigned text, you should read it.

You will always be required to justify your choice in the kind of reflective and metacognitive writing that supports the best decisions, and you will always have the freedom to change your mind, if the first 30-40 pages of your choice don’t pan out as you expected.

This is about choice. It’s also about assiduousness — about persevering to read something that takes time, takes focus, and rewards both.

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Emulation-Through-Analysis Reading: Literature

  By Space Explainers

In a makerspace, the focus is on creating, so students read what they write and write what they read as often as possible. Emulation is at the heart of the creative process. For most students, that means essay-writing, with poetry and short fiction occasionally.

Most other literature, especially the novel, is difficult to emulate. It takes a lot of time and a particular passion, like the it did for the first Pareto Project highlighted in 2017-2018. It isn’t for everyone.

Instead, literature is the primary tool for building a better human being:

The Reading Process

The first section of that post pitches reading as a tool for understanding ourselves and our world. As the video, “What Is Literature For?” puts it:

We should learn to treat [literature] as doctors treat their medicine, something we prescribe in response to a range of ailments and classify according to the problems it might be best suited to addressing. Literature deserves its prestige for one reason above all others: because it’s a tool to help us live and die with a little more wisdom, goodness, and sanity.

So literature is the most effective tool in the Humanities. That doesn’t address literary analysis. When do we analyze the symbolism, leitmotifs, imagery, etc., of a work of literature? When do we write essays of literary analysis?

Well, as much as Paul Graham seems to be right about how that subtype of essay-writing is “three steps removed from real work,” he’s not right to call it pointless. All analysis has a point:

View at Medium.com

Comedians deconstruct jokes; musicians deconstruct songs; writers deconstruct writing. Literature is slightly different, because it can teach us how to write well, even if we’re not interested in writing novels ourselves. There’s a reason that Hunter S. Thompson copied literature to learn how to write. Good writing is good writing.

Probably no student should copy Fitzgerald’s fiction verbatim (Hunter S. Thompson was special), but we can apply an emulation-through-analysis lens to literature, just like we would to nonfiction essays.

Emulation Through Analysis (ETA)

We’re going to use a series of questions adapted from The Language of Composition, a textbook on college-level argument and rhetoric, to apply an emulation-through-analysis lens to literature. From Chapter 2:

When we talk about diction, we might look for interesting or powerful vocabulary, but we also consider figures of speech like metaphors, similes, personification, and hyperbole. When we consider syntax, we want to notice interesting constructions like parallelism, juxtaposition, and antithesis, along with sentence types such as compound, complex, periodic, cumulative, and imperative, among others. We also might look at the pacing of a piece of work: Does the writer reveal details quickly or slowly? How does he or she build suspense?

The bolded terms here probably are worth memorizing, because they are the easiest to vary in your own work.

Use the following questions to analyze diction:

  1. What type of words draw your attention? Do they tend to be a particular part of speech, such as verbs, nouns, adjectives, or adverbs? Is the language general and abstract or specific and concrete?
  2. Is the language formal, informal, colloquial, or slang?
  3. Are some words nonliteral or figurative, creating figures of speech such as metaphors?
  4. Are there words with strong connotations? Words with a particular emotional punch?

Use the following questions to analyze syntax:

  1. What is the order of the parts of a sentence? Is it the usual order (subject-verb-object), or is it inverted (object-subject-verb, or any other pattern that is out of the ordinary)?
  2. What are the sentences like? Are they periodic (moving toward something important at the end) or cumulative (beginning with an important idea and then adding details)?
  3. Are many of the sentences simple? Complex? Compound? Are the sentences on the long side, or are they short?
  4. How does the writer connect words, phrases, and clauses?

If you are able to load the original textbook chapter through Google Classroom, you’ll note that the fourth question in the second set (“Does the writer ask questions?”) has been dropped. It’s a good question for certain texts, but it doesn’t have universal usefulness across different modes of writing.

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Inclusion Co-Teaching in the Makerspace

  By Space Explainers

This is a guide to inclusive teaching practices in Room 210, which is the Humanities makerspace at the high school. The post provides an overview of the process alongside a cross-section of strategies and techniques in English 10 and English 11 courses.

Co-teaching in a makerspace starts with flipped instruction — all lectures and notes posted online well in advance of any unit, individual lesson, or assignment. We plan instruction around student needs and curricular requirements. It’s done collaboratively: We discuss; I write and post. That keeps instruction consistent and clear1.

We collaborate with other teachers whenever possible, which also helps with alignment and consistency. In 2018, that meant partnering up our English 10 classes with another teacher’s unit on A Long Way Gone, including a UNICEF service project. And we otherwise follow our district’s ELA framework, sticking to assured experience and common texts as a means of teaching the same universal skills and traits.

That universal framework leads into our profile-based assessments, which use consistent expectations and language. There is flexibility for us to differentiate and even individualize assignments, because the substructure remains the same. The universal profiles, skills, and traits also give us a consistent basis for feedback and redirection. At all times, all teachers and students in the space are speaking the same language.

Next, we use redundancies to help students. This is the engineering version of redundancy: backup resources and systems to insure that all students get what they need. Instruction is posted here, to this website, and then cross-posted to Google Classroom; depending on need, we also print copies of these posts for distribution in class. All central texts are available in multiple formats, from audiobooks to PDF files to photocopies. Assignments are started and often finished in class, and then something is always handed in through Google Classroom or Google Drive. Copies of all writing are submitted as evidence of grade abatement profiles through Classroom, but students can also share directly with us, print and submit hard copies of assignments, or complete the work entirely by hand. Many assignments — most that aren’t essays — also have a Google Forms component, which makes it easier for us to sort responses by class, target missing work, look at patterns in the whole class, identify individual needs, etc., in addition to creating a further redundancy.

All these options — especially the multiple ways to hand in work — create plenty of opportunities for feedback, and feedback is the key to a co-taught classroom. In-class feedback is a given; it happens during every period, and we make a point to dedicate our time as evenly or effectively as possible. The “or” is operative: Due to our use of flipped or interstitial instruction, there is rarely a need for groups of students to stop and do the exact same thing at the exact same time. We are able to circulate constantly in order to intervene as necessary — to reinforce positive choices and correct negative ones. It’s a better form of feedback. In fact, the logic of that hyperlinked essay is stronger in a co-taught class than it was in the solo AP course for which it was originally written: We both act as experts, giving every student twice the opportunity to learn and then to teach others.

Examples of ICT Work

Here is an example of co-teaching in a Regents-level English 10 class:

A Long Way Gone: The First Five Chapters

The instructions were posted online for all students. They were given seven questions based on the first five chapters of A Long Way Gone and our pre-reading exercises and discussions, which are visible here. This is a screenshot of what the instructional post looks like:

That showcases the other flipped instruction happening in the makerspace. In English 11, another co-taught class, the students are receiving the same level of instruction. What’s more interesting is the evidence of feedback through this interstitial site. Both teachers developed that general feedback, using recent student work to generate feedback on the first profile scores of the year. (This is common, as seen in this general feedback post from the next scoring cycle.)

The English 10 assignment required answers to seven questions about the novel and the reading process. This is part of our unit on A Long Way Gone, and as an example of what we mean by “redundancies” in instruction, here is what that looks like on Google Classroom:

The assignment for the first five chapters — again, seven guided responses to seven questions about characters, plot, and the reading process itself — had to be typed in a Google Doc and submitted through Classroom, but it also had to be copied over into a Google Form. That gave my co-teacher and I a chance to monitor student progress and provide feedback in different ways.

The next screenshot shows me sharing the responses to that Google Form with my co-teacher:

This is one way to split the responsibilities of giving feedback. We can use the technology to talk to each other where students can’t see, like this:

I’m highlighting an obviously deficient response and preparing to ask how we should intervene. That’s a common question: What kind of feedback is going to motivate this particular student? How can we get more out of him in order to develop his writing? This is especially useful with students who haven’t done the assignment in full.

Form are one of the fastest way to look at patterns in student responses across a roster, which helps when we shift to giving feedback in real-time, as students finish their work, through a few different mediums. Here is what it looks like when we load Google Classroom to check on student progress on that same assignment:

Note that this is before the actual deadline. In a makerspace, especially a grade-abated one, the focus is overwhelmingly on process. You can see in this screenshot a bit of positive feedback to one of the students who finished already, but the real benefit of the workshop model is that it lets us run a kind of triage. We can see at a glance which students need attention first — the ones whose screen-capped work is minimal or missing.

Again, you can see the first part of a private comment left for a student who simply didn’t write enough. This is the equivalent of redirecting a student during the period when he gets distracted or discouraged. The advantage to using Google Classroom is that these comments are private, and students are notified about them through their GAFE accounts.

We are also able to open up student work for a particular assignment in Google Drive, which gives us another avenue for feedback:

This is additional redundancy that lets us differentiate. This Google Drive folder gives us access to all student work at once for any particular assignment, even before the deadline. In this case, the first student document was last modified at 9:05 by a teacher. That’s actually during the class period — an example of my co-teacher opening up and working on the writing while sitting with the student.

Where the ownership of the document has shifted to me, it means the student’s work has been submitted formally through Google Classroom. That sparks the usual feedback loop, in which we read and respond to student writing as a complete artifact.

More on ICT Feedback

All of this online and interstitial feedback exists in addition to the in-class, face-to-face feedback that occurs during the period. The importance of that face-to-face interaction has always been emphasized, and it matters doubly in a co-taught course.

As an example, I’ll explain a pre-reading assignment given to a co-taught English 11 class. Students were tasked with responding to a series of articles and ideas, all of which had been flipped online in an instructional post a week earlier. We set aside a class period and noticed, through the Classroom-generated thumbnails, that some students were already handing in work. We ran triage:

The first level of triage, especially in an ICT class, is often based around missing or incomplete work. Writing especially must be develop enough to allow for richer and more individual feedback. In this case, the student in the lower-right corner of that screenshot submitted very little:

Remember that this is still during the period, with a deadline of midnight for the complete writing assignment. My co-teacher found this to explain that this would obviously not be enough to earn credit, and to encourage him to focus on the flexibility and depth built into the assignment. Either teacher can then follow up with a private comment on the piece itself, a comment through Google Classroom, or a conference the next day. It depends on the student’s amenability.

When a student needs more direct interventions to be successful, we coordinate around a list drawn from our district’s RTI and MTSS implementation:

  • Accommodation: Additional Time
  • Accommodation: Schedule regular breaks
  • Accommodation: Student removed from group to work by himself
  • Cooperative Learning
  • Corrective Feedback
  • Counseling
  • Differentiated Instruction
  • Double dose of explicit, systematic instruction
  • Explicit Systematic Instruction
  • Goal Setting with regular follow up
  • Guided Practice
  • Individual Outreach
  • Instruction tailored to student interests and/or social situation
  • Modeling
  • Monitor with Frequent and Timely Feedback
  • Multi-Modal Instruction
  • Positive Reinforcement / Rewards
  • Remediation and Acceleration
  • Responsive Scaffolding
  • Summarizing
  • Supplemental research-based intervention curriculum
  • Targeted tutoring outside of class time
  • Use of manipulatives (concrete) and/or pictorial representations

This list is common to all classrooms, co-taught or not, but it takes on special importance in light of the divergent needs of an ICT roster. As we identify those needs, we are able to coordinate interventions. Here is an example from the very same day as every other example in this post2:

This is a student with self-identified difficulties speaking and writing in English, and this is her chance to write, without risk, about those struggles. This assignment replaces the original essay about A Long Way Gone — a substitution possible through a profile-driven assessment model — so she can grapple with a more pressing academic need. And while she met with only one of us to discuss the possibility of this individual assignment, everything else, from the prompt to the eventual feedback, runs through two teachers.

  1. I’ve also been developing an interstitial classroom in ELA for almost a decade. Those older sites are evidence of how long it took to develop an iterative process, and it would be unfair to demand another teacher take on the posting/design responsibilities any more than they’re comfortable. ↩

  2. This is important, because it highlights how any cross-section or snapshot of the classroom would reveal the same mechanisms. Barring the rare days set aside for prescriptive test prep, every period sees the same level of co-taught differentiation. ↩

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Dürer’s Rhinoceros

  By Grade Abatement, Space Explainers

The Rhinoceros Test

When grade abatement was being developed as a new kind of assessment, one of the central metaphors was Albrecht Dürer’s rhinoceros. (The first guide is here, alongside every Sisyphean High iteration up to a certain point. Dürer’s rhinoceros appears frequently, so it’s the mascot of grade abatement in the same way that the tardigrade is the mascot of interstitial teaching.) It serves the same function as saying, “Don’t miss the forest for the trees,” and it echoes the elephant test. It’s also related to Occam’s razor, or the law of parsimony.

If none of those hyperlinks interest you enough to do some ramiform reading, the basic idea (in here) is this: Often the simplest or most straightforward profile evidence is more important than everything else.

You should already be familiar with the process for assessment:

The GAP Process

Dürer’s rhinoceros is part of this holistic assessment, which is really an evidentiary assessment. Sometimes, one piece of evidence reflects your learning profile more than a heap of others. If you consistently sneak in visits to social media during class time, for instance, that runs afoul of one of the central pillars of a makerspace:

Focus and Feedback

A student earning a fourth-tier profile needs until the end of a cycle to produce evidence. It takes consistent reflection and metacognition, for instance, to fit just that single criterion for a 9. But a student who isn’t meeting the basic requirements of the course has immediately provided enough evidence for a much lower score. That’s Dürer’s rhinoceros.

It’s still a matter of growth and possibility, however. If you make a choice that would knock you down to a 60, for instance, you almost always have time to improve. Any improvements you do make will showcase amenability and work ethic, and that justifies a higher profile.

You can ask questions about this below. Meanwhile, I will hold onto the quixotic hope that this will all eventually be rendered moot1.

One more note: The use of metaphors and images like Dürer’s rhinoceros helps us avoid clichés, especially thought-terminating ones. George Orwell called them dying metaphors. Some clichés have power — a rose on Valentine’s Day is still nice — but you should try to find new images, analogies, metaphors, etc, whenever possible. Clichés don’t bring any vividness or clarity to ideas, however easily they come to us.

This and the lead image come from Little Einsteins, one of the best shows for kids. At some point, my own kids will age out of it, and I will miss it far more than other kids shows.

  1. Two words worth knowing: quixotic and moot. The former leads us to another metaphor for teaching and learning, since we sometimes tilt at windmills; the latter is one of those words with two accepted but contradictory meanings. ↩

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The Pareto Project: Complete Guide

  By Pareto Projects, Space Explainers

This guide has been adapted from the PDF and Google Doc used prior to 2018. The information here is most current and most correct. Those older guides might be interesting to some of you as examples of iterative instruction, though. You can see the evolution of ideas and language.

PROJECT OVERVIEW

The Pareto Project is an iterative form of project-based learning that was inspired by 20Time and Genius Hour. It invites students to design and explore meaningful, personalized projects during the school year, with about 20% of the time we would otherwise dedicate to course work instead dedicated to Pareto Projects.

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The GAP Process

  By Grade Abatement, Space Explainers, Triage
TL;DR

The grade abatement profile process really only requires this step-by-step guide:

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:

Clarifying Grade Abatement

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.

The Rule of Three: Triptych Panels

First, the overview:

Grade-abated assessment is holistic, evidentiary, and profile-based. It evaluates the universal skills and traits that are likewise valued by colleges, careers, and the real world. These are the same 21st-century skills espoused by educational leaders like Wagner, detailed in Brewster’s Strategic Coherence Plan, and required in every job or career.

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:

Grade Abatement Triptychs

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:

How Feedback Should Work

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:

▸ Grade Abatement Explained
▸ Grade Abatement Clarified
▸ Grade Abatement Amended

This essay, which is formally a series of connected explanations, remains almost entirely applicable to the current version of grade abatement:

View at Medium.com

The previously mentioned “release notes” essay also remains almost entirely applicable:

View at Medium.com

The following post is specifically focused on one scoring panel in 2017, but it’s discussion of how we assess interstitial learning is critical:

GAP Framework: Within Reason

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:

Time Enough at Last

Time to Understand

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:

Enigmas and Their Opposites

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:

Verbing Weirds Language

 

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.

  1. 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. ↩

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“What Do I Do Next?”

  By Opening Salvo, Space Explainers

Note: This post applies to all students in all classes.

Every year, we watch Ken Robinson’s talk on education as an introduction to the Humanities makerspace. That video, in fact, gives us the icon for the most important skill taught and strengthened in here:

Click the image to load the full set of profiles, skills, and traits.

That list of the universal skills and traits of learning includes a similar icon for each pair. For an explanation of the other icons used to signify these universal skills and traits, load this document:

You can also scan a QR code posted on the wall of our classroom to read it. You’ll notice that these are annotations of another handout — one titled “What do I do next?”

“What Do I Do Next?”

As you explore the ramiform links of various instructional posts, you’ll repeatedly encounter the idea that what we do together in person is more important than any other aspect of your education. I’m here to redirect you, but you really need an internalized mechanism for staying productive. That’s where the following handout comes in:

That is a three-step process for filling any spare moments in class with productive work. There is a QR code on some of the printed versions that loads the annotations embedded earlier.

Start with a working definition of the critical verbs: delve, collaborate, create, gather, and analyze. Then use the annotations of this handout — annotations that are embedded earlier, hyperlinked earlier, and now hyperlinked again — to learn about how this handout was constructed, which includes the origins of each term and image.

This reading is absolutely essential to your success in this course. It will give you the tools you need to be productive, and being productive is the key to success. It fuels the development of every skill and trait. Use this:

That handout details the most basic calculus for determining a profile. How you spend your time during class is, therefore, probably the single most critical component in the score you earn three times a quarter. In fact, the Google Form that caps the self-assessment process is built around this idea — that in-class focus and feedback loops determine your success.

There are many other essays, handouts, and posts that explain how this all works, but it will always come back to how you use your time in the space. And that will always be under your control.