Throwing Out Grades to Enhance Learning: Feedback-focused assessment

So, semester one has come to an end and it is time to reflect on my practice. It’s like cleaning off the make-up and seeing the real person underneath. It means that I have to face myself - the smile, the wrinkles, and the blemishes. Starting with the ugly. This was a messy process. Anyone that says that going gradeless is easy is a gigantic LIAR. The process was a lot of work, more work than I have put into teaching in awhile - like rookie teacher starting from scratch kind of hard work. It meant rethinking why I used a lesson or activity, and what information and skills student’s needed to demonstrate their learning. Redesigning assignments, tweaking rubrics, adding layers of scaffolding, and helping students self reflect was time consuming - actually it grew into somewhat of a black hole. The constant conferencing interspersed with compact lessons and marking to provide better feedback created stress and tears for me. Frustration mounted and feelings of defeat grew until final ass...

One of the best aspects of the TLLP is the ability of our team members to have release time to discuss our classroom experiences, to visit other schools and classrooms and to plan for what we will do in our classrooms. During today’s meeting, we all had a level of frustration around final evaluations. Every secondary school in the board has been helping teachers to revise and update their final evaluations so that they more closely meet our vision for empowering modern learners with “informative and purposeful assessment.” This has been a rewarding but also difficult process where all aspects of our final evaluations have to be examined, compared to a set of success criteria, and then revised to be more equitable, engaging and purposeful. This revision process is not where I had frustration, however. It is the breakdown of marks between term work (70%) and final evaluations (30%). It’s hard to articulate the reasons why this doesn’t fit a feedback-focused class. It’s like a square pe...