John Spencer on Accountability

I wrote a post about my disgust with the word accountability, and John Spencer left a very powerful comment that defines accountability better than I could have:

I use the word accountability in my class, but I define it as "mutual trust." We keep each other accountable by giving an account of what we're learning - conferences, portfolios, informal meetings.


Accountability should mean that when you wander off too far, there is a group of people calling you back and saying, "Look, you belong here. You are important to us."


When I think of authentic accountability, it is the sense of transparency and honesty and trust that bonds relationships. Does my wife keep me accountable? Yep, by asking me about life and engaging in conversation and spurring thought, but not by punishing me. Do my friends keep me accountable? Yep, for the same reasons.


I'm not ready to ditch the term altogether. I do, however, want to to define it in a non-behaviorist way.

It's important to note that we need people to "go too far". For without them, how would we ever know what was "far enough". Because we need these people, we can't simply use accountabilty as a punisher - because if we do, who in their right mind would ever volunteer to be such a pioneer?

We need to address our current use of the word accountability, because we are gaining mere compliance at the cost of stifling and smothering ingenuity, creativity, engagement and progress.

Assessment and Technology

You can't walk three feet into a teacher professional development event without tripping over sessions that focus on technology.

But we know there are cute ways to integrate technology into everyday learning and there are authentic ways to integrate. It's mostly just cute to use a word processor to add colours to your font, but it's a hell-of-a lot more authentic if you include hyper-links for your sources.

In our mania for testing, some have decided that simply taking multiple choice examinations and putting them on a computer and rifling the bubble sheets through a computerized scanner is authentic when really this is hardly even cute. It's one of the least imaginative ways to use technology to facilitate learning that I can think of. (It's only slightly more imaginative than posting the marks on-line for parents to see)

What's a more authentic way of integrating technology into testing?

What if we could assess children while they are still learning? What if we didn't force them to focus on how well they are learning, so they could focus mostly on what they are learning?

What would that look like?

First let's agree we have to stop asking kids to show us what they know by doing things they hate.

If we want to know if someone is proficient at catching a baseball, how would we assess that? I'm just going to throw this out there, but perhaps we could ask him to play catch with a friend, and we could watch him catch the ball. Or I guess we could ask him a multiple choice question. (Okay, that was snarky.)

We can do a heck-of-a-lot better job integrating technology into our assessment practices. I believe this is where simulations come in. The military and the medical fields have used simulations for some time now where k-12 mostly has not.

Pilots use simulators to hone their skills while an instructor assesses.

Did you catch that?

The learner is actually able to use the assessment tool, the simulator, as a learning tool while the teacher is able to use the simulator as an assessment tool.

Can you remember the last unit, mid-term or final exam that you actually learned from?

The kinds of exams we give now tend to be multiple choice and they serve more as a gotcha tool than a learning tool. These are exactly the kinds of assessments that halt learning in the name of measurement. These kinds of tests are not even diagnostic assessments - that is, they do not assess children for the purpose of finding out why the student has a low score - rather multiple choice examinations are merely for identifying who scores low and classifies them as such.

This is why there is no substitute for what a teacher can see and hear when observing and interacting with students while they are learning, and the proper use of technology, such as simulations and games, can help teachers more effectively and efficiently facilitate such authentic assessments.

Assessment Simplified

Too many people make assessment far more complicated than it needs to be. Here's how I simplify assessment into about as simple a way as I can think of:

There are two steps to assessment: you gather information about student learning and you share that information with others such as the student, parents and administration. Occasionally, you might add the hint of an evaluation, but otherwise students should experience their successes and failures not as reward and punishment but as information. Because homo sapiens can only ever experience grades as reward or punishment, we don't need them to gather or share this information about student learning.

The worst kinds of assessments encourage students to do only what they are already good at and hide their mistakes so that the teacher can judge. The best kinds of assessments encourage students to take risks and make their mistakes transparent for the teacher to use as a way to plot future learning. In other words, assessment is less about gotcha and more about diagnosing learning.

Just like learning, assessment should be about working with kids to construct and apply their understandings to create and perform for a purpose and in a context.

civil rights movement for our time

Politics tends to polarize issues. There is no shortage of topics that the left and the right are all to willing to engage in political duals.

But have you noticed that whether you are speaking with a liberal or a conservative, a Democrat or a Republican, or reading the Washington Post or Globe and Mail, almost everyone who may be progressive in other areas are indistinguishable from Fox News?

Have you noticed that Obama's education policy's simply took Bush's No Child Left Behind and added...

...more testing.

But this time the tests carry with them even more bribes and threats (read as Race to the Top and mass firings like Central Falls and Rhode Island). It all brings new meaning to Maslow's Maxim:

He that is good with a hammer tends to think everything is a nail.

When Tony Blair said the three most important fields for government to concern themselves with should be education, education and education, he was profoundly correct; however, when it comes to education, far too many people are simply ignorant towards what it means to provide excellent, progressive education for all.

The gaping void that exists between policy makers like Arne Duncan and real educators like Linda Darling-Hammond are inescapably gargantuan.

And the gap isn't getting any smaller.

Hence why many people are calling the issues around education reform the civil rights movement for our times.

Grading Moratorium: Chad Sansing

Chad Sansing has joined the Grading Moratorium. Want to join? Here's how.

Chad Sansing
Charlottesville, Virginia, United States
Grade 8
Language Arts & Civics
School Development

At what stage of the abolish grading game are you?

At present I have a request to abolish grading in my classroom under review by my school management team, of which [disclosure] I am a part, though I will abstain from any kind of vote on approval of my request. The team is made up of teachers, parents, community representatives, and our school co-founders.

In essence, I'm asking to trade away grades in return for increased teacher accountability for narrative feedback and reporting and increased opportunities for student self-assessment, peer critique, and expert mentoring.

In the past, I facilitated standards-based assessment and reporting pilots in my own classroom and across a department. I got my principal's permission for my pilot and a district waiver for the department pilot.

Why do you want to or why did you abolish grading?

Grades are the McGuffin of public education.

Learning is evident in students' lives and work. We should be facilitating and sharing opportunities - call them assessments if you still like that word (I do) - that showcase student learning in obvious and transparent ways.

We should not be juking stats or using numbers and letters in painfully brash ways to control children for adults' political and economic ends.

I want to abolish grading to help scale-up approaches that represent excellent student learning and work as they are.

What do you do in place of grading?

We use a mix of student self-assessment and teacher feedback to move learning forward in our class. Students design projects and assess them at the end using criteria that they create, negotiate with me, or borrow from me. As students work on the projects, they use entrance and exit slips to set daily goals and reflect on what they did to meet them. I look at the plans, entrance and exit slips, and self-assessments and suggest next steps and resources based on what I see. Sometimes students ask for help with a particular bit of research or learning, and sometimes I see a discrepancy between their work and their perception of it and we look at exemplars and/or possible next steps to help align students' notions of excellence with the quality of their work.

I also used some traditional grading last year in a school-wide A/B/Not Yet Mastered reporting scheme.

How do you establish a grade if you have no grades?

This year I have requested to report out on students' learning using narrative comments and some kind of progress- and mastery-based account of students progress through state standards. I do not anticipate establishing grades,

Last year I used students' self-assessments, rubrics, and some straight percentage scores on low-level assessments used to measure students' mastery of state content in support of larger rubric- and student-assessed projects. I don't endorse percentage scoring; it was a step backwards for me taken in response to fears and frustrations about standardized testing. I'm ambivalent about using rubrics; they're not an assessment strategy in and of themselves. Care should be taken with rubrics to make sure they incorporate students' voices and notions of excellence, as well as negotiated criteria for excellence and opportunities for reflection and revision. If student learning is its own obvious and compelling proof, then I don't think rubrics are any more or less necessary than authentic, quality feedback from a teacher, from peers, and from mentors.

In so much as a rubric - or any other measure - keeps learning inside the classroom, in a closed individual-student-to-teacher "network," it should be eschewed.

What fears do you have about abolishing grading?

I went through my long, dark night of the school regarding standardized test scores, AYP, and school-improvement last Fall. I carry a lot of anxiety about whether or not my teaching, in general, helps my students and contributes to the viability of my school. I want this to be a useful anxiety that pushes me to be accountable to my students and their learning by facilitating access to authentic learning and the creation of excellent work inside and outside the classroom with caring teachers, peers, and mentors.

Are you willing to speak with others who are interested in abolishing grading?

Of course.

Email csansing@gmail.com
Tweet @chadsansing
Consider http://classroots.org and http://coopcatalyst.wordpress.com

Real learning is found in children not data

Anything that's worth learning is worth doing in a context and for a purpose.

This takes time because learning is messy and real learning is really messy, and yet today's test and punish accountability is squeezing this kind of learning out. Ironically, it is the skill & drill kinds of learning that standardized test measure that are taking precedent over real learning. This is exactly why parents need to be concerned when they see rising test scores.

Many teachers feel compelled to teach to the test in fear of the threats or because they're enticed by the bribes. What's sad is high test scores may give teachers their merit pay and politicians their ever rising scores while giving the students nothing they really need.

How do we derail this bastardized kind of education reform?

We have to abandon our mania for reducing everything to numbers. Yes we need measures for learning, but they don't have to be reductionist or competitive in nature. 

So if grades and test scores are not the answer to "How do we measure learning?", then what is? 

The answer: Real learning is found in the children, not the data. If you want to know if your child is attending an excellent school and is receiving an exemplary education, watch them when they are not in school. 

Do they come home excited about what they did that day? Not only can they read, but do they want to read? Do they talk your ear off about the discussions they had with their peers? Are they rifling through the garage or kitchen seeking out materials for their very own science experiments? Do they relish the opportunity to learn from their mistakes and rethink their perceptions and understandings? Can they take what they learned and apply it to solve new problems?

Perhaps John Dewey makes the best case for learning in a context and for a purpose in his book Experience and Education:

What avail is it to win prescribed amounts of information about geography and history, to win ability to read and write, if in the process the individual loses his own soul: loses his appreciation of things worth while, of the values to which these things are relative; if he loses desire to apply what he has learned and, above all, loses the ability to extract meaning from his future experiences as they occur?

The good news is that kids tell us all the time when school loses its relevance: "When am I ever going to use this?" or "Does this count on the report card?" or "Will this be on the test?" These statements indicate the kids are lost, and rather than blaming the kids for saying it, we need to be thankful they are giving us the heads up - we need to take this feedback and reconnect the kids to their learning. Until we do so, nothing else will mean much.

The most important attitude we can instill in children is the desire to go on learning. When we fail to make learning relevant, in a context and for a purpose, we fail kids more than they could ever fail us.