6 reasons to reject ClassDojo

“I like it because you get rewarded for your good behavior — like a dog does when it gets a treat.”

-Grade 3 student on why he likes ClassDojo

Recently an article in The New York Times took a closer look at an App called ClassDojo.

While some see ClassDojo as a revolutionary new way to teach and manage a classroom, I see it as more of the same primitive behaviourist practices that should be abandoned. The philosophy and pedagogy behind ClassDojo is nothing new. Carrots, sticks, rewards, punishments, bribes and threats have been around for a long time. ClassDojo simply takes adult imposed manipulation and tracks it with mindless efficiency.

ClassDojo reminds me of Gerald Bracey who said:

"There is a growing technology of testing that permits us now to do in nanoseconds things that we shouldn't be doing at all."

Bracey was speaking of standardized testing, but I think the spirit of his words can be applied more generally:

Poor Pedagogy + Technology = Accelerated Malpractice

Here are 6 reasons to reject ClassDojo:

• ClassDojo gets character education wrong. Children's psychiatrist Ross Greene reminds us that when a situation demands a child's lagging skills, we get unsolved problems. Because we know that misbehaviour is a symptom of much more complex and interesting problems, we need to see these unsolved problems as teachable moments. ClassDojo reduces children to punitive measures where the misbehaviour is seen as nothing more than an inconvenience to the teacher that needs to be snuffed out. ClassDojo judges and labels students by ranking and sorting them and distracts even well-intentioned adults from providing children with the feedback and the guidance they need to learn.

• ClassDojo gets motivation wrong. There are two kinds of motivation: intrinsic & extrinsic. The problem here is that we need to stop asking ‘How motivated are my students?’ and start asking ‘How are my students motivated?’. Motivation is not a single entity that you either have a lot or little of. There are two kinds: intrinsic and extrinsic. If you are intrinsically motivated then you are doing something for its own sake; if you are extrinsically motivated, you are driven to do something, or not do something, based on a reward or punishment that may be waiting for you. But that is not even the interesting part—the real catch here is that these two kinds of motivation tend to be inversely related. When you grow students' extrinsic motivation by bribing them (or threatening them), you run the risk of growing their extrinsic motivation while their intrinsic love for what you want them to learn shrivels. Rewards can only ever gain short-term compliance from students when what we really desire is their authentic engagement.

• The public nature of ClassDojo is inappropriate. Making this kind of information for all to see is nothing more than a way of publicly naming and shaming children. I know very few adults who would put up with this kind of treatment at their workplace, so then why would we ever subject children to this? A doctor would never post their patients' health records publicly, and an accountant would not post their clients' tax records publicly. A lawyer would not post their clients' billing information publicly, nor would a teacher post their students' Individual Program Plans for all to see. So why would a teacher ever think that it would be appropriate to share ClassDojo publicly? To do so would be unprofessional and malpractice.

• ClassDojo pits adults and children against each other. Teachers who use ClassDojo spend a great deal of their day catching kids being good and catching kids being bad. Point systems, like token economies, pit children and adults against each other and ultimately rupture relationships through power struggles. With ClassDojo, children come too see their teachers less as safe and caring allies and more as judges-in-waiting whom they learn to keep their distance. 

• ClassDojo can only ever be experienced as coercive and manipulative. Like Alfie Kohn says, rewards and punishments are not opposites -- rather they are two sides of the same coin, and they don't buy us very much other than short-term compliance. ClassDojo is by definition a way to do things to kids when we should be working with them. And for those who use ClassDojo only for the positives and the rewards, remember that with-holding a reward or removing a privilege can only ever be experienced as a punishment. The best teachers understand what Jerome Bruner meant when he said, "Children should experience their successes and failures not as reward and punishment, but as information."

• ClassDojo prepares children to be ruled by others. School already places a premium on blind obedience and mindless compliance, and an App like ClassDojo that implicitly and explicitly makes following the rules the primary goal of school prepares children to be ruled by others. When we allow operant conditioning to infect the classroom, we see children less as active, free thinkers and more as passive, conditional objects. Under these conditions, Attention Deficit Hyperactive Disorder (ADHD) is less likely to be a problem than Compliant Acquiescent Disorder (CAD). It's important to remember that mindless compliance is responsible for far more of the atrocities against human kind than needless disobedience.

In Japan, a dojo is considered a special place that is well cared for by its users, so it is customary that shoes be left at the door. Similarly, I propose that schools be considered a special place that should be well cared for physically and pedagogically, so it should be customary that before entering schools Apps like ClassDojo be left where they belong -- at the door.

What if a child is manipulative?

When compliance becomes an adult's ultimate goal with children, we will resort to, and justify, manipulation, which includes rewards, punishments, carrots, sticks, bribes and threats.

So what's the problem?

Show me a child who manipulates others, and I will show you a child who has grown up being manipulated.

Not only does the end not justify the means, but a well intentioned, but misdirected, means can ruin the end.

Here's what I mean.

Many years ago, I made a conscious decision to try and abolish rewards and punishments from my teaching and parenting tool box. (Here are all of my posts on rethinking discipline)

The inspiration for this move came from being a miserable teacher, looking for change. When I read Alfie Kohn's book The Schools Children Deserve, I came across a quote that would re-shape my mindset for working with children. The quote belongs to Jerome Bruner, but it has become my teaching and parenting mantra:

"Children should experience their successes and failures not as reward and punishment but as information."

There are many profound reasons to adopt such a mindset, but here's one of my favourite.

When my students or son and daughter try and manipulate me with bribes and threats or rewards and punishments to get me to do whatever they want me to do, I can turn to them and honestly say, "I don't use rewards and punishments on you, so don't you bribe and threaten me."

When I call children on their attempts to manipulate me, I don't get into power struggles or arguments because they know I don't use manipulation to get them to do what I want. They know that I don't do things to them to get what I want -- I work with them. I inspire them. I don't manipulate them.

So when they try and manipulate me, I have the best argument for rejecting their manipulation.

I don't manipulate them, so I won't tolerate them manipulating me.

And they know it.

Education students ponder the profession

This was written by Lauryn, Lauren, Jeni, Jonell, Callie, JoAnne, Erica, Jimmy, Brandon, Katie and Alexis who are education students in Wisconsin. As I read their post, I get a very real kind of deja vu as I reconnected with how I felt when I was first learning to become a teacher. Education students embody a very peculiar mixture of enthusiasm and uncertainty. 

Great teachers are not born -- they are created and educated. Education students have a daunting challenge -- they need to remember how school was for them, not so they can replicate it, but so they can make it better for their future students. This requires a boatload of patience and reflection that too few people possess.

by Lauryn, Lauren, Jeni, Jonell, Callie, JoAnne, Erica, Jimmy, Brandon, Katie and Alexis

“Relationships can improve the classroom experience and reduce the stress that students experience on a daily basis.” 

- Jimmy B. 

 
We are Lauryn, Lauren, Jeni, Jonell, Callie, JoAnne, Erica, Jimmy, Brandon, Katie, Alexis. We are students in the Introduction to Education class in Wisconsin. Thank you to Joe Bower for letting us contribute to his blog.

“Treat a child as though he already is the person he’s capable of becoming,” said Haim Ginott. This mindset shows that every child can grow and prosper if you give them the tools to do so. As teachers, those tools could be used to offer not just an academic relationship with a student, but also a personal one as well. This personal level indicates that the teacher does indeed care for the student, therefore inviting the student to be more engaged. When students feel connections with teachers, the students academic achievement will increase.

Although relationships are essential, statistics show that teachers tend to build them with only ideal students, such as those with good work habits and initiative. The kids that need it the most, such as ones with behavioral issues and decreased motivation to achieve, are often overlooked. As a teacher, you need to not succumb to favoritism, regardless of how perfect that student may be. Treat every child with the same respect and interest or else you risk leaving one child behind. After all, you are not just a teacher, you are also a friend and sometimes a parent or even just a shoulder to cry on. The true challenge is to successfully fill those roles.

Classroom Management

Effective classroom management is possibly the most important thing in education. The classroom can either have a very positive atmosphere or a negative one. How the teacher handles the disruptions, problems, and emergencies reflects on the students' attitude during class. Many students have difficult home lives and support systems which could make school the only safe place for them. However, if the teacher has poor classroom management, students will have a poor experience and a negative attitude towards the school and/or teacher. This is why classroom management is so important.

Rewarding students can have a positive and negative effect on them. It can provoke students into thinking too highly of themselves but also help kids who don’t do well in school learn the ways of appropriate behavior. Giving students a proper reward can give them the motivation to do their best in school. However, schools who use certain reward systems like gold stars or point systems may give the students the impression that the school is degrading them. Sometimes all students need is to instill good behavior in themselves, and that can be encouraged by treating them like the individuals they are.

Classroom Discipline Without Embarrassment

Have you ever been so flat-out embarrassed by someone that you just wanted to crawl under a rock and never come out? What about being embarrassed by someone who had the responsibility of educating you? There have been countless reports of teachers embarrassing their students all across the country. Some parents have been so angry that legal matters have been brought into play. There was one particular story that stuck out to us about a seventh grader who had a lot of difficulty controlling his stuttering condition. During school one particular day, the class was reading from a computer magazine and the new teacher decided to pick this student to read a passage. He began to speak, instantly jumbling his words. The teacher then interrupted him and says, “Shaun, what’s wrong? Can you not read? Why the heck do you stutter so much? D-d-d-d- you ha-ha-have a p-p-prob-problem reading?” The teacher then proceeded to pick a new student to read. After the student who took Shaun’s place finishes reading, the teacher looked at Shaun and said, “See Shaun? That’s what READING looks like.”

We found this particular story to be absolutely appalling, offensive and cruel. Not only is this not an okay attitude for a teacher to exhibit, but it’s not okay for ANYONE to do this. An experience like the one Shaun had will live with him the rest of his life. As kids, we remember the most minute details and tend to take everything to heart.

Rather than advising a student when surrounded by another group of peers, one should take the approach of going to the student and asking quietly, “What are you doing?” (Wait for a response.) “What are you supposed to be doing?” (Wait for a response.) “When will you start?” Using this approach puts the student at ease. It avoids feeling of embarrassment the student would feel if you were to address it in front of the whole class.

Embarrassing your students is by far the worst choice you could make. Most students who are quiet in the classrooms are this way because they are nervous that their peers will make fun of them, but it would make them feel even worse if it was the teacher who did it. Embarrassing your students will just cause them to not want to come to school anymore in fear of it happening again and again. If your students are doing something embarrassing you can simply pull them away from the crowd and try and help them with the situation, rather than announce it in front of everyone.

The Importance of Boundaries in the Classroom

The personalities of students are a diverse range. In each class you teach, you will experience, from students, both love and hate. Often, after being with the same group of students for a full school year, you will develop close connections with some of your pupils. It is these connections that cause you to run the risk of blurring the lines between student and friend. A student-teacher relationship must be maintained in order to stimulate the most productive learning environment for all students.

There are many factors that may cause a student to latch on to a teacher and overstep their boundaries. One that I have experienced is the age of a teacher. Last year, a new teacher was hired at our school, fresh out of college. She has made it a priority to be close with her students. She invites kids to hang out in her room and spend time with her during school hours and to talk to her about things that are going on in their lives. Many students have taken a strong liking to her and she has developed a close, friend-like relationship with many of her students, which would seem like a positive thing. However, once class begins, the effects of these relationships have made it difficult for students to understand their boundaries with the teacher.

For some students who need a stable relationship with an adult, this relationship can help with their esteem and provide them with a healthy role model, thus influencing the student's behavior. Also, this relationship can take away the pressures of being in a classroom with people you may not necessarily want to be around.

Some students may not be able to properly differentiate between friends and teachers. Students have the tendency to cling to teachers who provide them with consolation and help in their times of struggle. This makes for awkward moments in the classroom and the chance of upsetting other students who are hurt by your lack of a relationship with them. Also, this may affect the amount of respect that the students have in the classroom. Friends are often not afraid to act rowdy and disrespectfully around their other friends and when a student believes that the teacher is their close friend, that respect won’t disappear, but change. Your class will become disruptive and unruly.

Boundaries are vital in your classroom management style. You must be sure to be kind to your students without inviting them to cling to you and disrupt the learning of the other students in the class.

For those of us considering the education field, these are some of the topics that are close to our hearts. When we enter the classroom, we will strive to build the healthy relationships in comfortable learning environments that benefited us in our learning. The problem is, we are only 11 students. We cannot change your classrooms. That’s up to you. Reach out to your students in an appropriate, healthy way. Provide your students with someone to turn to in their times of personal need. Be the role model that many of your students need.

3 reasons to stop rewarding and punishing children

Teachers and schools make thousands of decisions, big and small, everyday. Just as we would hope that our doctors and hospitals are making decisions based on evidence and research, so should teachers and schools.

Should schools use rewards and punishments on their students?

Here are 3 reasons why schools and teachers need to stop using rewards and punishments:

1. We want children to do the right things for the right reasons. Too often rewards distract children from doing the right thing for the right reason. Instead of being virtuous and doing the right thing regardless of whether anyone is watching or waiting to catch them, too many children (and adults) will do good only when they stand to personally gain -- then we lament about why some children (and adults) become grade grubbers, praise junkies and bribe bait. We can't teach children to do the right thing with carrots and sticks. We want children to share and adults to slow down in playground zones not because they might get caught -- and yet when we reward and punish children to do the right thing, we teach them to look over their shoulder before they do good or bad.

2. There are two kinds of motivation: intrinsic & extrinsic. The problem here is that we need to stop asking ‘How motivated are my students?’ and start asking ‘How are my students motivated?’. Motivation is not a single entity that you either have a lot or little of. There are two kinds: intrinsic and extrinsic. If you are intrinsically motivated then you are doing something for its own sake; if you are extrinsically motivated, you are driven to do something, or not do something, based on a reward or punishment that may be waiting for you. But that is not even the interesting part—the real catch here is that these two kinds of motivation tend to be inversely related. When you grow students' extrinsic motivation by bribing them (or threatening them), you run the risk of growing their extrinsic motivation while their intrinsic love for what you want them to learn shrivels. Rewards can only ever gain short-term compliance from students when what we really desire is their authentic engagement.

3. To a child, an adult's praise and presents are cheap -- it's our presence that they value the most. There is absolutely nothing wrong with recognizing children -- problems occur, however, when our recognition is manipulative and controlling. Too often the children we deem the most undeserving of our recognition and attention are those who need us the most -- too often rewards and punishments rupture our relationships with children. My teaching and parenting mantra is borrowed directly from Jerome Bruner who once said that, "Children should experience success and failure not as reward and punishment but as information". This mindset lays the foundation for shifting away from doing things to children and moving towards working with them.

Further reading:

Punished by Rewards by Alfie Kohn

Why we do What we do? by Edward Deci

Drive by Daniel Pink

The education question we should be asking

This was written by Alfie Kohn who writes and speaks on parenting and education. Kohn tweets here and his website is here. This post was originally found here.

by Alfie Kohn

“While we’re at it, maybe we should just design classrooms without windows. And, hey, I’ll bet kids would really perform better if they spent their days in isolation.” My friend was reacting (facetiously, of course) to a new study that found kindergarteners scored better on a test of recall if their classroom’s walls were completely bare. A room filled with posters, maps, and the kids’ own art constituted a “distraction.”

The study, published last month in Psychological Science [1] and picked up by Science World Report, the Boston Globe, and other media outlets, looked at a whopping total of 24 children. A research assistant read to them about a topic such as plate tectonics or insects, then administered a paper-and-pencil test to see how many facts they remembered. On average, kids in the decorated rooms were “off task” 39 percent of the time and had a “learning score” of 42 percent. The respective numbers for those in the bare rooms were 28 percent and 55 percent.

Now if you regularly read education studies, you won’t be surprised to learn that the authors of this one never questioned, or even bothered to defend, the value of the science lessons they used — whether they were developmentally appropriate or presented effectively, whether they involved anything more than reading a list of facts or were likely to hold any interest for 5-year-olds. Nor did the researchers vouch for the quality of the assessment. Whatever raises kids’ scores (on any test, and of any material) was simply assumed to be a good thing, and anything that lowers scores is bad.

Hence the authors’ concern that children tend to be “distracted by the visual environment.” (Translation: They may attend to something in the room other than the facts an adult decided to transmit to them.) And hence my friend’s wry reductio ad absurdum response.

Alas, “sparse” classrooms had their own problems. There, we’re told, children “were more likely to be distracted by themselves or by peers.” Even if we strip everything off the walls, those pesky kids will still engage in instructionally useless behaviors like interacting with one another or thinking about things that interest them. The researchers referred to the latter (thinking) as being “distracted by themselves.” Mark that phrase as the latest illustration of the principle that, in the field of education, satire has become obsolete.

Our attention seems to be fixed relentlessly on the means by which to get students to accomplish something. We remain undistracted by anything to do with ends — what it is they’re supposed to accomplish, and whether it’s really valuable. Perhaps that’s why schools of education typically require “methods” classes but not goals classes. In the latter, students might be invited to read this study and ask whether a child could reasonably regard the lesson as a distraction (from her desire to think, talk, or look at a cool drawing on the wall). Other students might object on the grounds that it’s a teacher’s job to decide what students ought to do and to maximize their “time on task.” But such conversations — Time on what task? Why is it being taught? Who gets to decide? — are shut down before they begin when all we talk about (in ed. schools, in journals, in professional development sessions) is how to maximize time on whatever is assigned.[2]

Those of us who are disturbed, even outraged, by what’s being done to our schools in the name of “reform” — imposing ramped-up, uniform, prescriptive standards; high-stakes testing; and pressure that’s both vertical (with kindergartens now resembling really bad first-grade classrooms) and horizontal (with little time for music and the arts, recess, student-designed projects, or any subjects not being tested) — ought to consider how this agenda is quietly supported by research that relies on test scores as the primary, or even the sole, dependent variable.

Then, too, there’s the way such research is described by journalists. Most articles inEducation Week, for example, ought to include this caveat:

Please keep in mind that phrases such as “effective policies,” “higher achievement,” “better results,” or “improved outcomes” refer only to scores on standardized tests. These tests are not only poor indicators of meaningful intellectual accomplishment but tend to measure the socioeconomic status of the students or the amount of time they have been trained in test-taking skills.

The idea that kindergarteners ought to block everything out but facts about plate tectonics reminded me of an essay called “Can Teachers Increase Students’ Self-Control?” (as usual, the question was “can,” not “should”) written by a cognitive psychologist named Daniel Willingham. He offered as a role model a hypothetical child who looks through his classroom window and sees “construction workers pour[ing] cement for a sidewalk” but “manages to ignore this interesting scene and focus on his work.”[3]

But what was the “work”? Was it a fill-in-the-blank waste-of-the-time that would lead any child to look out the window or at the wall? Or was it something so intellectually valuable that we’d be justified in saying, “Hey, this really is worth it”? I don’t know. But for Willingham, as for so many others, it apparently doesn’t matter: If the teacher assigned it, that’s reason enough to ignore the interesting real-life lesson in how a sidewalk is created, to refrain from asking the teacher why that lesson can’t be incorporated into the curriculum. An exemplary student is one who stifles his curiosity, exercises his self-control, and does what he’s told.

Is a given lesson worth teaching? I may not always be sure of the answer, but I’m pretty sure that’s the question we should be asking — rather than employing discipline, or demanding self-discipline, or pulling stuff off the walls in order that students will devote their attention to something whose value is simply taken for granted.

NOTES

1. Anna V. Fisher, Karrie E. Godwin, and Howard Seltman, “Visual Environment, Attention Allocation, and Learning in Young Children: When Too Much of a Good Thing May Be Bad,” Psychological Science, DOI: 10.1177/0956797614533801. Published online 21 May 2014.

2. A couple of years ago I wrote an article called “Teaching Strategies That Work! (Just Don’t Ask ‘Work to Do What?‘)”, which focused on a research review challenging the effectiveness of discovery-based learning without ever asking what constitutes effectiveness. There, too, my point was that if we don’t ask what we’re looking for and argue about the values that underlie our answers, we’ll end up by default with a goal like higher test scores — or, in the case of classroom management strategies, compliance.

3. Daniel T. Willingham, “Can Teachers Increase Students’ Self-Control?” American Educator, Summer 2011, p. 23. I offered this example in my book The Myth of the Spoiled Child (Da Capo Press, 2014) and, in the same chapter, cited a pair of studies by Angela Duckworth and her colleagues that found an elite group of middle schoolers performed better in the National Spelling Bee if they were higher in grit, “whereas spellers higher in openness to experience — defined as preferring using their imagination, playing with ideas, and otherwise enjoying a complex mental life — perform[ed] worse.” The study also found that the most effective preparation strategy was “solitary deliberate practice activities” rather than, say, reading books. Thus, if enjoying a complex mental life (or reading for pleasure) interferes with performance in a one-shot contest to see who can spell more obscure words correctly — and if sufficient grittiness to spend time alone memorizing lists of words helps to achieve that goal — this is regarded as an argument in favor of grit. But of course the unasked question once again concerns ends rather than means: How important is it that kids who are exceptionally good spellers win more championships? Should we favor any strategy or personality feature that contributes to that objective (or to anything that could be described as “higher achievement”) regardless of what it involves and what it displaces?

Is it this simple?

Success -- it's not always what you see

Four years ago I wrote a post titled What leads to success? I took an old TEDtalk and explained how testsandgrades do not lead to success.

When I came across this graphic on Twitter via Greg Miller, I have a couple questions:

Students. Have you ever worked really hard and learned a lot about something and received a low grade? Have you ever slacked off and learned almost nothing but received a high grade?

Parents. Can you think of someone you went to school with, and you knew they were really smart, but they always received low grades? Can you think of someone who received really high grades but you knew they were a dolt and that they had, at best, a superficial understanding?

Teachers. Can you think of a student who you knew to be a critical and creative thinker but often scored low on standardized tests? Can you think of a student who you knew to be quite a shallow and superficial thinker, but often scored high?

When I ask these questions to students, parents and teachers, I often get a lot of head nodding. People seem to understand the point.

Testsandgrades are broken. 

They don't tell us what we think they tell to us and they distract us from learning.

For an authentic alternative to testsandgrades, check out my chapter Reduced to Numbers: from concealing to revealing learning.

Dear Google, You Should Have Talked to Me First

This was written by Jen Marten who has been a teacher for 25 years. She is a National Board Certified Teacher, and is currently working on her PhD in Curriculum and Instruction. She blogs here and tweets here. This post was originally found here.

by Jen Marten

Dear Google,

I wish you’d talked to teachers like me before you made that $40 million investment in Renaissance Learning.

I’ve seen the damage Accelerated Reader can do.

I witnessed it for the first time when I tutored a struggling 5th grader…eighteen years ago.

He hated to read.

He hated being locked into a level.

He hated the points associated with the books.

But more importantly, he was humiliated when he didn’t earn enough points to join in the monthly party or get to ‘buy’ things with those points at a school store full of junky prizes.

I’ve seen kids run their fingers along the binding of a book, a book they REALLY wanted read, but then hear them say, “But it’s not an AR book,” or “It’s not my level.”

I’ve watched them scramble to read the backs of books or beg a friend for answers so they can get enough points for the grading period.

And I watched it slowly start to unravel S’s love of reading. It’s why I gave her permission to practice a little civil disobedience and Stop Reading for Points.

You see, Google, I’m a reader, and one of the things I’ve loved about teaching is connecting kids with books.

Books that spark their interest.

Books that make them think.

Books that pull on emotions they didn’t know they had.

Books that teach them empathy.

Books that make them laugh and cry.

Books that make them angry at the injustice.

Books that they come back and ask to borrow…five and six years after they leave my class.

Do you know what Accelerated Reader and programs like it are doing to readers these days?

I’ve heard of teachers being reprimanded for not leveling all their classroom books.

I know of school libraries where children have to show the librarian a card with their reading level on it before they can check out books.

I know of kids excited about books being told, “No! That’s not at your level. You can’t check it out. You can’t read it.”

I know of kids who struggle to read in the first place, having to spend an afternoon reading while their classmates who read get a pizza party or a movie or some other special prize.

I know of kids who never pick up a book unless it’s required because the joy of reading has been sucked out of them by leveled reading programs.

I’ve read about teachers who see what I see. Those who lament the Lex-Aisle.

Those who pull from their own memories of AR and how it ruined a great book.

And parents who see their children afraid to read.

Imagine, Google, if you limited your employees the way Accelerated Reader limits our students. How would that impact the creativity of your 20% time?

Oh, I read the Ed Week article that called this investment innovative, but there is NOTHING innovative about Accelerated Reader and their levels and basic comprehension quizzes.

It’s a sad commentary on the state of education in the U.S. when a move like this is praised.

To say I’m disappointed that Google views education through such a narrow lens is an understatement. For a company that has been built on innovation to invest millions into a program that levels books, awards points for low-level knowledge and comprehension, and creates bad data is a travesty.

And you call this personalized learning? What’s personalized about letting a computer system match kids with books?

You’re missing the point about what reading instruction should be, and you are helping to systematically destroy the joy in books.

If you had taken the time to talk to teachers like me, here’s some of the things we would’ve suggested you spend that $40 million on.
Books, lots and lots of books. Ones that aren’t leveled.
Children’s librarians in public libraries across the country.
Picture books, novels, non-fiction, series (many a reluctant reader has been hooked by a series like Captain Underpants or Goosebumps).
Full-time librarians in schools, especially those in high poverty areas where they seem to always get cut.
Um, books. Books kids can take home to keep because we know having books in the home is one of the best ways to increase literacy. (bit.ly/1fGubAj)
Free Little Libraries - take a book, return a book, gather in your neighborhood
More books! So many great authors and genres out there!
e-readers for schools and public libraries to use and loan out.
A Google library of free e-books.
Did I mention books?

I could go on, but I think you get the idea.

If you need a little more research, check out this list I’ve compiled about the downside of reading for rewards.

You really should’ve talked to me first. I could’ve saved you $40 million.

Rethinking Awards Ceremonies and Honour Rolls

St. Basil Elementary and Junior High School in Calgary has decided to end their year-end awards ceremony. Unfortunately, when stories about schools that are trying to make changes like this hit the media, the public can have a hard time suspending judgement long enough to find out what is really going on. (If you need proof of this, take a moment and read some of the explosive comments here.)

If it sounds like I'm in favour of the move away from awards ceremonies that's because I am. In 2007, I worked with my middle school to move away from awards for a few to recognizing all students.

While it may seem counterintuitive to suggest that we should abolish awards ceremonies and honour rolls, this is precisely what the research has been showing us. Alfie Kohn reminds us that "There is a world of difference between getting kids to focus on their performance or achievement and getting them to focus on their learning."

Some people have a hard time grasping the rationale behind removing awards ceremonies, so let's take a moment and address some of the most common myths about moving away from awards.

Myth 1: Awards ceremonies and grades serve a purpose: they act as incentive and motivation for children to learn.

Many people believe that we need to bribe and reward students with grades and honour rolls to motivate them, in my book De-Testing and De-Grading Schools, I write about why this is folly:

Conventional wisdom tells us we grade students to artificially induce their extrinsic motivation to strive for the reward of a high grade, or to avoid the punishment of a low grade. Either way, it is the carrot or the stick that is the driving force. 

The problem here is that we need to stop asking ‘How motivated are my students?’ and start asking ‘How are my students motivated?’. Motivation is not a single entity that you either have a lot or little of. 

There are two kinds: intrinsic and extrinsic. If you are intrinsically motivated then you are doing something for its own sake; if you are extrinsically motivated, you are driven to do something, or not do something, based on a reward or punishment that may be waiting for you. But that is not even the interesting part—the real catch here is that these two kinds of motivation tend to be inversely related. 

When you grow students' extrinsic motivation by bribing them with high grades or threatening them with low grades, you run the risk of growing their extrinsic motivation while their intrinsic love for what you want them to learn shrivels. Grades can only ever gain short-term compliance from students when what we really desire is their authentic engagement. If we give grades and our students are uninterested or disengaged, might it be because they are searching for a more intrinsically motivating reason to learn? I suppose we could use grades to artificially induce children to learn, but I would hope we could help them find a real reason to do so. Needless to say, playing on children’s extrinsic motivation to learn is, at best, a questionable practice.

The problem is not that too few students achieve As -- rather, the real problem is that too many students have come to see collecting As as the purpose of school. Things go very wrong when testsandgrades, awards ceremonies and honour rolls become the primary goal of education.

There is an enormous gap between what we know and what we do. Too often what we admire and aspire to does not align with our actions. If we really want children to become life-long learners then it makes little sense to distract them with artificial bribes and awards. 

Myth 2: Removing awards de-values academics

Replacing awards for a few with recognition for all is not about devaluing anything. In fact, it is about broadening our current narrow vision of what is important by valuing more than just grades in academics. Many honour rolls place an arbitrary premium on core academic subjects while placing less importance on classes that we call options (art, foods & fashion, wood working, etc.) This is about shifting away from valuing only student achievement (read: grades) and moving towards valuing a wide range of students' achievements.

For years, I organized and ran my school's awards ceremony and for years I found a disturbing trend: The same children who received accolades all year for their grades were being marched across the stage multiple times during the year-end ceremony. When you really think about it, grades are rewards and awards ceremonies are awards for getting rewards.

When we used to hand out traditional honour certificates to students, I would grow disheartened to find so many of the certificates left behind on the floor or even in the trash. Many students and parents did not value the certificates. However, when we handed out a personalized recognition poster that celebrated a wide range of students' achievements, including a personal message from their teacher, the students and parents showed far more appreciation. I never found any of these posters on the floor or in the trash. Sometimes I wonder if all students valued these posters because we chose to value all students in a personal way.

Myth 3: Removing awards celebrates mediocrity

What if an entire school's population made the honour roll? What would be the public's reaction? Would this be seen as good news? It's highly unlikely that the school would be given admiration and credit for this. It is far more likely that people would say that the school was being too easy on the kids. 

On the surface, it appears like awards ceremonies and honour rolls are about excellence -- but that's only if excellence is defined as raising standards until failures are created.

Honour rolls and awards ceremonies make success artificially scarce. The allure of winning an award or making the honour roll comes in large part because others will not be allowed to win or make it. If we aspire to making school a great school for all children, then we need to stop making success artificially scarce and exclusive.

When I ran my school's traditional awards ceremony, less than a third of the students were ever invited -- the other two-thirds were left out. When we moved to recognizing all students for their wide variety of successes and strengths, all students and their families were invited to the event. Some of the most thankful parents are those who have children who would never be invited to be recognized by their school's awards ceremonies -- in some cases that's three-quarters of the school.

Too often when schools get around to recognizing things like citizenship, these awards are artificially scarce which means that many students who exhibit good citizenship are arbitrarily ignored.

Why do we devalue something simply because everyone can achieve it? Do we wear dropout rates as a badge of honour? I would hope not. So why do we scoff at schools that celebrate every student? Recognizing every student is no more an exercise in mediocrity than believing all children should graduate from high school. It might be more accurate to say that mediocre schools give awards to only a few students -- great schools recognize all their students.

Myth 4: The real world is a cruel and unjust place where some people win and some people lose -- kids need to learn that the real world doesn't care about them.

I did not become a teacher so that I could merely prepare children to live in a cruel and unjust world. I became a teacher so that I could help children grow up and make the world a better place. Yes, the real world is full of competition that makes winners and losers out of everyone, but we don't need to immerse children in competition to learn this. When we teach children about racism, we don't immerse them in racism. I refuse to subscribe to the notion that because children will one day grow up and have bad things done to them that means we need to do bad things to them in school to get them ready for it.

The real world is not a fixed and known place -- the real world can be made and unmade by the people who live there. Too often, the real world is an excuse to do nothing about the inequities that rob children of their futures. I think there is some truth to what Sydney Harris said, "Anyone who begins to call himself a realist is prepared to do something he is secretly ashamed of doing." I refuse to live in a world that doesn't care about how children feel. And if the real world is that cruel and unjust then I'm going to fight like mad to make the real world a better place and I'm going to take my students with me.

***

Changing schools so that we promote high achievement among all students is not easy. Sometimes the greatest obstacle to changing and improving school is our memory. When some people say they understand what school should look like, they are really saying that they recognize what school was like for them. Too many people are reassured by signs of formal-traditional school and are disturbed by their absence.

That's why when we hear schools trying to make changes to what they've always done, we need to suspend judgement long enough to find out what is really going on, and in the case of abolishing honour rolls and awards ceremonies, the research and rationale are (maybe surprisingly) sound.

For more on rethinking awards ceremonies, I suggest you check out Chris Wejr's blog.

Here's my interview with Doug Dirks on The Homestretch:



Here's my interview on the Simi Sara radio show:



Here's my interview with Jim Brown on CBC radio The 180:

Best. Video on Giving. Ever.

It is not good enough to merely get children to do the right thing -- we need them to do the right things for the right reasons.

Motivation matters.

And only through our relationships can we cultivate the kinds of communities that we would want to live in. Respect, honesty, trust and loyalty, the prerequisites for giving and caring, are only grown out of authentic engagement and real relationships.

Are we teaching this?

It took only six years before I wanted to quit teaching

I started teaching in 2000.

I'm now starting my 14th year.

In my chapter Reduced to Numbers: From Concealing to Revealing Learning, I reflect on my 13 years:

I am not the same teacher I used to be. When I started, I was focused on power and control. I assigned loads of homework, dished out huge penalties for late assignments, assigned punishments for rule-breaking behavior, and averaged marks to determine the students’ final grade. I did some of these things because I was trained to do so in university. However, most of these teaching strategies were being done mindlessly and, for the most part, I was simply teaching the way I was taught.

It took only six years before I wanted to quit teaching. I had become increasingly unhappy with my teaching and my students’ learning. I was tired of laboring through hours and hours of marking, and I hated nagging kids to complete their homework. Instead of students asking “What is this question worth?” I wanted them to actually get excited about the content. I wanted change, and I came close to thinking that change required me to leave the profession.
Instead of pulling the plug on what could have been a short teaching career, I started to question the traditional pedagogy that I had so mindlessly adopted. I began asking questions that would challenge the status quo. Many professional development conferences provide teachers with opportunity to ask questions such as “How do I mark better?” or “How do I get my students to do their homework?” At first glance these look like challenging and provocative questions, but they are still questions that promote more of the same. Far more powerful questions are “Why do I mark?” or “Why do I assign homework?” Investigating the motives for our actions, rather than merely examining our methods of implementation, is a better use of our time, particularly if the subject in question is a belief or habit that we’ve come to accept as a given truth. I have come to see that:

"[t]here is a time to admire the grace and persuasive power of an influential idea, and there is a time to fear its hold over us. The time to worry is when the idea is so widely shared that we no longer even notice it, when it is so deeply rooted that it feels to us like plain common sense. At the point when objections are not answered anymore because they are no longer even raised, we are not in control: we do not have the idea; it has us." (Kohn, 1999a, p.1) 

For too long, I was letting schooling get in the way of my teaching and too many of my teaching practices were based on pedagogy that was at best unhelpful and at worst harmful to my long-term goals. Through critical questioning and extensive research, I came to the conclusion that my pedagogy had to revolve around one priority: learning. If there were things that worked to sabotage learning, then it was my professional responsibility to remove them.

Since 2006, I have worked to identify and remove things like grading that traditional school has done for so long. And when I share this with others, I receive mixed responses. Some listen intently, nodding their heads in agreement, as if deep down they have always sensed something wrong with what Seymour Papert (1988) described as School with a capital S, which is a place that he explains as having a bureaucracy that has its own interests and is not open to what is in the best interest of the children. Unfortunately, when most people close their eyes and think of their Schooling, many have experienced no other kind of School than the one with a capital S. Some listen in shock and awe at how school could even function without such things as grading. The people who have a hard time comprehending how children could learn without extrinsic manipulators concern me the most. They are so invested in traditional schooling that they have never questioned its foundation. Unfortunately, some have a distrustful view of the nature of children; they believe that without grading there would be nothing to stop children from running amok.

Albert Einstein on school

The Children in the Numbers

This was written by Kurtis Hewson and Jim Parson. Hewson is currently a Faculty of Education Associate at the University of Lethbridge, Alberta and an award-winning teacher and school administrator. Parsons is a professor with the Faculty of Education at the University of Alberta with four decades of experience teaching, writing and researching at the post-secondary level. This first appeared in Education Canada Magazine here.

by Kurtis Hewson and Jim Parsons

The face that launched a thousand ships.”

“A picture is worth a thousand words.”

“The personal is political.”

Through the ages, astute observers have understood the extra motivation created by personalization. Establishing a human connection evokes emotion and is a powerful catalyst for motivation that inspires and moves us to action. The same is true in schools.

Student achievement goals are often rooted in numbers; but numbers seldom motivate humans working with humans. They hardly ever motivate teachers. In fact, numbers can hide our true goal as teachers: children’s learning. For example, consider the following “typical” learning goals established in schools in relation to improving student achievement:

“Our school is focusing on increasing the percentage of Grade 2 students achieving ‘acceptable’ on the district’s reading assessment from 72 percent to 80 percent over the next three years.”

“This year, our goal is to improve student absence rates from an average of 2.1 days absent to 1.5 days absent.”

“Over the next two years, we plan to decrease the number of suspensions related to male misbehaviour from 112 to 50.”

On the surface, there is little wrong with any of these three goal statements. Each statement meets the SMART criteria connected to effective goal development. Each is Specific, Measurable, Attainable,Relevant and Time-bound.[1] Each can be further developed with related strategies to promote attainment. The problem is that common school goals like these focus on overall averages, percentages, or totals. And that is where they can lack power. By emphasizing overall averages, percentages, or totals, two basic problems emerge: 1) numbers, rather than children, become the focus; and 2) subgroups or individual students can be hidden within the overall averages.

Focus on students

Sharratt and Fullan remind us, “We are wired to feel things for people, not for numbers.”[2] A goal like improving overall student absence rates from an average of 2.1 to 1.5 absent days may not inspire much passion or commitment. It is hard for teachers to get excited about making a difference for children when the focus is on nebulous “school averages.”

What if the issue were framed in the following way:

Last year, our overall student absence rate was 2.1 days per student from Grades 3 to 6. When examining our current student population of 300 students, actually 200 students missed less than a day all year! Another 50 students missed 2 or fewer days. However, 30 students missed 5-10 days and 20 students missed more than 10 days. We have compiled a list for each grade level of the students with 5-10 days absent, which are coloured yellow, and the students with more than 10 days, which are coloured red. Let’s start to talk about what actions we can be putting in place to specifically address these yellow- and red-coded students. Which yellow students can we reduce down to 2 or less days absent? With appropriate interventions, which red students could become yellow?

Such personalized focus shifts teachers’ conversations from general school-wide strategies to goals for specific students. Interventions can be established that focus on specific students and subgroups of heightened concern, and ongoing monitoring can be established to focus on individual student progress.

Consider this literacy example:

In previous years, the Grade 3 team used multiple measures to determine students who were reading at grade level upon entering and exiting Grade 3. Last year, we succeeded in raising students’ overall entry to exit progress from 75 percent to 82 percent, although students fell short of our goal of 85 percent overall. This year, the grade-level team will focus on individuals rather than the overall average. The team has found that 22 students entering Grade 3 are not yet reading at grade level. They posted these students’ pictures whenever they met as a Grade 3 team; and, by mid-year, they already knew that Susan, Michael, Philip, Esther, Frank, Desmond, and Cecilia were well on their way to reading at grade level. That only leaves another 15 students to place special attention and focus on for the remainder of the year.

It is easy to see that the approaches taken in the two examplespersonalize and make learning goals about children, not numbers. We are not suggesting that schools eliminate the formation of goals, and we subscribe to the power of SMART goals as foundations for sound school improvement. However, attempting to raise an overall school average by 5 percentage points likely will fail to elicit the commitment needed to succeed. By contrast, when specific students are identified and collectively targeted, the overall averages, percentages, and totals will take care of themselves. Teachers will expend tireless efforts when they see a difference being made for one child.

First steps

When starting to focus on children rather than faceless averages, consider using pictures. It is powerful when teachers see the faces of those children most in need of everyone’s support. We are not suggesting public displays that inherently ostracize children and families! But in closed staff or team meetings, sharing children’s photographs on PowerPoints or posters personalizes the goal.

We have experienced a celebratory final staff meeting where, rather than showing a bar graph of yearly school progress from 75 percent to 78 percent reading proficiency overall, photographs of students who moved from at-risk to at grade level were shared. The emotion and celebration among teachers was inspiring, and they shared success stories with each other and found it fulfilling to see for whom exactly they had made a difference. The buzz in the room also definitely motivated teachers to continue to build upon these successes. There were still students who needed help!

The importance of disaggregation

Moving from overall to individual analysis more than just inspires and creates purpose. It pulls back the veil to display children (and sub-groups of students) who can be lost when focusing upon overall averages. Consider Alan Blankstein’s observation:

Data represent all groups within a school. Overall averages can hide persistent problems that do not reveal themselves until the data are disaggregated in order to describe each group that makes up part of the student population. A school can take pride in the fact that its mean Grade 8 reading score is at the 72nd percentile, but that figure may hide evidence that although 10% of the class reads at the 99th percentile, a troubling 15% are reading below the 40th percentile. Unless this school examines disaggregated data, the needs of 15% of its students may be overlooked.”[3]

We further suggest that the “lost” 15 percent in Blankstein’s example should be individually identified, regularly monitored, and supported through specific interventions or focused strategies. In addition, sometimes successful overall scores and averages can foster or promote a degree of comfort (at best) or educational apathy (at worst) within a school. Our experience suggests that it can be difficult to create a sense of urgency for that small sub-group of students that remains at-risk when heralding the success of a superior overall average.

A school where 91 percent of students are proficient in reading has achieved an outstanding accomplishment. We should take time to celebrate this school success. Then, let’s go back to work! There remains nine percent of the population (almost one child in ten) still not achieving at grade level. Those children may be frustrated, upset, confused, hurting, and blocked from growing towards personal goals. We are still falling short of our mission to ensure success for all our students – each child.

Numbers distance; faces motivate. By remembering that a single child’s learning success is our ultimate teaching goal, schools can ensure the development of strong emotional connections between educators and their students that carry a sense of urgency. The faces of children should be the goals of our teaching – it is these young faces who will launch our ships.

3 Major Shifts Public Education needs to make

"When practice becomes unmoored from purpose, rigidity sets in." This is one of my favorite quotes from Grant Wiggins. An entire series of books could be written on the implications this has not only on education but our society in general.

This is precisely why I always go back to asking the question: What are my long term goals for my students? Parents want their kids to be happy, hard working, motivated, responsible, honest, empathetic, intelligent, collaborative, creative and courageous. Of course we want our children to grow academically, but we also want them to grow emotionally, socially and physically, and this requires a well-rounded education.

I want to tell you a true story that happened in my grade 8 classroom a few years ago, and then I want to challenge us all to make 3 major shifts in public education.

As my grade 8 students filed into my classroom, I prepared to gather their attention so we could start science class when Liza, one of my students, approached me and said, “Mr. Bower, Alex won't come and talk to you, but he is very upset.”

I turned to look at Alex, and I could immediately see how distraught he was. His head sulked, his shoulders slumped and his eyes were red with the beginnings of tears. I could tell something was really wrong. Liza continued to tell me that Alex had lost his silver chain. I thanked Liza and approached Alex. At first he hesitated but then he told me that he was playing football outside at lunch and that it must have fallen off somewhere on the football field. 

I asked him if he thought we should go look for it, and he asked, “You mean I could do that?” I replied with the affirmative.

I turned to the class and said, “Class, we have a problem. Someone has lost something very valuable to them, and this item is somewhere outside. Alex was playing football at lunch and his silver chain is lost somewhere out on the football field. Does anyone have any ideas for how we could solve this problem?”

Lewis threw up his hand and blurted, “we could go outside and look for Alex's chain and then play football for the rest of class.” I was impressed with half of Lewis's response and unsure about the other. Hands flew up as every student volunteered to go outside. Rather than leap from our desks and march immediately outside to find the chain, I wanted to clarify something.  

“Lewis, I know that it is the last class on a Friday before you leave for a fun-filled weekend, and I bet many of us would love to do this just so we could go outside for the duration of this period and perhaps even get to play football; however, could someone come up with a better reason for why you would volunteer to do this?”

Lewis knew exactly what I was getting at, and he replied, “We should go outside to help Alex find his sliver chain.” Other students just as quickly blurted their agreement. The best reason to go outside right now was to help Alex, because he needed our help.

And so we marched outside to find another class playing football, so I invited them and their teacher to join us. We lined up on the end line, and began to walk together, looking down, searching for Alex's chain.

I looked up sporadically to see every student looking intently at their section of ground. I couldn't help but get that warm fuzzy feeling. My class was working together to accomplish a common goal. But that feeling was quickly hijacked by another thought – what if we don't find the chain? Wouldn't it be awesome if we actually found it!

Any thoughts of pessimism I might have had quickly evaporated when Colby announced, “I found it.” You can only imagine the feeling I had, and the atmosphere that was created amongst 50 grade 8 students, 2 teachers and 2 student teachers. Everyone had a huge smile on their face, but none were larger than the look of glee that could be found on Alex. While he walked over to Colby to accept the chain and say thank you, almost every student in the class came over to give Alex a congratulatory pat on the back. We were all so very happy for Alex.

Not wanting to be done with this experience, I asked the students to share what they thought about today's class.

Ethan shared with us a story about when he was in elementary; he tumbled down a hill and lost his lens out of his glasses. Upon returning from recess, he told his teacher what had happened, and she had told him to gather some friends and go find it, because this was important. They found it. I could tell Ethan looked back upon this experience with enthusiasm and joy; it was a pleasurable memory.

Jared shared with us a story about when he was in elementary; he had lost his glasses on the school yard. Upon returning from recess, he told his teacher what had happened, and she had told him that this was class time, and that he had lost his glasses during recess, so he would have to look for them on his own time. He never found his glasses. I could tell Jared looked back upon this experience with disgust and contempt; it was a vile memory.  

As we concluded the debriefing, child after child agreed whole-heartedly that today's activity was the right thing to do. The following list of words and phrases were used time and time again by the students to describe the whole event: kindness, teamwork, community, motivation, doing the right thing, citizenship, considerate, helpful, respect, responsibility and cooperation.

Let's use this story to push 3 major shifts in public education:

MOTIVATION

What if the class agreed to help Alex only if they could personally gain? What if Lewis agreed to help only if he got to play football? What if Colby only gave Alex his chain because he did a quick cost-benefit analysis and decided the reward was worth more than the chain? Motivation matters -- it's not just important that we teach kids to do the right things, but we must also do the right things for the right reasons. Children who grow up doing the right things for the wrong reasons grow up to be adults who stop doing the right things because they can personally gain by doing otherwise.

Research tells us there are two kinds of motivation: extrinsic and intrinsic, and they are inversely related -- meaning if one grows, the other usually diminishes. The research also tells us that extrinsic motivators are only effective in gaining short-term compliance. When we frame teaching as do this and you'll get that, students will care less about this because they are distracted by that.

When it comes to intelligence, many people have shifted from asking "how smart are my students?" to "how are my students smart?".

We need to shift from "how motivated are my students?" to "how are my students motivated?".

DISCIPLINE

The anecdotal evidence and scientific research that makes up the case against the use of rewards and punishments is as impressive as it is secretive.

The reason Alex hesitated when he told me he was playing football was because the boys were playing tackle again despite being told over and over again that they were to play touch football. If I subscribed to punishment or its pseudonym consequences, I might say to Alex that because he chose to play tackle football, the natural consequence is that he lost his gold chain. Alex will in fact learn a lesson, but it won't likely be that he shouldn't have played tackle -- rather, he will likely learn that his teacher doesn't care.

Rewards and punishments are not opposites -- they are too sides of the same coin. Rewards control via seduction and punishments control via fear. Classrooms that focus on power ultimately resort to controlling children to gain compliance. Classrooms that focus on empowerment seek to collaborate with children to be engaged.

We need to shift from focusing on control and compliance and move towards collaboration and engagement.

CURRICULUM AND ACCOUNTABILITY

Under what circumstances would the teacher choose not to take their class outside to help find Alex's chain?

What if you are a grade 7 teacher and you are responsible for teaching over 1300 outcomes? What if this happened moments before the kids were scheduled to take a standardized test?

While it may seem counterintuitive to suggest that content-bloated curricula and test-based accountability might be obstacles for great teachers and real learning, this is precisely what the research has been showing us. Curriculum should not be something that is designed, laminated and mailed to the schools by distant authorities, nor should assessment be reduced to a primitive grunt that says, "test scores low, make them go up."

I once had a politician say to me, "Well you know Joe, what doesn't get tested, doesn't get taught." In some ways they are horribly wrong -- and in other ways they are horribly right (but not the way they might like to believe) If this is true, can someone show me the test that holds me accountable for helping Alex and/or teaching the class citizenship, collaboration and kindness? It's true that we should concern ourselves with what's on the test -- however, I think we grossly overlook what's not on the test.

The things that matter most in school are difficult, if not impossible, to measure, but they can always be observed and described.

We need to shift from valuing what we measure to measuring what we value. 

3 MAJOR SHIFTS

We live in exciting times -- especially education. Things are changing -- especially in Alberta. With change comes crisis and opportunity. With change comes promise and peril. 

The way I see it, these are three critical shifts that public education needs to make:

• Shift away from asking "how motivated are my students?" and move towards "how are my students motivated?".

• Shift away from focusing on control and compliance and move towards collaboration and engagement.

• Shift away from valuing what we measure and move towards measuring what we value.

I'll leave you with one final thought.

Please remember that the only thing that cancerous education policies and sit-and-get-spew-and-forget traditional school requires to succeed is for strong, progressive teachers to do nothing.

Ungraded Students

This was written by Hadley Ferguson who is a middle-school history teacher at Springside Chestnut Hill Academy in Philadelphia. Ferguson is co-founder of edcamp philly and a board member of the edcamp Foundation. Read her blog and follow her on Twitter at @hadleyjf. This post was originally found here.

by Hadley Ferguson

Two years ago, seventh-grade history became the only ungraded class in the school. The administration agreed to let me try it, as a means of empowering students to take more control over their learning. The students receive comments instead of letter grades as their assessment. I point out the strengths of their work as well as the next steps that they should take. Over the course of the year, the goal is to have them do more and more of their own assessment. At the start and end of every lesson, we talk about the skills that they used, and they write a self-reflection, based on three questions. What did you do well in this assignment? What did you find challenging? What would you do differently if she had to do it again? After they have written their self-reflection, I review their work and reflections and write comments. I make sure to point out where they had growth or new success. I also help them identify the next steps.

Because there is no final goal post of an A that allows the student to stop the learning process, there is always another challenge. Students show a lot about themselves when the grades are removed.

1. We have trained many of our most successful students to work only for the grade. When the grades are taken away, so is the validation that they are good students. Their effort was to please the teacher; it was totally disconnected from curiosity and learning. They are good students, not because they are good at learning, but because they are good at playing the game of school. These students take the longest time to engage in the work of the class. They continually asked, “Will this be graded?” as a sign of how significant the task is. On the last day of school, I had a student come up to me and ask, “So now will you tell me my grade?” She was convinced that I had a secret grade book that I just wouldn’t share with them. We created these students, through our use of grades as rewards and as punishment. We trained them that the work of school isn’t about the work of learning. We need to find ways to undo the damage that this has done to our students.

2. Students who are used to getting medium to poor grades felt like they have been freed from prison when the grades are taken away. Most of those students learned early on in their days at school that their best efforts did not lead to success, and that it would be someone else squealing with joy over a returned test or quiz. They had given up on working hard, simply wanting to hide in the classroom. When grades are removed from the equation, these students begin to flourish. It isn’t scary to get back their work, because there is always praise on it. There is also direction for every student of the “next step.” They are not the only ones with work still to do. Class becomes a safe place, rather than one where they are in danger of being exposed as inadequate. The vast majority of students begin to come alive, willing to test their ideas and take risks that they never did before. They also are willing to help each other learn. It wasn’t a competition for the best grade; it was a journey of learning that we are on together.

3. Finally, students love to learn. When they no longer worry or hide, they simply engage in the process. There are no students who want to be stupid, who want to be failures. They all want to grow and learn. We have just created a system that discourages that from happening. When we take away the fear of failure, and we allow them to develop and become more competent, they want to do it. They are willing to do the hard work of learning! The students began to set higher and higher goals for themselves, each one pushing herself to reach new levels of understanding. When they felt safe, the sky was their limit.

The Trouble with Grading

My article The Trouble with Grading: From Concealing to Revealing Real Learning was published in the Iowa Science Teachers Journal.

IOWA SCIENCE  TEACHERS JOURNAL
SPRING 2013

The Trouble with Grading

By Joe Bower

“A mark or grade is an inadequate report of an inaccurate judgment by a biased and variable judge of the extent to which a student has attained an indefinite amount of material.”

--Paul Dressel

When I share with others that I assess my students everyday without ever grading them, the responses are often thick with bewilderment. While it is true that some congratulate me in a kind of envious tip of the hat, most teachers and parents struggle to rationalize how a classroom could even function without grading. Some like the idea - others don't - but almost no one can begin to conceive an alternative. This inability to conjure an alternative to grading scares me because nothing is more dangerous than an idea when it’s the only one we have.

Alfie Kohn (1999) writes:

There is a time to admire the grace and persuasive power of an influential idea, and there is a time to fear its hold over us. The time to worry is when the idea is so widely shared that we no longer even notice it, when it is so deeply rooted that it feels to us like plain common sense. At the point when objections are not answered anymore because they are no longer even raised, we are not in control: we do not have the idea; it has us (p. 1).

Kohn was referring to behaviorism, and yet such thought-provoking words can be used as a warning for any idea or practice we mindlessly implement.

Grant Wiggins (2012) reminds us that "when practice becomes unmoored from purpose, rigidity sets in." Reflecting upon one's beliefs can be a very productive use of time, and I can think of no better time to do so then when we have come to accept something as a given truth. When questions are no longer answered because questions are no longer being asked, it's time to pause and reflect. The mark of a true professional is one that spends just as much time asking why as asking how. Teachers can, and do, fill conferences with session after session on how we can better grade. However, the real issue with grading is not how but why (Kohn, 1994).

Below are three common reasons I have heard used to justify grading:

1. Motivation: Grades induce a kind of artificial, extrinsic motivation to strive for the reward of a high grade, or to avoid the punishment of a low grade. This view assumes we need grades to make kids learn.

2. Rank and Sort: Grades place students nicely on a fabricated hierarchy so that we can order those who are more worthy for post-secondary admissions and job placement. This view assumes grading indicates who is qualified and who is not.

3. Feedback: Grades provide students and parents with knowledge of student progress. This view assumes grades communicate to students and parents useful information.

While these three goals are common, using them to justify grading is problematic. That is, if we accept the above goals, grading is not necessarily the best means to promote the goals. Below, I discuss why grading doesn’t “make the grade” when it comes to achieving these goals.

First, we must fully grasp the chasm that exists between what science knows about motivation and what we typically do in schools. My thinking has been greatly influenced by Alfie Kohn's Punished by Rewards: The Trouble with Gold Stars, Incentive Plans, A's, Praise and Other Bribes. The first 300 pages completes an autopsy on the idea of using extrinsic manipulators to achieve compliance, while the final 100 pages of notes, references and citations drive the final nail in the coffin. The key idea I have taken from Kohn’s work is that the two different kinds of motivation, intrinsic and extrinsic, are inversely related; meaning, that if one grows, the other is likely to diminish. Because grades can only ever be experienced as a reward or punishment they, by definition, are likely to diminish a student’s love for learning.

Second, when it comes to sorting, the issue isn't that we are not sorting children well enough, rather the issue is that we spend time sorting them at all. We could be using our time and effort to help them improve. Ranking and sorting, bickering over grade inflation, rigid criteria and higher standards do little to help children become better people. As Kohn (1994) succinctly notes, “What grades offer is spurious precision, a subjective rating masquerading as an objective assessment.”

Third, reducing something as messy as real learning to a symbol, letter or number provides little useful information. Grades simply cannot help a student know what they have done well or how they could get better. Moreover, several researchers note that numerical grades can have a negative impact on student learning (Black et al., 2004; Butler, 1988; Pulfrey et al., 2011). Grading is a primitive form of feedback that is at best unhelpful and at worst harmful, and in many cases it can be argued that the best kinds of feedback actually requires the absence of a grade.

Unfortunately, myths are often more satisfying than truth. In education, we are distracted by grading. We have been distracted by grades, honor rolls, achievement, winning, losing, test scores, data...the list goes on and on.

Let's refocus.

Assessment can be simplified into two steps.

1. Gather

2. Share

At first this may sound overly simplistic and rather benign, but here's the catch: you do not need to use tests to gather information about student learning, nor do you need grades to share student progress (Kohn, 2011).

So what can we do instead?

We have to abandon our mania for reducing everything to numbers. While we should have measures for learning, they do not have to be reductionist or competitive in nature, and they certainly do not need to be multiple choice.

Multiple choice exams can be very clever but they are not very authentic. You cannot gain as much insight into what a student knows and what they can do if they are not afforded the opportunity to generate a response. Students cannot construct meaning in a preconceived bubble. For the most part, multiple choice science tests end up being glorified vocabulary exams, and I am not prepared to end a year's worth of class that was filled with investigation and thought-provoking discussion with a simple vocabulary test. That is why I break from traditional exam format for my final exam in my middle school science course.

First off, I provide my students with zero questions. Instead, I have my students select a collection of science concepts that we studied throughout the year and ask them to show their understanding. Because this assessment does not resemble the traditional rules of a final exam, I prefer to call it a project. To complete this project, I have had my students typically use Microsoft Publisher, but keep in mind any program that allows kids to use text, simple drawing tools and import pictures will do. Importantly, the project can be done on paper so technology does not need to be a barrier (See Figure 1).

This is not a “take home” project. While students can plan and collect materials outside of class, they create the project during the final exam time. My students have done this project in the gym while seated in traditional rows of desks as well as in a computer lab. When in the gym doing this by hand, I allow students to bring in a folder of their “raw materials” which could include pictures, diagrams, and paragraph excerpts. The collection of these materials and planning serve as a very purposeful way of reviewing the course concepts.

When introducing the final project to students, I make clear that I am less interested in knowing if kids

can draw the changes of state triangle and more interested in knowing what they can do with that knowledge. Rather than wasting time drawing the diagram, I would rather they spend their time sharing with me what they think of changes of state. As you can see in Stephanie's example, she brought in a picture of erosion and used it with an old saying, a description, a real life example from a previous grade and a question.

I also help the students understand that simply cutting and pasting a picture or paragraph does not show much understanding. We agree that for everything they paste on their project, they need to do something with it. This could include summarizing, explaining, sharing thoughts, feelings and opinions, making connections to other concepts, asking questions, telling stories, describing experiments, making metaphors, labeling diagrams, remembering field trips, etc.

While some may wonder about the rigor of this final project, I concern myself more with its vigor. One year, Lizzie (a grade 8 student) was the first to finish her project. She chose to write for just over an hour. Alex was the last student to finish writing - she chose to write for just over two hours. In contrast, the other students, from other classes, who were writing a 60 question multiple choice test were all done inside of 45 minutes, and many were done inside of 30 minutes. On average, that's only 30 to 45 seconds per question!

On average, my students write for about 1.5 hours while showing their understanding for 10-20 concepts. When I gather feedback from students, I hear over and over again from them that this alternative to a multiple choice test requires far more time and effort on their behalf while actually allowing them to show their learning. Students have said to me, after writing for over an hour, that they actually had fun learning from this project. When was the last time you heard a student say that they had fun learning from a multiple choice exam?

A student’s love for showing their learning is not a fire we have to light, rather it is a flame we must be careful not to extinguish. Just as curiosity is the cure for boredom, the cure for curiosity is worksheets and multiple choice tests. Only after years of schooling does children’s thirst for sharing their learning dissipate, lay dormant or die.

At this point, I would wager you are wondering how I assess this project. If by assess you mean how do I calculate a mark or grade... I don't. I've been with my students for 10 months. By the time this final project comes around, I already know all I need to know to assess their learning. And because I abolished grading from my classroom years ago, I have no grades to average anyway. There is no substitute for what a teacher can see with their own eyes and hear with their own ears when observing and interacting with students while they are still learning.

However, if you mean, “How do I observe my students' learning?”, let me address that question. I work with my students while always observing and listening. I don't labor over reducing their learning to a grade or a symbol - it's simply not a good use of my time (or theirs). While it is true that this project cannot be run through the bubble-sheet machine, we must remember not to allow our misguided obsession with counting and measuring to narrow the kinds of learning opportunities we provide children -- especially when one could argue that the most important kinds of learning are beyond measure.

References:

Black, P.; Harrison, C.; Lee, C.; Marshall, B.; and Wiliam, D. (2004). Working Inside the Black Box: Assessment for Learning in the Classroom. Phi Delta Kappan, 86(1), 8-21.

Butler, R. (1988). Enhancing and undermining intrinsic motivation: The effects of task-involving and ego-involving evaluation on interest and performances. British Journal of Educational Psychology, 58, 1-14.

Kohn, A. (1994). Grading: The Issue Is Not How but Why. Educational Leadership. Retrieved from http://www.alfiekohn.org/teaching/grading.htm.

Kohn, A. (1999). Punished by Rewards. The Trouble with Gold Stars, Incentive Plans, A's, Praise and other Bribes. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.

Kohn, A. (2011) The case against grades. Educational Leadership. Retrieved from http://www.alfiekohn.org/teaching/tcag.htm.

Pulfrey, C., Buch,. C., & Butera, F. (2011). Why grades engender performance avoidance goals: the mediating role of autonomous motivation. Journal of Educational Psychology, 103, 683-700.

Wiggins, G. (2013, January 14). Avoiding stupidifcation: granted but... thoughts on education by grant [Web log]. Retrieved from http://grantwiggins.wordpress.com/2013/01/14/avoiding-stupidification/.