Category: Grade Abatement

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Static GAP Score Feedback

  By Grade Abatement, Space Explainers

All scores posted to a gradebook in this course are grade abatement profile (GAP) scores. Students self-assess through a form first, with special focus on a paragraph or more of analysis; then the teacher works with the student to evaluate the evidence, including that self-assessment, in order to arrive at the right profile.

The final GAP score can be understood through this Static GAP Score Feedback post, which is adapted from the Step-By-Step Guide to Grade Abatement and the GAP Process post.

The basic components are the grade abatement profiles and set of universal skills and traits. All other guides and clarifications, like this post that clarifies grade abatement, further elaborate on those basics. The entire process is evidentiary.

Students have photocopied versions of every element of this process in addition to these digital ones. The opening week or two of the year is spent getting to know students and introducing them to this process.

Students and other stakeholders must unpack each GAP score through these resources; they must metabolize their understanding through discussion, reflection, and writing; and then they must use the building blocks of the space to improve. When in doubt, read the many testimonials for a guiding light.

Tier 1
Profile Scores: 1, 2
Grades: 50, 60

It is likely that contact has already been made about your performance. It is likely that meetings and other interventions are scheduled. Regardless, you should immediately begin to advocate for your success in this course by yourself, without waiting for the system to save you.

Understand that the system is likely to save you, and in here, it won’t be due to social promotion or a floating standard. See the step-by-step guide to grade abatement for more on how the course works to help you to pass authentically and legitimately.

But likely isn’t the same as certainly. And the real issue is what happens if you graduate having learned all the wrong habits. Many students fail out of college for exactly this reason. In the workforce, the lack of just one of our skills, focus, is creating a crisis.

If you have a score in this tier, however, it is absolutely not too late. Only a refusal to take help will keep you here. Remember that.

Tier 2
Profile Scores: 3, 4
Grades: 65, 70

Your struggles start with the absence of positive evidence. Look at the basic record-keeping tools of the course — from Google Classroom to in-class checkpoints — and you should be able to list what is missing. Remember, this is an objective, fact-finding process. The work is done or it isn’t — no quantum-state cats here.

If you say that the evidence exists, then you haven’t submitted it, which is also a serious flaw. It’s possible that you haven’t created much that you can present for assessment. It’s possible that you aren’t taking the course seriously. It’s more likely that there is some other issue preventing you from understanding how to be successful.

If you would like a face-to-face conference to review your progress, you can schedule one. You can send an email, too, or stop by office hours. You can rely on Guidance counselors and even peers for help — just be sure those peers know what to do themselves.

What is most important is an action plan of your own. Completing a SWOT analysis, for instance, might help. Treat the next panel — the next 15-day assessment period — as a chance to learn from your mistakes and show growth.

Once you start completing assignments, meeting deadlines, and engaging with the material, you’re likely to have enough evidence to justify a higher profile. This is how the course is designed. Tier 2 scores are avoided just be completing most assignments.

Another way you could look at it: You always have work to do, and absolutely everything counts; yet you always have flexibility and space, and feedback works very differently in here. The more you complete work and focus in class, the easier it will be to build the necessary feedback chain.

You may also be here in Tier 2 because of something singular and significant, as outlined here. Plagiarism, disrespect, lying, etc, actively hurt the learning environment, and without significant and immediate growth after such a mistake, your ceiling is a 4. Your choices matter.

Tier 3
Profile Scores: 5-, 5+, 6
Grades: 75, 80, 85

You haven’t reached the fourth tier and its top scores because you aren’t yet grappling with the true purpose of the course, which is to individualize instruction in order to hone universal skills, traits, and understanding.

Continue to identify and improve your feedback chain. The first link of that chain to strengthen is your attentiveness and focus during the class period. The second is the quality and quantity of required assignments, especially writing, submitted through Google Classroom or by hand.

Remember that all formal assignments are designed to produce the evidence you’ll need to fit a high profile. Improving your in-class focus will produce better work on those formal assignments, and it will invite better feedback.

Just like in Tier 2, you must remember that you always have work to do, and that absolutely everything counts; yet you always have flexibility and space. The top tier is accessible to anyone. You just need to put in the effort. It often helps to differentiate sufficient from insufficient work.

If you would like a face-to-face conference to review your progress at this tier, you can schedule one or reach out over email. You will need to show that you’ve reviewed what you can on your own, though, because self-efficacy and self-awareness are key components of the best learning.

As always, you might start your review of this GAP score by noting any missing, incomplete, or insufficient work. Meeting all basic requirements will almost always guarantee a 7 or higher. Remember: Those requirements include in-class focus.

Tier 4
Profile Scores: 7, 8, 9
Grades: 90, 95, 100

Continue to identify and improve your feedback chain. You’ve done some of this already, if you’re in this tier, but it’s worth noting: The key to your learning is the feedback you receive from the teacher and the many “cloned” materials of the course.

Evaluate the extent to which you do the following:

  1. Learn directly from the teacher in small groups or as an individual
  2. Learn directly from folks who’ve done #1
  3. Interact thoughtfully with the interstitial or online instruction of the course
  4. Learn directly from folks who’ve done #3

These are all detailed in the universal, step-by-step guide to this process.

You should recognize now that learning from a knowledgeable peer is nearly as effective as conferencing with the teacher, with the added benefit that it more closely emulates what you’ll need to do throughout your life, which is to read and annotate and think about the writing of others. The mentorship you might get from a teacher one-on-one (or in a small group) will be something you seek out as you get older, and it is objectively more effective. But it’s not always a given.

Since you’ve found some success here, you must now teach others how to do the same. That is known as the protégé effect, and it is universally accepted as the best way to learn. In this course, we also call it proxy feedback. Improving the work of others will further strengthen you. This is true whether you have earned a 90, a 95, or a 100 as the final grade.

You must also continue to think about your thinking — to get to know yourself and your choices through regular reflection and metacognition. Like the feedback chain, that can be created in person or through writing, but it needs to be insightful and consistent. You should also know the difference between reflection and metacognition.

Since you have evidence of these accomplishments, you can make the call about how to approach a review of that evidence. You can schedule an an individual conference or write an email. You can read the feedback you’ve been given and apply it as you usually do.

It may be most important to note that that there can be no goal of perfection. Perfection is impossible in here, just like it’s impossible in the real world. Instead, a 9 indicates exactly what the profile indicates. Superlative work isn’t perfect work, and even a GAP score of 9 should simply affirm the need to continue to work hard.

Above all, placement in this tier is a challenge to continue to put in the work. There is always a next stage in your life.

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The Feedback Chain

  By Grade Abatement, Space Explainers, Triage

This is another exploration of how feedback works in a Humanities makerspace. These are other posts on the same subject:

There are many, many more.

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WIP GAP Explained

  By Grade Abatement, Space Explainers, Triage

© Metro Trains Melbourne, Dumb Ways to Die™

TL;DR — WIP GAP

WIP GAP stands for work-in-progress grade abatement profile. It refers to a provisional score entered into the online gradebook. Click on provisional in that sentence, and you’ll see why we’d use that adjective: This score should be changed later by the student’s further choices.

The use of a WIP GAP score, as opposed to the scheduled GAP score, is often because students have failed to meet the basic requirements of the course. For example, students may have failed to read assigned texts, to complete assigned analysis, or to use class time effectively.

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GAP Score Triage: Overview

  By Feedback, Grade Abatement, Space Explainers, Triage

This post explains “triage” delivered through Google Sheets and posted alongside GAP scores during some, but not all, GAP panels. This triage is designed to help students be honest with themselves as they implement the feedback built into the GAP scoring process.

Examples of spreadsheets are at the very end, after the crucial discussion of why and how this works.

Weakness Into Strength

I will now explain why I am taking such pains to create a spreadsheet instead of using Infinite Campus, which is the online gradebook most courses use. As always, this feedback 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. We have to push out low-information resistance and build herd immunity.

Third, this kind of spreadsheet is somewhere in between scores on individual assignments and the assessment ideal, which is a narrative. 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.” Unfortunately, online gradebooks are inescapable. So we must look for a way to fight that toxic salience through some kind of sustainable feedback model.

Here is a clarification of grade abatement that elaborates on this idea:

Clarifying Grade Abatement

Look especially 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:

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…
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…
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…
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.

As a result, these spreadsheet numbers are simplified. 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 Sheets1.

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. The work is discussed. We use a dozen different techniques to differentiate and reiterate and redirect. Look at this post on the co-teaching environment:

Inclusion Co-Teaching in the Makerspace

We shouldn’t have to show students that work is missing before assigning a GAP score, but we know it is necessary.

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 in them.

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.

This is explored in great detail here:

Insufficient vs. Sufficient Work

The ideas are elaborated further in a separate post specifically for students in Honors or AP courses.

The message can be made even simpler. I’ll use an assignment that asked for a response to a lengthy article on procrastination — part of a unit on that sort of thing. Students were given the article ahead of time, and then they were given 40 minutes in class to write. They had the rest of the day and night to finish, as necessary, before submitting the work.

The instructions called this response an essay. It didn’t have to be five paragraphs or feature a thesis, but it had to echo our writing process. It had to be developed. It had to say something meaningful, since it would then be part of in-class discussion, further reading, and additional writing.

Here’s a submitted 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 pre-GAP triage, that response would be coded as a 1. It can’t be given any real feedback. It’s insufficient for a makerspace, regardless of what kind of in-class discussion we’re having.

Here is a response that would be 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

That one is 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. It’s repeatedly emphasized through instruction, lessons, feedback, and so on. Making good choices in class is essential, which is why this is a recurring unit:

The Return of the Fatal Flying Guillotine

That unit is revisited all year, every year, through posts like this one on the classroom space:

Objects in Space

Each day requires a goal, and each goal is checked and rechecked. In-class focus is more important to the GAP process than anything else.

So spreadsheets like this 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.

No one is not looking to catch students off-task. 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 obvious:

Dürer’s Rhinoceros

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, which is why, to link to it again, there are 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 obviously, seriously, and repeatedly broken that contract. They have not to meet the most basic expectations of the space, despite constant feedback.

The 0 or 1 for in-class focus, like the 0 or 1 everywhere else, is designed to deliver a sort of limbic shock: Yes, you need to work harder.

Examples

For Q1A of 2018, students were given a set of exhaustive notes on their progress. Here are the spreadsheets:

For Q1B, they were again given notes on collective and individual progress in English 10, English 11, or AP English. This time, the spreadsheets were posted to Google Classroom.

On November 5, at the end of the first quarter, they were given another post of exhaustive, annotated data. This time, the spreadsheets were moved back to the instructional post:

Another good example is is the following spreadsheet, from February of 2019, which includes every class and links back to this post:

It includes data on daily goal-setting, an example of how test prep is incorporated into the makerspace, and an in-class focus score. It also removes the provisional GAP scores, which forces students to grapple with the granular feedback, not just a final profile.

  1. 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 truly motivated and invested stakeholders to deepen their understanding. The practical work, like the implementation of a spreadsheet, can be more straightforward, as a result. ↩

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Clarifying Grade Abatement

  By Grade Abatement, Skill-Building, Space Explainers

What Grade Abatement Isn’t

In her 1977 book, On Photography, Susan Sontag tells us that “[i]n teaching us a new visual code, photographs alter and enlarge our notions of what is worth looking at and what we have a right to observe. They are a grammar and, even more importantly, an ethics of seeing.” It’s a novel use of “grammar” — a word usually associated with English teachers attacking spliced commas and split infinitives — but it means only that there are rules in play, even if we are unaware of them.

There are rules in teaching, too, that we don’t usually question, especially when it comes to grading. Grades create a grammar and ethics of learning — an implicit code about why we learn and how we assess that learning. What I call grade abatement is an attempt to change this. It is an attempt to shift the focus from grading to authentic learning — to circumvent the harmful effects of grading on student self-efficacy and productivity.

It may be most helpful to discuss first what grade abatement isn’t:

1. Students do not “choose” their own grades. The verb is in quotation marks because students do participate in the process; that process is precise and data-driven, however, with no element left open to subjectivity. We use Tony Wagner’s idea of “collective human judgement informed by evidence.” This guide covers that process, and the instructional post for that process is embedded further down. Here is a direct link: The GAP Process.

2. It does not exist to give the teacher more time. Grade abatement takes about the same amount of time as traditional grading, because of the amount of oversight and feedback required to help students learn without the old crutch of grades. The difference is in how that time is spent. It feels better — more authentic, more useful — in comparison to the sometimes ambiguous and usually frustrating mechanisms we are used to.

3. It does not change the frequency or quality of teacher feedback. It heightens that feedback, in fact, because there is no number attached. Students have to grapple with the specific feedback given to their performance, and they lose the limbic resistance that comes with lost points. There’s no shorthand, because there’s no number. Their focus shifts from numbers to the skills and knowledge being learned. Here is an explanation of that shift: A Better Form of Feedback.

Why Grade Abatement Is Necessary

As for what grade abatement is, it’s best to start with why it’s necessary. Alfie Kohn breaks down the harmful effects of traditional grading in his essay, “The Case Against Grades,” which is really required reading for anyone hoping to understand grade abatement. From Kohn’s opening:

By now enough has been written about academic assessment to fill a library, but when you stop to think about it, the whole enterprise really amounts to a straightforward two-step dance. We need to collect information about how students are doing, and then we need to share that information (along with our judgments, perhaps) with the students and their parents. Gather and report — that’s pretty much it.

You say the devil is in the details? Maybe so, but I’d argue that too much attention to the particulars of implementation may be distracting us from the bigger picture — or at least from a pair of remarkable conclusions that emerge from the best theory, practice, and research on the subject: Collecting information doesn’t require tests, and sharing that information doesn’t require grades. In fact, students would be a lot better off without either of these relics from a less enlightened age.

The italicized sentence is what I keep in mind: Collecting information doesn’t require tests, and sharing that information doesn’t require grades. The crux of grade abatement is this belief. We can gather and assess all the information we need to help students learn without resorting to grades on individual assignments, and the grades we do use can be stripped of most of their harmful effects.

Here are a few more critical points to address, before we delve into how grade abatement 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. Instead, we need to 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; again, his essay on this is pretty much required reading — 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. So does the teacher’s relationship to the material—  and to the students. 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… [s]uddenly 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 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. The positive impact of grades (and that’s a questionable list in the first place) is eclipsed entirely by the negative effects. Which is why it’s so unfortunate that…

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 country. 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 sustainable and self-powered kind of learning.

What Grade Abatement Is

The word “abatement” is the key: Since we can’t abolish grades, we must try to abate their negative effects. The primary goal is to establish profiles — grade abatement profiles, or GAPs — of each student, and then to apply a holistic assessment through those profiles. The complete process has its own corner of this site:

The GAP Process

The process is complex. That makes sense. This is not a small shift. It requires changes to instruction, assessment, and feedback. It can be broken down, though, which is what I’ll do here.

It starts with traits that teachers can observe and students can hone: amenability, collegiality, and assiduousness. Then we consider general skills that support learning: organization, autodidactic strength, metacognition, and the ability to collaborate empathetically. Finally, we consider the core skills of critical thinking, close reading, and effective communication.

The last three skills are universal to all learning, and they are most readily measured through some kind of artifact: essays, multiple-choice tests, presentations, and so on. Instead of number grades, however, those artifacts are filtered through the complete constellation of learning: how amenable the student was to feedback, how collegial and collaborative he was, how well he understood his own learning process, and so on.

Of these, metacognition may be the most important skill, because it allows the student and teacher to parse, quantify, and evaluate elements of learning that can’t be tested by traditional means. Metacognition is also the most important element for achieving a better form of feedback, which has its own complex post.

At some predetermined point, the teacher and student collaborate on a holistic assessment of the student’s total progress and output. In the Humanities makerspace, this assessment occurs every three weeks, using technology and old-fashioned analysis to give the work a new kind of authenticity. The evidence is gathered in a way that invites honesty and introspection. The student is a partner in the process, helping to fill in the teacher’s observations and notes. Then the profiles are used to translate that evidence, including any final conferences or writing responses, into a number.

The full GAP guide has a copy of the rubric and a description of each profile, plus detailed explanations of each criterion and element of the process. Most of the particulars wouldn’t change if this process was adapted for other courses, because we are really talking about the basic components of learning. Moreover, the language of each profile is precise enough to prevent ambiguity, while giving students a significant amount of agency and choice.

Here are the skills and traits written out more generally:

  • The skill of reading closely to build empathy, broaden knowledge, and emulate authors
  • The skill of thinking critically, especially in answering essential questions
  • The skill of communicating effectively, especially in writing
  • Assiduousness, or the ability to persevere in completing difficult tasks
  • Amenability, or the ability to take criticism well and use it effectively
  • Collegiality, or the ability to collaborate with peers to read, write, and think
  • Metacognitive aptitude, especially as demonstrated in journals and self-assessments
  • Autodidactic aptitude, especially in navigating an interstitial classroom

They can then be paired under more precise labels:

Collegiality ⇆ Empathy | The crux of the course and the stuff of growth, especially in a collaborative learning environment. Empathy is a skill built through discussion, writing, and reading in the Humanities.

Integrity + Character | The focus on individual learning environments and experiences, especially the honesty and openness necessary to take risks. Character is built through the internal and external artifacts below.

Close Reading ⟹ Internalization | Encompasses the texts analyzed for emulative purposes, the universal languages and structures memorized, and the literature read to develop empathy.

Critical Thinking ⟹ Metacognition | The problems being solved, the meaning being made, and, most importantly, the thinking that drives every iterative and individual choice.

Effective Communication ⟹ Writing | Employs bishop composition to centralize writing, especially essay writing, among other discussions and communications.

Amenability ⇆ Self-Awareness | Requires an awareness and acceptance of critical and constructive feedback from all stakeholders in the atelier environment. Especially focused on radial discussion, proxy feedback, and metacognitive analysis.

Assiduousness ⇆ Self-Efficacy | How to live like an academic tardigrade: testing limits, adapting to challenges, and embracing failure as a necessary step in learning. Builds the muscles to beat down procrastination, impulsivity, and complacency.

Organization ⟹ Autodidacticism | The systemic, systematic, and individualized approach to getting things done. The “secret” skill that frames the rest and enables self-directed learning.

The ⇆, +, and ⟹ convey a relationship of sorts, which is the point: These skills and traits connect to each other, support each other, etc., in a way that matters. Understanding that lets us develop a single sheet —  a handout that can be posted, downloaded, photocopied, and so on. That’s an essential step in making this usable in a classroom: taking a complex process and giving it an intuitive user interface.

The final step takes those skills and traits and connects them to the profiles, which can again be presented through a more user-friendly handout:

The two fonts are due to my stumbling into this excellent infographic. One handout is better for online use; the other, for photocopies.

Iterative note: This is always evolving, which is really the point of a makerspace. Here is another version of the profiles, with a breakout of each tier: Grade Abatement – Tier Guide

Efficacy and Transparency

Grade abatement is student-centered, but the teacher must build, tweak, and tune the machinery. It’s ongoing and iterative. This requires flexibility and a kind of interstitial access to student evidence — a means of taking notes and marking progress throughout the assessment period. The narrative comes together over time; after a few weeks, for instance, it should be more or less clear to both the teacher and student which tier fits. Technology is invaluable here, because it makes the data readily available and trackable over time.

The skills and traits required in all classes are, at a basic level, the same, which is why the profiles are essential. Beyond the profiles, the teacher needs to distinguish a set of more specific criteria. What are the most important artifacts produced by students? What skills are tested on state or national exams tied to this course? When are students most responsible for their own learning?

The key to all of this — gathering evidence, collaborating with students, compiling GAP narratives, and arriving at a profile score — is efficacy. We can use the definition implied by Jerry Jesness:

Grades are educational quality control, and passing grades “prove” that teacher, student, and school are successful; therefore, the “best” teachers are those who give the highest grades, and the “best” administrators are those who can convince their teachers to do so. In this bizarre system, it is better to teach 10 vocabulary words than 100. If a teacher assigns 10 words and the student learns eight, the student scores 80 on the exam and both teacher and student are successful. If the teacher teaches 100 words and the student learns 50, both student and teacher have failed, even though the second student has learned more than six times as much…

The entire essay, “Why Johnny Can’t Fail” (published in Harper’s in 1999) goes a long way toward identifying how a dependence on grades warps our teaching, and it echoes Kohn’s logic and research into how grades corrupt authentic learning and effective feedback.

The GAP process, in contrast, lets us create assignments with efficacy, and it helps students to recognize, report on, and utilize that efficacy. That leads to the second watchword: transparency. Sharing GAP guides — this is one among dozens — with students gives them more control. There is a blueprint for the learning process, and that transparency should empower students to focus on the skills and knowledge they truly need. There are stakeholder guides, system update notes, and archives of pretty much every iteration.

It’s all part of a kind of engineering redundancy. I repeat and repeatedly connect the elements of instruction, assessment, and feedback so that we have failsafes in place. It becomes nearly impossible to be uninformed or misinformed about grade abatement or any of its mechanisms, except through willful ignorance, spite, or a weird kind of rumor-mongering. That happens, of course, but more and more, it happens only outside of the classroom, with stakeholders who are consumed by their own issues1.

And this matters because grade abatement is important. It lets us focus on learning. It lets us sharpen student skills and deepen their knowledge and inculcate the traits they will need for the rest of their academic and post-academic lives. It prevents the entitlement, grade inflation, and social promotion that hurts learning, replacing all of that with the potential for a radically different environment. Grade abatement let me build this makerspace, and this makerspace does wonders for students:

Sisyphean High

Use the top menus to navigate this site. The course syllabus is embedded here, since that is the fastest and most comprehensive way for students and all other stakeholders to start learning about what a Humanities makerspace is.

  1. Isaac Asimov identified one of the issues with paradigm shifts: “There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that ‘my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.'” ↩

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A Better Kind of Quiz

  By Feedback, Grade Abatement, Space Explainers

The origin of the term is also its purpose: A pop quiz asks what a student actually remembers, not what was crammed into short-term memory in the moments before the bell. A pop quiz reveals what is internalized.

Except when it doesn’t. In my experience, pop quizzes don’t work. They operate on fear and anxiety, which undermine knowledge and skill. Quizzes require obfuscation and subterfuge on the part of the teacher, too, resulting in a kind of arms race between student gamesmanship and real learning.

What I did with that realization is here:

View at Medium.com

The first two paragraphs are mostly the same as the start of this post; the rest of that Medium essay explores what pop quizzes do and how we might reimagine them.

Data-Driven Quizzes

In a makerspace, the goal of a quiz would be to gather data that lets us direct instruction and learning. For example, during a unit on narrative writing and literary analysis in English 11, we needed to test students’ understanding of literary devices. That led to this quiz:

The directions are repeated at the start of the Google Form, too, for the sake of a kind of engineering redundancy:

DDQ: Literary Devices (1)
Complete the following quiz without using any additional online or offline resources. Match the term to the definition. Identify what you have internalized. Then use the resources of the makerspace to make sense of your performance. Submit evidence of that metacognitive insight as indicated elsewhere.
Terms and definitions: https://blog.prepscholar.com/list-of-literary-devices-techniques
Header image: https://dribbble.com/shots/5330302-Creativity-Book-Club

The focus is on how students learn, not a quiz score. The scores help students self-assess their needs and advocate for their roles in a different and often better form of feedback.

In this example, the questions were simple enough: given the literary device, match it to the definition. For each term, all 19 definitions (we cut it down from the 24 suggested in the instructional post) were randomized, which forced a basic kind of repetition. Here is the start of the choices for verbal irony:

In a quiz like this, each question is instructional, and determining the correct answer is about learning, not performance. On my end, I am able to look at real-time data like these:

That screenshot is illustrative of the process. One tab is open to an instructional post; another, to this quiz and its data. For each question, I am able to see what students seem to know. Irony, for instance, is a difficult concept; perhaps these students need a lesson in irony, then, or a model text that demonstrates verbal irony. I’ll know the answer when I read their metacognitive analysis of the quiz.

Moving Forward

That’s an explanation of the pedagogy. For students, it’s now a question of efficacy: Does this help you to internalize information? Does it make your learning habits more transparent? How does your performance improve as a result of this kind of reimagined quiz? Use the comment space here to ask questions and offer insights — including any onomatopoeia that might replace “pop” with a better metaphor.

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SWOT Analysis

  By Grade Abatement, Organization: Getting Things Done, Triage, Units

Network of Possible Wanderings

To create the best version of you, you must become an expert in your own learning. You’ve done a considerable amount of metacognitive work already, but there is always more to do. This time, we’re looking to expand your “network of possible wanderings,” a term used by Teresa Amabile to define expertise:

Continue reading

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Insufficient vs. Sufficient Work

  By Grade Abatement, Triage

When any teacher using the makerspace remarks that a student’s work is insufficient, that really means that the work is not substantial enough to garner feedback. Often this remark is made in person; occasionally, it is flipped online as part of general feedback.

The trick, if there is one, is that students don’t need to be told when work is insufficient. They need only self-awareness, integrity, and a post or two like the one you’re reading now.

Time Enough

The point of a makerspace is to create something meaningful. Look at this section of our skills and traits:

This is the reading/thinking/writing of all learning. Many assignments in English, of course, focus on writing, and with good reason:

Writing gets us at the truth, and sometimes the capital-T Truth, while making our understanding clearer and our learning more permanent. The writing must be substantial, as a result, which is why students are always given enough time, in and out of class, to do their work.

This goes hand-in-gnarled-hand with the lecture-as-instruction-post on working harder, because all work in our space needs to reflect the time allotted to it. This isn’t subjective. In a grade-abated course, it’s more like a sorites paradox: when a heap becomes a heap. It’s obvious when the work is substantial.

What follows are examples based on common English assignments.

Example: Essential Questions

Essential questions are a staple of English classrooms. They invite us to consider timeless issues, personal beliefs, and societal norms. The most common assignment, at least at first, is to respond freely to the questions — to write, for a class period or more, without worrying about anything but getting ideas down.

Here is a set of essential questions used in several units in our space:

  1. To what extent can any of us trust our senses?
  2. To what extent can any of us trust our memories?
  3. How do ignorance, knowledge, and happiness interact for us? In other words, would you want to be ignorant and happy, or have knowledge and be miserable?
  4. To what extent and in what ways does power corrupt?
  5. In what ways are any of us ever truly alone?
  6. To what extent are people naturally self-destructive? What does it mean if we are?
  7. At what point and for what reasons should a group stop an individual from doing whatever he or she wants?

These seven questions were assigned to a junior-level English class on October 31, 2018. Students had three days in class to write, with encouragement to expand on their ideas at home.

Here is an example of insufficient work:

Here is another example of insufficient work:

It is not obvious to every student, without context, that these responses are insufficient. The questions are answered, and the assignment is checked off. But a single response to those questions ought to be this long:

Notice that writing more led this student to something interesting. That’s the power of an essential question: Writing more almost always leads to something more interesting. Writing more almost always justifies the effort.

Example: Short Essays

What if the prompt asks for an essay? In October of 2018, students in various classes were given a series of prompts based on this instructional post.

Here’s what is possible with one day of writing and a day to finish at home:

The point of an essay, sometimes, is to practice the act of writing. It’s to prepare for a discussion. It’s to freeze understanding. 850+ words is possible, and the more often a student pushes toward saying more, the more possible it becomes.

This is also acceptable:

That’s the comment I left, too, to highlight this point: A short essay can be 800 words or much shorter, but it has to look like an essay. It has to have a purpose and a shape. It needs to have a reason to exist beyond the assignment.

This is not an essay:

There is one original sentence in that. The rest is quoted material. That quoted material could be turned into something, though, and that’s the real loss: More substantial writing would almost certainly produce an opportunity for feedback. That the subject of these essays is akrasia and procrastination just highlights the problem.

Here’s another example:

I’m using this to highlight my response to the student. They’ve taken issue with the number, as you can see, but that number has context only through the copious instructions and explanations here. This is also a common refrain: that substance ought to trump length, and that writing just to pad the length is a bad practice. It is. But for most of us, there’s a simple truth: Substance almost always comes from length.

Writing succinctly is a goal. Brevity with precise insight is a goal. It takes a long time and a lot of practice to reach that goal. A half-page essay that mostly summarizes an article has not reached that goal. Writing more, when the assignment asks for it, is a way to garner more feedback and better direction for the writing. The point is to get feedback, improve, and work toward being succinct and precise. It’s the rarest student who excels at that from the start.

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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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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. ↩