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.
