Let’s Dump The ABC’s — And D’s and F’s, Too
The votes are in. Experience, common sense and neuroscientists agree: People don’t learn when they are scared. Well, they learn, but they don’t learn math or history or whatever lessons schools are actually trying to teach. Kids learn to hate school or to fear Mr. Smith or even to hate themselves, and the cause is so frequently connected to grades that it’s a wonder we continue to revere them.
Too often, grades create a fog of fear and loathing, or at least despair and frustration, that poison those on both sides of the desk. They can turn teachers and students into antagonists when they should be natural allies, one helping the other to develop new skills and knowledge, make sense of the world and find a meaningful place in it.
Many students see grades below A as mirrors of their stupidity or unworthiness. Like most of us, students don’t like being criticized or judged, so they react defensively, usually by wadding up the essays and tests containing the labor of their teachers’ thoughtful comments and suggestions and hurling them, unread, at the wastebasket, sparking a jolt of anger in the teacher. Or they seek the teacher out, not to learn how to improve but to challenge the grade, putting the teacher on the defensive. Parents call teachers to berate them for the grades they have “given” their children.
Grades can too easily become the enemy of learning, and yet grades, not learning, have become the focus of most schools. And so every fall, there comes the moment when the hopeful honeymoon of the new year ends: Teachers return the first graded assignment or test and become, for many students, the enemy.
The late Kurt W. Fischer, former researcher and director of the Mind, Brain and Education Program at Harvard, wrote and spoke convincingly about the non-linear process of learning. Performance, Fischer said, cannot be judged independent of its context, and people do their best work when the conditions are most supportive. When teenagers learn to drive, parents typically create those conditions by choosing a dry, sunny day to take them to a large, empty parking lot with no distractions. They drive fairly well. But move them too soon into crowded streets with bikers, pedestrians and snow, and their driving skills quickly regress.
This cycle of progress and regression is the normal rhythm of learning. In fact, regression is essential, because learning is the result of building and rebuilding neural networks. The rebuilding process results in increasingly stable networks so that, eventually, we can drive well in heavy traffic.
In schools, teachers constantly work to create supportive conditions in their classrooms. Joe may be able to write a paragraph only in class when the teacher provides a template and helps talk him through the process of filling in the pieces. Sally may be able to write a paragraph without the teacher’s direct help as long as the teacher has created the optimal conditions — a quiet room, an effective prompt to stimulate the mind and emotions, a relaxed atmosphere. Both may write gibberish when asked to write a paragraph at home amid noise and distractions or, worse, on a test. Even Billy, who turned in a fine homework paragraph on osmosis in science class, may find it impossible to write a paragraph analyzing a poem.
How do teachers grade these students? Can the students write a paragraph? Well, yes and no, depending on the circumstances. The interplay between the existing conditions, which constantly change, and the inevitability of regression creates a steady flux in performance. Too many teachers forget or never even consider that any skill can fall apart given the right circumstances. Despite insights from researchers like Fischer, these teachers continue to focus only on performance and fume or despair over Joe’s or Sally’s or Billy’s natural and ever-fluctuating successes. The F often becomes a punitive expression of a teacher’s frustration.
The point is that grades tell us too little and can do too much damage. Yet unless we work in one of the few enlightened schools that have abandoned them or have in our classrooms the few students who seem to thrive on grades, we would be wise to find ways both (a) to use grades more carefully to reflect the relation between context and performance (a goal that may be impossible given all the variables) and (b) to find ways to reduce the fear and obsession they generate.
In my own English classes, I tried some things that helped. My main method was to postpone grading essays until the student decided her work was ready to be graded. She could write drafts on which I would write my comments so that she could rewrite until she felt she had something she liked. The result was a lot more responsiveness to the comments I wrote (there was no flashing scarlet letter distracting her from them), and the student felt more in control of her own grading — she could decide when she was ready. And if she didn’t like the grade, she could rewrite again and get a new grade. I tossed out the old one.
Yeah, maybe this slow process prevented her from writing eight new essays each term (oh, dear, where’s the Rigor?); she might write only three. So what? She was constantly writing and constantly working on her writing skills. Her skills improved — a whole lot more than they did when she wrote eight bad essays and flung them in the wastebasket.
I also worked to give students more control over some of the circumstances in which they wrote. Frequently, the (absurd) five or six courses that most students carry create an overwhelming tsunami of high-stakes performances (tests, papers, oral reports, quizzes) that often come due at the same time–when it’s time to report grades. I encouraged students to create their own calendar of individual due dates in my classes so that they could reduce both the stress and the simultaneous demands on their time.
These are just one man’s compromises with the dogged unwillingness to throw out the whole system. Other teachers might invent better methods to reduce the fear and loathing. And we can all dream about the day when learning becomes more important than grades. Perhaps, we’ll even design practices that embody insights into brain function and how people learn.
Alden Blodget is a mostly retired high school teacher and administrator who currently volunteers as a writing tutor at LEAP for Education (Salem, MA). This article was originally published by Edify (WBUR, Boston) and is posted here with permission from Alden Blodget.
Like most of the pictures on TeensParentsTeachers, the picture posted with this article is courtesy of a free download from Pixabay.com.