Things to avoid Part 1: Grading accuracy, participation, and engagement/effort

 

There was a discussion on a Facebook group page that asked for guidance regarding grades and grade books.  I was surprised to see the number of teachers who count things like accuracy, participation, and effort.   

Now, my thinking has changed a bit, especially on participation and effort, as I continue to decolonize my classroom, my teaching practice, and my curriculum in my journey to become a more equitable educator. 

 (Update on that: I am also a Teaching Assistant now for the MITx class, Becoming a More Equitable Educator, that was so impactful for me last year, and it is just as impactful going through it again and working with learners from ALL OVER THE GLOBE in their pursuit to become more equitable educators.  It is *free* and great.)  

I am really struggling with where classroom management, white supremacy and systems of oppression, and my classroom practice intersect, but I have no clarity, so I am going to keep struggling on that and asking questions and seeing what I can think of.

However, over the course of my work and collaborations with amazing educators, I have really come to understand more about the role that grading for effort, accuracy, and participation/engagement play in a comprehension based classroom. I don't think I have all the answers, but I have some strong thoughts! 

 In terms of grading for participation, effort, and accuracy, I would say that all of those concepts may allow teacher bias to strongly interfere with grades.  They create systems of  rewarding some students for being better at "playing school", and reinforce a "numbers=learning" mindset.  And of course, if some students get rewarded, other students are going to be penalized.  

As I continue to work with teachers on assessment and grading practices, this student (and caregiver) mindset about numbers (percentages, points) being the equivalent of learning is consistently the number one issue that teachers have, so it is worth considering how our classroom practices play into creating the situation in the first place.  Remember that effort and participation might look a lot like compliance, and grading for compliance is never a good idea. Read my previous posts about grading for accountability, which is another way to say compliance.

Grading for Accuracy 

Since students have no control over the rate at which they acquire, grading for accuracy on a daily basis is going to reward only faster processors and punish other students for not being faster processors.   

Research about Ordered Development tells us that language features (verbs, word order, what we think of as grammar, etc.) is acquired in an order that is independent of instruction. 

That is to say, it doesn't matter how many times or how creatively a Spanish teacher teaches the difference between ser and estar (to be and the other to be) or the difference between the preterite and imperfect past tenses, students will not produce them until their brain is ready, and when they have traversed the developmental stages of acquisition for that word (or language feature).  Furthermore, learners move through those stages in a non-linear fashion!   They may be able to use a feature accurately one day, then in another context revert back to an earlier phase of development.  This developmental order plays out in every language, for every language feature, no matter what the learner's first language is. We see it in first language development as well.  For more information about ordered development, there is a paywalled article in Hispania by Dr. Bill VanPatten, as well as his great books available from ACTFL: The Nature of Language and While We're On The Topic".   

Accuracy is probably the least important component of proficiency.  Consider: for those of you that have very young children, can they communicate with you?  Of course! It is usually imperfect and often adorable, but it is communication. For those of us who prefer four-legged furry friends, do you know when your dog or cat wants something? I sure do, and I speak terrible Dog and her English is just as poor. But we communicate! (Usually.)   

Why would we expect our students to communicate about something accurately after mere tens of hours of instruction? Even after hundreds of hours (600+) of instruction, the rather small percentage of students who reach a proficiency level of Intermediate Mid (ACTFL proficiency scale) can only do so much.  For example, they can handle concrete, familiar, and predictable situations but might have difficulty linking ideas and time frames, and they are not expected to be accurate speakers of the language.  Read about that study here, and my analysis of it when published:  What Standards Should I set for my students? 

In short, we should not grade students for accuracy, especially on a daily or weekly basis.  

Grading for Effort

Effort is another tricky concept. Many teachers say that if students are trying, then they are making the effort. But what does that look like? Does "trying" look the same across cultural contexts? Does my "trying" look the same as someone else's? And if the teacher sees someone trying, but doesn't see someone else, who gets the reward (the grade)?  

This goes right along with the familiar teacher practice of "well, little Johnny tried really hard so I will just bump up their grade because they deserve it."  Now, that is coming from a place of love and support, but wow- there are so many issues with that!  

First, if we bump up one kid's grade, why don't we bump up another? Who are we to judge how hard one kid tried and value that over another? Do we have the right to make those calls? 

Again, I guarantee that our implicit biases are going to come into play.  If we bump up the grade, do little Johnny and their caregivers have an inflated idea about what they can do in the language? Or does it mean that little Johnny gets credit despite not being able to meet a performance target?  

Grading for effort is a dangerous road, fraught with opportunities to let implicit biases reward students who understand the dominant cultural norms of the classroom and/or fit the teacher's definition of trying hard.  

Participation

Participation is also one of those concepts that needs to be carefully considered. The silent period (lasting 6 months to two years) is a documented stage of language acquisition. We also know that students do not need to be speaking in order to acquire language (they do need to be participating in communicative events, but that doesn't mean speaking!) 

Students who are not neuro-typical may demonstrate participation differently, as might students from other cultures. Again, teacher bias may strongly affect these grades, rewarding kids who are good at "playing school" and/or who understand the norms of the dominant culture.

But What About Engagement?

But wait! Don't you ask students to engage in class?  Don't you expect them to take risks and try to use the language?  

The answers to those concerns are COMPLICATED.

Engagement and participation are DIFFERENT in my book. Participation often looks like forcing kids to speak before the words come pouring out of them, or to speak in complete sentences. It also might be coupled with the belief that students must take risks in order to acquire language.  

I do not believe that students should feel like they are taking risks in speaking in my class.  My goal (and it *is* a high bar, I recognize) is that they feel like they have so much to say and they want to say it so badly that words just pour out.  

Engagement is something that I am really working through.  In order to meet the need for enough grades in a grade book, in my last school placement I asked students to self-assess on behaviors that support language acquisition, then I recorded that grade. (You can read more about what I used to do in this blog post: What goes in the Grade Book.)  After a while, I continued to ask students to self-assess, but recorded it less and less.  The practice was useful in some ways, but now I am really asking myself some hard questions about how I was rewarding those kids who played school (and penalizing others, including students from different cultural backgrounds and those who would be considered to be neurally diverse), and how I can try to reach the same goals (helping students self-regulate and attend to the input) while eliminating white supremacist culture in my classroom.  This is an ongoing exploration for me.  Whew!  

I truly believe that the way we grade can help us become more equitable educators, and that the way we grade should help all students believe that they are capable of successfully acquiring another language. 

What goes in the gradebook....

I have seen a lot of questions about setting up a gradebook lately on social media.  So, here's my response.

First, I have some flexibility in how I set up my gradebook.  Most teachers at my middle school use categories like Tests, assignments, projects, and citizenship.  All teachers have a citizenship category, but we have flexibility to define it.

After working with a great administrator for a couple of years, our language department moved to the following: Assessments: reading and listening, Assessments: Speaking and writing, Language Participation, and citizenship.  We all have different weights depending on the level and grade for each category, but we pretty much agree on what the categories mean.  This is as close to proficiency based grades as we can get within the system that we have at our school.  It is not perfect, but it is a good compromise, and student grades now tend to reflect their language abilities at their level.

Language Participation 
First, it's important to know that we define participation as engagement- NOT as speaking. Students can get 100% in this category and never produce an original, spoken sentence.  They are, however, expected to respond to questions, respond chorally, and be engaged.  "Work" also goes in this category, which in Spanish mostly means whatever they do in their Interactive-ish notebook.  Any (rare)  homework assigned and anything that is not an assessment goes here too.  Truth be told, there aren't too many assignments in this category outside of the interactive-ish notebook and our weekly daily engagement grade.  For more information about how I assess their interactive-ish notebooks, check this out. 

What we actually expect from the kids in class is this: listening to understand, one person speaking at a time, signaling when the teacher is not clear, doing their 50%- defined as responding enthusiastically and all the time (chorally, or to individual questions at their level), getting as much comprehensible input as they can, and supporting the flow of class and language.  We modify this based on individual students (i.e. eye contact is tricky for some students, etc.).  We use a slightly modified version of this rubric.   (Click here for my version)  We call it daily engagement.

Adapted from MagisterP 

Depending on the age/grade/level, students self assess daily or weekly, write down their score, and at the end of the week, come up with an average.  (I tell them to eyeball average it.  And that a .5 is fine.)  Then, the teacher goes through those scores, agrees or disagrees as appropriate, and puts them in the gradebook.  Weekly engagement grade complete.    Our version has 8 weeks on one double sided page, so it is easy to keep track of and we don't use a ton of paper.

Citizenship
This is a required category, so we decided that it has to do with two things: being prepared for class with their notebook and something to write with, and getting tests and quizzes signed by parents. (Another school expectation).   To keep it simple, we start by giving kids 100 points per trimester.  As they forget something, they sign a Citizenship log, and we periodically go through the log and deduct points from their 100.

Assessments: Reading and listening

This is what my gradebook looks like- or at least a few things!  

We use the reading and listening assessments included in the unit plans for SOMOS in Spanish 1, 1A, 1B, and 2.  We tend to give some kind of interpretive quiz for each unit, sometimes more than one. For my units that don't have included reading assessments, I have started using a text from the unit (or one that I write) and one of these forms to grade it.  For more info about how I grade these, see this post.  

Assessments: Writing and Speaking
The title of this category is a bit of a misnomer as well as we only assess speaking once, during their 8th grade year.  (They are novices! They need input, not "practice speaking" or presentations. But it looks good.)  

Most of the SOMOS units include writing assessments; for the ones that don't, either we do a timed freewrite or a focused freewrite based on the target structures or content of the unit.
For more information about how I actually grade these, see this post.  In 7th and 8th grade (Spanish 1, 1A, 1B, and 2- we have honors classes) we also do timed freewrites weekly, and grade them about every 4-5 weeks per class.

The weight of each category changes depending on the level of class.
Span 1A (7th grade):   Writing/speaking: 20%, Listening/reading: 40%, Language Participation: 25%, Citizenship, 15%
Span 1B (8th grade):  Writing/speaking: 30%, Listening/reading: 45%, Language Participation: 15%, Citizenship, 10%
Span 1 (7th grade honors): Writing/speaking: 25%,  Listening/reading: 50%, Language Participation: 15%, Citizenship, 10%
Span 2 (8th grade honors): Writing/speaking: 40%,  Listening/reading: 35%, Language Participation: 15%, Citizenship, 10%

Note that the highest class level has more weight on what they can actually do.  This is an experiment for me this year- previously it has been more in line with the other classes, but I feel like I want their grades to reflect what they can actually produce at that level (but only that level!). 

Quick update: I will be teaching a whole TeacherLab Series on assessment and grading in February 2021. Click on our page for more information! 

February  2021