The Journey of Inquiry

When I first met with Lil and Steve, I told them that I was interested in assessment because I was conflicted as to how an letter and/or number grade could ever reflect a student's writing. Seriously, though? How can it? As we met during orientation and began mapping out ideas of things that we wanted to inquire about, mine seemed to all circle around assessment (well, for the most part) as seen here.

Even on the first day of SI that we actually put those thoughts on paper and narrowed it down to three, assessment was still on mine, but I felt like there had to be something of more value to inquire about. 

So I started focusing on my middle topic. I wanted to look at how to engage students with real-world writing. After all, I felt like my demo was in that area and I feel like it's an area that I'm super weak in.

I had a rough start to my inquiry. I had trouble finding the right resources that I needed. Maybe I wasn't saying this correctly? Was my topic old news? Was it no longer a "hot topic"? I was about to give up when I finally found some helpful resources in the last few minutes of our time in the library.

But everything changed when I read the article over the weekend about assessment. The tension of grading is more than I can bear at times. So here I am back to assessment. I haven't left my other topics behind, but at the moment assessment is where my mind keeps coming back to.


Rocking the World of Grading

I read the article "Ranking, Evaluating, and Liking: Sorting out Three Forms of Judgment" by Peter Elbow. It totally rocked my world. This is what I sent my fellow 10th grade teacher, Steph:

I finally saw, heard, thought, about the reasons behind things I had seen her model, but never understood. I was equally frustrated but in my "new teacher trying to not be a pushover" I couldn't grasp it. Now, 5 years in, which yes, I know is not much, I am seeing all the problems with grading. I am in constant tension between giving students feedback and useful comments of assessment and the demand for grading. 

Personal Experience with Grading as of Late

I am in a school that went through a pd, if that's what you want to call it, on standard-based grading. Can I be so blunt here? Teachers left the meeting time after time confused because our instructor was using terms incorrectly, angry because disagreements were not handled in a good community, and determined to not do whatever was demanded for the heck of it. What that has left us with is a grading policy which states that 25% of grades are formative assignments (which formatives shouldn't be graded, but whatever, smarter people than me obviously made this thing) and summatives are to be 75% which can be restested with remediation to get a better grade replaced. My heart hurts even writing that.

So what has that looked like in my classroom and in my school?

I see more students cheating, which Elbow talked about in his article. I see more students doing the least amount of work because they can retest whenever it's more convenient for them. I see more teachers being frustrated. I see expectations lowered because after all, formatives are the time to learn anymore, summatives are and you can learn and relearn and relearn some more as many times as you want until you end up with the summative grade that you want (or should I say need)

So how does this apply to the Elbow article and my inquiry of assessment?

I want this environment of this stupid grading system to not control my classroom. At the beginning of the article, he said that assessment drives/controls teaching. So here's my inquiry: If that statement is true, don't I want my assessment to be authentic? Do I want my assessment to control cheaters? Or do I want my assessment to grow writers/learners who have authentic learning experiences in my classroom? I'm trying to figure out how I can apply his premises to my classroom:

1. Less ranking
2. More evaluating
3. Installing evaluation free zones
4. More liking

I know this is specific to writing and I'm bringing a much larger problem of grading into the mix, but I think my inquiry will continue to help me understand both the narrow and larger picture and hopefully transform my classroom into a better place to learn. 

Stupid grades.