From “Why I Hacked Donkey Kong for My Daughter.” In here, we’re hacking a different DK.
TL;DR: Panel by Panel, a Picture Emerges
Roughly every three weeks and fifteen class periods, you will earn a profile score that will be posted to Infinite Campus. This will happen three times each quarter. Your final grade for each quarter will be the average of those three profile scores. This will gives us a three-panel “triptych” of your performance, with each panel showing the body of evidence you produced in that time.
The protocol for scoring will always be the same:
- You will review the profiles, skills, and traits.
- You will review the basic guide(s) to self-assessment.
- You will review the handout on in-class focus and feedback.
- You will complete a self-assessment form, online or in class.
The form will always be assigned through Google Classroom. Your teacher(s) then review the self-assessment, their observations and notes, and any evidence you’ve submitted. Then an accurate GAP score is entered in Infinite Campus.
“The Salience of Those Grades”
There are some advantages to having more numbers, even though it is hard to argue with Alfie Kohn: “In fact, posting grades online is a significant step backward because it enhances the salience of those grades and therefore their destructive effects on learning.” In a perfect world, the system would not require numbers. In our world, Sisyphus always ends up back at the foot of the mountain, so we need to imagine ourselves happy.
One key to how students are assessed in a triptych model like this is the bolded line from a favorite quotation in here:
We may take as our guide here John Dewey’s observation that the content of a lesson is the least important thing about learning. As he wrote in Experience and Education: “Perhaps the greatest of all pedagogical fallacies is the notion that a person learns only what he is studying at the time. Collateral learning in the way of formation of enduring attitudes… may be and often is more important than the spelling lesson or lesson in geography or history… For these attitudes are fundamentally what count in the future.” In other words, the most important thing one learns is always something about how one learns. As Dewey wrote in another place, we learn what we do.
~Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death
Postman articulates a sensibility that is present in nearly every iteration of this GAP system. If you look at one of the first guides, it’s called a “rhinoceros test,” which uses Dürer’s Rhinoceros as a metaphor for seeing the obvious picture in spite of any weird or inaccurate details. In that obvious picture, we look for how you learn, first and foremost.
But we are truly able to withstand the “salience of those grades” because a grade abatement profile doesn’t allow for any weird or conflicting details. We’ve ironed out the process so that every version of the profiles, skills, and traits — from this set of tiered notes to the annotations of those notes to the general syllabus uploaded in 2018 — tells us exactly what goes into a particular profile. Each score out of 100 points can be unpacked and parsed to tell a specific story about the student, with no need to adjust for any of the bizarre machinations of traditional grading, like the ones on display in this old gradebook of mine.
GAP scores have internally consistent logic. That’s why the threshold mechanics delineated in this tiered guide and further detailed in all current protocols are so critical: The profiles have been interpreted to offer a series of logical imperatives, all built around the interstitial and student-driven structure of the course. That means that we can determine a new GAP score for each student once every three weeks without needing an essay, report, or conference, although all current protocols are clear about what sort of student artifacts are necessary in each tier.
That protocol will be constantly rewritten to be a little cleaner and clearer, but the crux won’t change: Every choice a student makes during a particular three-week period counts for or against him, all the way up to the start of the day when the self-assessment form is assigned and collected. Of all those choices, in-class focus and feedback loop matter most, because those are the two most impactful kinds of evidence. Otherwise, the focus is on self-awareness and accountability — an end to the Dunning-Kruger effect and a crusade against procrastination and akrasia.
Outward Order, Inner Calm
In order to transform the GAP process from a teacher-dependent one into a system-dependent one, we need organization. There is an old Medium essay on this subject that might be worth reading, but it is course-specific and deals with an older version grade abatement. Still, it underscores how critical organization is to the other universal skills and traits of our learning.
How instruction is organized also serves as an example: When coupled to our various universal languages for learning and writing, the interstitial classroom creates ongoing, embedded, student-generated learning. It’s a feedback loop. If the student isn’t organized, however, the feedback never comes. There’s no Skinner box to punish and reward choices, so organization is the difference between agency and frustrated delusion over what success looks like.
There are always three central focuses:
- Interstitial instruction is always a central reading focus. These posts and essays are written so that they teach everything from new vocabulary to argumentation. That they are flipped and frozen online just makes them accessible anywhere; the real value is in how they are written.
- Metacognition and reflection are always the central writing focus. This kind of writing overlaps significantly with critical thinking, of course, which plays out in this version of the GAP protocol: “Remember that the most effective kind of metacognition is uncomfortable; it challenges your preconceived notions and expectations. The enemy of critical thinking is, therefore, a kind of Dunning-Kruger capitulation.”
- Individualizing the course is always a central thinking focus. The idea is to make the course work for you, which is why individual learning is emphasized so strongly in the fourth tier threshold mechanics in this guide.
I want to teach small groups and individuals about those central focuses. I’d like to workshop essays, discuss an author’s ideas, brainstorm about lessons and entire units… but I can’t do any of that if my students aren’t ready. I can’t serve as an expert if we don’t have a lingua franca between us, and that only happens if we’re all organizing our learning in the same way. The class, every weird chamber of it, must be sacrosanct.
As an example, look at the lessons organized and taught to juniors in AP and Regents classes at the start of the third quarter in 2016-2017, during the first three-week GAP period ever attempted:
These instructional posts cover the three weeks from January 30 (when the 1/29 Orwell post was read with students) to the GAP 3A date, as indicated on the course calendar for those students. Each lesson builds on the previous one, which is why there are so many hyperlinks and embedded posts. It’s a deliberate kind of systems redundancy: If a student misses critical material the first time, he’s likely to see it another dozen times throughout the year.
Do we always get the grade we put in for if we provide adequate evidence or is some it based on what you observe? I was unclear on that.
It’s that idea of “collective human judgment informed by evidence,” which is Tony Wagner’s description of a similar process. It’s evidentiary. If the evidence is there, it’s there. My observations are part of it. The work you produce is part of it. Your focus, use of feedback — those are probably the two most important parts, simply because they lead to everything else.
My hope is to empower you to know, at all times, how you are doing. That doesn’t mean every student will be performing at the level of a 9 at all times — there are often reasons outside of our control that prevent us from reaching our potential. But you should all know the mechanisms required to perform at that level.