Over the past 4-5 months I’ve been helping one of our longest-standing ERC client schools, The White Mountain Regional High School in New Hampshire, with some deep work on assessment. Under new administrative leadership and with several new faculty members it was time for a “refresh”, an opportunity to revisit core values about teaching and learning and to develop the flexible yet durable set of agreements around teacher practices that every good school needs.

Assessment and grading are such a huge, combined thing in schools, yet they are seldom explored in intentional ways. Not only does that neglect make for a weak instructional fabric, but it can also get us in trouble. In addition to the many small “grading” skirmishes that occur regularly in every school among students, parents, and teachers, every so often there are bigger, more splashy beefs. I was reminded of a recent case in Maryland and another one in Texas.

Not every situation gets as heated and public as these, but our ERC experiences in schools suggests that grading and assessment, which are surprisingly infrequent topics of discussion, can become quietly but dramatically discordant. Wildly different and unexplored approaches conspire against making a school’s approach consistent and understandable to parents, and perhaps more importantly, to the students themselves as they stress over how to navigate which behaviors and standards work with which teachers but not with others. They’re often told, that’s just how school is, right?

Over the years, as we’ve forgotten the roots of our normative workings, we’ve made it comfortable and routine to assign a single number or letter to a stunningly complex body of work emerging from a developing mind, with each teacher largely guided by their own beliefs and standards. That’s where instructional leadership should come in. Schools should routinely make time for discussions of how they want to deal with the paradoxical undertaking that teachers must live with – managing the equilibrium between two different purposes of schooling: honoring each child’s growth, their different ways of seeing the world, their grasp of skills and content at that moment in time of their development and, simultaneously, complying with the demand to sort and report the “grade” or rank of their students.

Teachers spend huge amounts of time on grading. In some cases, they spend a good deal more time on grading than on planning engaging lessons and on looking at formative assessment results. The latter often in particular gets short shrift, with easy to score “quizzes” serving as the primary indicator of a student’s understanding of key concepts and skills. Most teachers will say it’s just too time consuming to dig in on formative assessment --how each student is doing with their learning-- and so, over the years, quiz grades have become the coin of the realm. Visiting a state still struggling to gain some benefit from competency-based learning, I was struck by how quickly I heard teachers lurch from any discussion of the quality or characteristics of a student’s work to inserting a “grade”, and how easily they conflate grading with assessment.

As a remedy for these potential ills, and to help new White Mountain Co-Principal Patsy Ainsworth get her teaching staff grounded in the key issues and beliefs, we co-developed a series of professional conversations about assessment and grading. As Ainsworth, who takes the instructional lead, shared with staff in one of their meetings, the need for a revised Program of Studies for the high school made it more important than ever that the faculty have some strong agreement and beliefs about how to approach the complicated issues teachers inherit when they enter the field.

Central to those professional development conversations has been what we’ve taken to calling our ERC “Assessment Board Game”. Digging into the purposes behind formative and summative assessment can take us back to how we look at motivation, compliance, rewards, and reporting to multiple audiences. These can be incredibly complicated topics as each of us recalls and examines our own experiences, attributes certain results to certain behaviors, some rooted in the psychology of learning but many not so much. Hence the value of the Board Game --giving these topics their due fresh air.

Teacher Leader Jeannine LaBounty, who has shouldered much of the professional development work with Ainsworth, shared that this work has been important and overdue at the Regional, “It not only allows teachers to examine their work but to come together and build consensus about grading practices, how we define and develop formative and summative assignments, and importantly how we inform and report to parents and the ‘permanent record’. This assessment work will really pay off because the conversation is around common topics and will have a direct impact on instructional practices at WMRHS.”

Initially, the differences in opinion, definitions and assertions were striking. But by making time for recurring discussions, conducted in multiple, varying groups, and being sure to have each teacher share thoughts documented at each session, the more prevalent and enduring values began to emerge. A strong and clear statement of values and beliefs about assessment and grading, from the professional community, will undergird the Program of Studies. My guess is that people will take extra care as they wield that grading pen (or mouse) and enjoy greater confidence in answering a question from a student or parent.

The work I’ve seen firsthand at White Mountains has been incredibly rich and thoughtful. And it has reminded me of the perils –small and large—in not having these discussions. Fairness meters are part of a student’s tool kit, and they can help remind us of how students think about what honesty, integrity and accountability look like in the adult world, a civics education in its own right. School folks deserve the chance to enjoy being part of a real collaborative community, one that takes learning seriously.

If you’d like to know more about how you can elevate your work in this arena, or how to use the Board Game, please contact us.

Larry Myatt

Co-Founder, ERC