No Grading: I Think I Did it Wrong

After spending the summer researching assessment and grading, after meeting with colleagues and my principal about facilitating a no-grades classroom this school year, after resisting numbers and letter grades on student work for nearly nine weeks, after countless hours of writing narrative feedback to students and teaching them to write narrative feedback to one another, yesterday, I wrote letters next to my students’ names. Our beautiful conversations ended in, well, grades. Did I do this no-grades thing all wrong?

Teachers have used narrative feedback, well, forever. Every time we encourage, suggest, and nudge a student to try something new or to try again, we are giving narrative feedback.  And when we write on student papers  and blogs suggestions for revisions or kind requests to “do-over,” we are using narrative feedback. However, when a letter grade or number accompanies that feedback, the potential for deeper learning, the stretching of thinking tends to end; students seem to pay more attention to the grade than the feedback. (Think about students’ reactions when they see an “A” or a “F” on the top of their papers– are they thinking about what’s next?) In other words, narrative feedback- verbal or written- keeps the conversation about learning moving toward mastery learning, or what I like to call “beyond.” Thus, instead of adding narrative feedback to grades this year, I tried to replace grades with narrative feedback. I say “tried” because I did not succeed.

Narrative Feedback in Reading Literature

For seventh grade reading, our class is a reading workshop model where students read self-selected books while I conduct reading conferences. In mini-lessons, we work on reading standards, and then once a week, students write about their reading experiences on their blogs using the standards we practiced. In this example, Kaitlyn is focusing on how the setting impacts the character and using text evidence to support what the text explicitly says. I ask students to color code “for example” and the citation to illuminate their evidence. The asterisk at the end of the post is Kaitlyn responding to my feedback from the previous week, which is different for most students depending on what I am noticing about their reading experiences.

Below is my narrative feedback to Kaitlyn. You will see that for Kaitlyn I don’t comment on the evidence of standards. Perhaps I should have started with that (or noted it at all), but I wanted to continue a conversation we’ve been having about stretching her reading experiences and give us something to talk about in our next face-to-face conference. You will also notice that I use qualitative words like “beautiful” and “great,” which is rather subjective, but as a reader, I have an aesthetic response and feel the need to express that though some teachers may not like this sort of assessment. (You’ll also notice many typos in my feedback here. I write or dictate about 90 of these each week. I rush. I don’t proofread. I am working on doing better with this.)

Kaitlyn’s response to mine is appreciative and  not typical. This exchange, I think, shows how she and I are in an ongoing conversation about her reading, which goes beyond mere standards.  Of my 90 reading students, about half respond to my feedback similarly and weekly; the others respond intermittently, so I conference daily with students about their reading and, on Fridays, I work with small groups to guide them in the process of reading and responding to feedback.

Narrative Feedback in Composition

For seventh grade composition, one piece of writing we took through the writing process is a comparison article. Writers took on the role of a blogger for an online magazine and wrote a point-by-point piece about something they knew well. We worked with the informative essay standards in our writing workshop, and they published their work on their blogs.

As a class, we offered verbal feedback during the writing process — from beginning to end — but once students published their work, it was up to me to assess how well they were meeting the standards. Instead of a grade or percentage, I wrote each student a letter inspired by Mark Barnes’ SE2R (summarize, explain, redirect, resubmit).  Below, I summarize what Stela did in her essay using standards language and explain its function/purpose; then, I make a suggestion for the conclusion.

Stela read my feedback  and then revised  her conclusion adding the question I suggested (the above screenshot is of her revised essay).  For students who really worked through the writing process, I did not suggest revisions.  Like in the reading classes, much of the narrative feedback is verbal, as students are working on the standards, so the feedback for published pieces are mostly summary and explanation based.

The above examples offer a glimpse of how I used narrative feedback in lieu of rubrics, points, and grades for the first eight weeks of school. Knowing I would have to assign a grade to each student at the end of the quarter, I set aside week nine, the final week of the quarter, for conferences — five days — and managed to conduct 170 conferences during class time. It is here where I am wondering if I failed. What does a final grade do for learning? Does a final grade continue, wrap-up, change, or just end the learning conversation?

End-of -Quarter Grade Conferences

In week nine of the quarter, while composition students worked on projects to teach conventions and literature students took a test that synthesized the quarter, I met with students one-on-one to review evidence from the prior eight weeks, make goals for second quarter, and, yes, decide on a grade.

I created a standards-based grade sheet, gave it to students to self-assess, and then used the standards and their evidence to guide our grade conversation.

For example, composition students came to our conference with their self-assessment of their informative writing, narrative writing, writing for short periods,  the writing process, use of technology, and speaking and listening; they brought their notebook (evidence of writing for short periods of time); and I pulled up their blog on my laptop (evidence of their informational writing skills). We reviewed all their artifacts and our memories of class.

And then, then, we talked about where they fit into these “grade” categories: A,B, C, D, U (unsatisfactory). I developed definitions for each letter blending language from colleagues (teachers, social workers, administrators) and Marzano (see Kelly Mogk’s article). We had a short conversation (some longer than others) about which category best captures the evidence and experiences:

• A: I can show a lot of evidence having completed all of the tasks for these standards, which shows I can do it/apply it consistently. Also, I can show with evidence that  I am taking risks and going  beyond what was taught/expected including in-depth inferences, extensions, and elaboration in the tasks/activities/assignments. I do not require much supervision when doing this. I can even help others.
• B: I can show a lot of evidence of these standards having completed all of the tasks. There are no major errors or things left out regarding the simpler details or skills taught; I have tried the more complex tasks/skills, but I do not consistently do the harder parts like in-depth analysis, elaboration, or extending my understanding beyond the standard.
• C: I can show most of this evidence, missing a few tasks, which shows my understanding of the simpler details, skills, and information. I do not have much evidence of the more complex thinking of this (there are inconsistencies). With help, I can do the harder things, but I need supervision during the task and as I revise, which shows I cannot do it on my own consistently yet.
• D: All (or most) of my evidence is partial or incomplete, which shows I have tried the standards but cannot do the basic parts or lack commitment to finishing at this point. (Let’s talk about why – absences, effort, use of class time, time outside of class, focus.)
• U: I do not have evidence of this. I haven’t tried it. (Let’s talk about why- absences, effort, resistance, focus, use of class time.)

Our beautiful conversations ended in, well, grades. We decided on just one letter to represent  learning that defies any easy measurement — but not before I told the students why, up until then, I had resisted putting a number or letter on their work: I told them that learning is a process and that today we are taking time to talk about what we’ve done together and where we are going next. I told them (lectured a bit) that, moving forward,  I hoped they would find ways to take the skills we are learning “beyond.”

Defining “beyond”:

• take risks,
• imagine what else you might say or add that was not in the assignment or project,
• take what we do together and make it your own, and
• propose another way to capture your thinking that I did not/could not imagine for you.

Did I fail at the no-grade thing?

I feel pretty good about the narrative feedback approach. Between the face-to-face daily conferences and the online weekly conversations with students,  I am getting to know what these human beings need from me to stretch their learning. Still, I am concerned about the mixed message and the end-goal.  Is all this narrative feedback so that, in the end, they can point to the “A” and say that they have evidence that they’ve gone “beyond”? I think I just want one student (okay more than one) to say, “I don’t need a letter to tell me that I am learning a lot.”

So did I do this no-grades thing wrong? Did I undo the hard work of the quarter by talking about grades? Was there another way to do this that I did not see?