The letter was sent separately, because it is by far the most thorough explanation of our project-based work. The weekly update that followed is a review of each project and a collection of important links.
To understand what we’re currently doing, that letter and post are required reading. To understand where we were on March 12, when school dismissed early due to the coronavirus, you need another document:
March 12 was meant to be an inflection point for us. As that letter says, March 12 was exactly three months from the end of classes, exactly halfway through Q3, and exactly halfway through Q3B. On March 13, the high school planned to send out progress report notices.
You all know what happened next. Once our situation changed, those GAP scores had to be held in abeyance until distance learning could be put into place.
The most important thing to remember is this: The GAP scores posted today, March 27, reflect only the work done between February 3 and March 11. We also had a week off in February, which complicates the calendar:
2/3–2/14 + 2/14–2/28 → GAP Q3A | Posted 3/27
3/2–3/11 → GAP Q3B WIP | Posted 3/27
3/25–4/24 → GAP Q3C | TBD
As the letter and post from March 25 explain, that last profile score will include any distance learning we do. Students need to set daily goals, work for 30+ minutes, and share evidence of their progress for feedback. The expectations for student work have been clarified by the district and building administration, too.
Meanwhile, we have the body of evidence students produced in February and early March. The main focus for that time frame: in-class focus and use of feedback. Again, the letter meant for March 12 is your best guide:
In a world without the coronavirus, you would’ve gotten GAP scores alongside this letter. March 12 had been highlighted for several weeks prior as an inflection point, a day when you would get a lot of feedback and direction before diving back into these end-of-the-year projects. The feedback included profile scores to unpack and analyze, individual comments on your progress, and that letter, which thoroughly explains what we are doing and why.
Of course, we went home early on March 12. We haven’t been back since. It’s unclear when we will be back. We have to adjust.
Unpacking the GAP Scores
Note: This is optional. It would make a good goal, however, for any of the next few days of distance learning.
Once you have your GAP scores on Infinite Campus, you can unpack and analyze them. Focus on that first verb: unpack. Each score corresponds to a profile, and the language of that profile can be unpacked to describe student skills, traits, and knowledge.
You can only make sense of these Q3 scores in the context of our project-based learning, which in turn requires a focus on in-class learning and feedback. You can start here:
Each tier and individual score can be used to build a blueprint for improvement or continued success. That’s your job now: to take what you can from the start of Q3 and apply to the you that is now working from home.
You’ll also want the usual reference links, especially if you invite another stakeholder into this work:
Take your score at face value. Connect it to a profile. Unpack that profile, bit by bit, to form a picture. Then use the resources I’ve just listed to build a better approach to your learning for the future.
If you do this in writing, I can help you refine your analysis. We will have to hold off on our usual face-to-face conferences until next week, when there should be more clarity on the length of our distance learning.
Ask questions below. Focus here on questions that might help others. Email individual questions, or share individual writing directly.
Emulate those in the future. Use the feedback below to help you.
Requirements
First, even though it’s obvious: You have to do the writing. It is always required. You should never turn in a GAP report without attaching a response, and the amount you write should fit the definition of sufficient in this post:
It may also help to see hard data about noncompliance and its effect on the learning environment. Here are some statistics from November 14, 2019, which was the date of the last GAP report of Q1:
Section 1: 29 students | 17% submitted a written response. Section 2: 27 students | 33% submitted a written response. Section 3: 25 students | 24% submitted a written response. Section 4: 16 students | 19% submitted a written response. Section 5: 19 students | 33% submitted a written response.
This does not include late work or work generated through individual conferences the next week. The key takeaway: Only 25% of all students met the deadline for a written response.
Next, we have to evaluate whether the individual responses in that 25% were adequate or effective. This kind of self-analysis must use the language of the selected profile and the language of the skills and traits. That’s not difficult to do, because all of that language fits on the front and back of a single page:
If a student just copies over the selected profile and writes, “This is me,” it at least demonstrates an awareness that there is required language. It’s a lapse in close reading and critical thinking to make up what you think constitutes a particular grade.
Overall, 41% of the completed assignments were adequate or effective. That means only 10% of the total student roster handed in adequate work by the deadline. This is much lower than normal, and it doesn’t include late work. That’s why I’m using the example: All that late and insufficient work slowed down the feedback process and prevented us from using the makerspace’s flexibility to make adjustments. It gummed up the works.
If you take the time to write when asked, you improve your score, help your progress, and prevent damage to the class.
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 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 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:
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.
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.'” ↩
Students who attend class regularly, complete their assignments, and listen to feedback can use that document for an evidentiary evaluation of their work. One of the only additional lectures or texts that is emphasized is this clarification of the process:
The rest of this post more thoroughly explores grade abatement, offering the history and reasoning behind the shift. There is a Guide to Stakeholder Involvement that covers feedback and instruction; this post is more specifically about assessment, although every aspect of the learning environment is involved.
This is an attempt to explain how we accomplish the “collective human judgment informed by evidence“ that Tony Wagner has described as fundamental to 21st-century learning. It’s an explanation of how we can transform assessment so totally that the toxic effects of grades are almost entirely gone1.
You can learn more about what a Humanities makerspace is, and how it helps prepare students for their futures, through any of the menus and pages on this site, Sisyphean High. Most of what you’ll find is ramiform or branch-like, too, by design; so you will see the same links and materials repeated.
The primary inspiration for grade abatement, again, is Alfie Kohn’s “The Case Against Grades,” which can be read here. Dozens of other folks much smarter than me further inspired it, but it was that 2011 article that started the shift.
Early iterations of grade abatement discuss the impossibility of eliminating grades. Over time, the process has evolved from using one profile to reflect an entire quarter to using a metaphorical triptych, or three-panel picture, of the student:
Each “panel” corresponds to three weeks of a nine-week quarter, which is roughly 15 class meetings. The assessment process used every three weeks is outlined here:
This is, in essence, another TL;DR. That step-by-step guide includes the skills and traits we evaluate, the profiles that collect evidence into a picture of each student’s growth and progress, and directions for evaluating the evidence we collect. A lengthier breakdown is below (including even more copies of that document).
The GAP Assessment Process
All profile-based, grade-abated assessment starts with self-assessment. Students complete a form that guides them through an evaluation of the evidence they have produced in the indicated time frame. That self-assessment is then checked against the teacher’s observations and the evidence gathered through normal assignments. Then the teacher and student collaborate on selecting the appropriate profile.
The process is evidentiary and precise, because the profiles, skills, and traits are evidentiary and precise. It is about fact-finding and analysis, not “giving” a grade, as one of the earlier clarifications of the method explains. There is an objective reality to a student’s work. We can find it, if we are honest and collegial enough, and sometimes the process of becoming honest and collegial enough is just as important as the accuracy of that profile.
When a form is posted at the end of an assessment panel to Google Classroom, it can be completed by the students in or out of class. The necessary knowledge and understanding (e.g., the profiles, skills, and traits) are included as links or images within that form itself. In addition, the most important handouts are always posted alongside the self-assessment assignment and photocopied in class:
Those three are the crux of ongoing self-assessment and self-understanding. The middle one (which is helpfully bolded) is, again, the step-by-step process, and it is nearly enough by itself. If I had to add any more documents to the list of what is absolutely necessary, it would be these:
Those are interactive or instructional guides to how students should spend the class period. Face-to-face time is strongly correlated with whichever profile is eventually correct. To a sometimes surprising extent, staying actively engaged in class is all it takes; the rest of the learning process is almost a logical consequent of that investment and focus.
The guides and posts that follow are most useful to stakeholders who want an even better understanding of how this all works and why it is so important. All students need an understanding of at least what precedes this sentence to be successful; what follows will only deepen that success, as all investment in the learning environment does.
Skinner Unboxing
For most students, the greatest difficulty is controlling the Skinner-box part of the brain:
That post is from 2017, but it applies, still, to all students. There is no judgment here. We are all wired to react to immediate gratification. It’s human nature. Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending), a person’s ability to delay gratification early in life is strongly linked to success later in life.
That last link is to a study published in 2018. Similar studies are done each year. The most famous exploration of this theory is probably the “marshmallow test” first conducted in 1972:
That video documents a recreation of the original experiment, and it makes the conclusions obvious. We all feel like those children, to some extent, every time we face a test of our self-control.
Of course, the marshmallow test isn’t a perfect study. It’s more useful as a metaphor: We all struggle with delayed gratification, and we all benefit from self-control. That might be no more obvious than in school, where traditional grading doles out a reward or punishment almost immediately. School weaponizes that desire for immediate gratification. Students are trained early on to motivate themselves in reaction to threats and prizes, so to speak.
Experimentation and risk are more difficult habits to develop in that kind of Skinner box. And it seems that what students learn most in the system is how to game that system:
Her story is common in a system built on instant gratification. What’s less common is how honest and self-aware Elif Koc is in detailing how the pursuit of grades — of instant gratification — forced her to be dishonest and insincere about her learning.
What does grade abatement do to combat this? First, it delays the score enough that students need perspective and self-awareness to make sense of the number. Second, it bases that score on profiles, and the profiles on objective evidence of universal skills and traits. Third, it lets students make their learning choices in an environment of ongoing, collaborative feedback. The elimination of the immediate grade moves all stakeholders into a better state of mind, psychologically and academically.
New Numbers
It’s also very much about using the traditional, 100-point number system in a new way. Those scores can’t be eliminated from public education, which means we’re always going to end the assessment process with a number.
I recognize, by the way, that there needs to be systemic change, but it’s nearly impossible to believe there will be systemic change. The system is too bloated with mandates and political money, and that all happens far away from the frontlines. So it’s about using the lingua franca here — 100-point grades — and forcing those numbers to mean something different. We can abate the toxic effect of grades by gutting them and building in more authentic and meaningful machinery.
And we can do that because the surface-level heuristic can stay. High scores indicate success in ways we all agree matter; low scores indicate failure in ways we all agree matter. What changes is the specific feedback the number conveys to folks willing to invest in unpacking it. Low-information stakeholders still receive useful feedback, but high-information users are able to unpack a GAP score precisely and consistently. That’s what even this early guide explains. There is no black-box logic.
What’s most interesting, actually, is that the guide hyperlinked in that last paragraph makes the mistake of leaning too much into the heuristic. The profile indicated for a GAP score of 10, for instance, which was converted into a gradebook score of 100, isn’t clear or actionable. It indicates only that a 100 is perfection, which makes the pursuit of a 100 the pursuit of perfection. The sixth section of notes from this update talk about why that had to change.
We can’t base our reasoning and feedback on the number. The final number is, instead, code for the more meaningful and consistent profile. That’s the most important thing: The score is what unlocks other, more useful feedback. The score can be unpacked into a profile, and the language of that profile is precise enough to be unpacked and connected directly to the universal skills and traits we value.
Then it’s a simple matter of going over the formal work that was assigned, the informal steps taken to finish that work, and the collaborative, metacognitive, and individualized efforts we can identify and corroborate. All of that evidence-gathering is made 100% transparent through Google Classroom, the instructional website, and many other online and interstitial mechanisms.
Which means that a student’s accurate GAP score every few weeks provides actionable feedback all by itself. There is other feedback, of course, but the number is now useful. To an extent, we’ve turned the system against itself; the number now tells us something consistent and actionable, which means it should lose most of its Skinner-box shock.
Moreover, any stakeholder can use that number to enter the learning environment, because there is no weighting, no shifting percentages, no question of how many points were lost here or there. The number tells us exactly how to decode the experience.
What’s It Take?
What’s it take to implement grade abatement? For students, it really only requires accepting the idea that the score is based on evidence. There is nothing subjective about it. Errors in collecting or reporting evidence will occur, but those can be fixed; this is a fact-finding mission, not an argumentative one.
Each profile corresponds to a period of time, and we want a clear, collaborative assessment of that period. It takes self-awareness and amenability to do that:
Discrepancies between a student’s self-assessment and their actual profile happen because of human nature. It is human nature to avoid uncomfortable truths. The Dunning-Kruger effect happens for almost all of us at some point in our lives:
For others, it’s a constant battle against imposter syndrome:
That’s why grade abatement leans on Tony Wagner’s idea of “collective human judgment informed by evidence.” We are after truth, nothing else. The profile and its attached number have to tell us that truth, because that is the only way we can continue to grow and learn. If we could eliminate numbers entirely from the equation, that would be perfect; because we can’t, we have to weaponize those numbers as another way of confronting our assumptions, our expectations, our egos, and our fears.
This is also why the delay between the work students do and a score is such a critical delay. It’s no longer about immediate reward or punishment. Learning is now about each choice, the context of that choice, and the student’s ability to understand and react to that choice. This quotation, from the first guide to grade abatement, puts it like so:
The ugly parts of us don’t operate on a switch. Apathy, disrespect, entitlement—these aren’t sweaters or jackets you can shrug off and cast aside when you’re tired of wearing them. That stuff will stick to you, stay with you, for a long time. When you choose not to work, you are breeding future selves, developing right now the habits that will poison or empower you in every aspect of your life. Your daily life is inculcation in its purest form: the linking together of a chain of decisions that will protect you or drag you down.
This is not some dire jeremiad, either, about your generation. You are probably—hopefully—never going to experience the effects of a sudden and obliterating choice. You should be much more concerned with the small, insidious, and irrevocable ones that you make each day, each period, and each moment. In fact, we could sum this up
with a borrowed Orwellian metaphor:
Do you truly believe that disrespect, disengagement, or failure now will pass through you like a grain of corn
through the body of a bird, undigested and harmless?
That’s from Part III of that guide, which is worth reading in full, and not just because it’s the first attempt at codifying grade abatement. It’s also worth seeing that the early guides were written for college-level classes, which makes them somewhat less accessible to all levels now. There is also a more negative tone at work in the writing. Because it’s not just about “disrespect, disengagement, or failure”; the good choices we make build up over time, too, and make us into better versions of ourselves. Those good choices matter. The true purpose of a Humanities makerspace is to build ourselves into better people.
Old Ones
I’ve mentioned “old” guides to grade abatement a few times. This process started with what Alfie Kohn calls “de-grading” back in 2010, so there are hundreds of essays, handouts, posts, etc., about grade abatement. Every iteration is instructive, and most of the philosophical and even practical components have stayed the same over time. This is, to a large extent, about the evolution of the idea, not just its current form.
This history is probably most useful as a guide for how to shift away from traditional assessment. It contains attempts to counter misinformation, for instance, like this early explainer that was written for interested stakeholders. I don’t know that it’s necessary for every stakeholder to invest their time into reading all of it, but there’s value in the process. With that in mind, the materials below weave together a picture of what grade abatement does and doesn’t do.
These three guides are somewhat outdated, but they’re also foundationally important:
The following two posts are examples of iterative assessment and changes over time — i.e., of how grade abatement has changed in response to feedback and student needs:
That last one is a likely candidate for a complete rewrite. We need a static place for questions about grade abatement.
Here is another post that, while locked in time to a particular set of expectations and a particular set of students, provides a good example of what we continue to do:
We could continue for a while, unearthing old posts and essays, but we’ll end here, with a particular detailed look at how much evidence goes into every profile:
That post has a wealth of data — really, just an ungodly amount of it — as an example of how deep the assessment process can and often does go. That’s also the post to read for a sense of the potential for responsive feedback. When a student asks for it or needs it, that’s the level of feedback available; and as this post carefully details, that kind of student investment and student responsibility is critical
In fact, responsiveness might be the operative word for grade abatement. A stakeholder who reads only the TL;DR at the top of this post would still be able to suss out a student’s performance, especially with the importance placed on in-class focus and feedback. But the more any stakeholder invests in learning about the process, the more the learning environment will open up. That goes for students, of course, but also for parents and other stakeholders.
This is precisely why an older version of this website used the term umwelt in its URL: Each individual experiences the same environment in different ways, and that is by design. (Read more about the concept of umwelt here, through the medium of a particular smart webcomic: 1037: Umwelt – explain xkcd.) The folks who push themselves to learn more do learn more. Grade abatement honors that without requiring it of all students.
And since I always link to Alfie Kohn in these explanations, here is another article on the subject. Head to Google for more. There are plenty, because the toxicity of grades is among the most obvious problems in public education. ↩
