# data[].attributes.body
Making sure brains are calm and ready to learn and retain information through developing neural pathways

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Note: Always with enthusiasm!

Duration: 1-3 minutes

BRAIN PREP
Our brains aren't always primed to learn the moment we walk into a classroom. These activities help students get in the right mindset.

Prepares the brain for learning

Activates both sides of the brain using cross-lateral movements, spatial awareness, and balance

Improves visual tracking

Random Break Select a Break

Note: Class Interaction Time!

Duration: variable

CLASS COHESION
When we are in an uncomfortable or unsafe environment, our brains route information to the amygdala, a region of the brain that impedes learning. These activities get the students working together.

Creates a comfortable learning environment

Fun activities for the start of the term or when students are not connecting with each other

Random Break Select a Break

Note: Content Brain Breaks!

Duration: variable

CONTENT REVIEW
As a teacher, you know how important it is to review content. But, did you know that some methods are better than others? These activities are designed to help the learner make new and unexpected associations with the topic.

Small group activities

Allows for review of classroom material within the content area

Random Break Select a Break

Note: Tabula rasa!

Duration: 1-2 minutes

BRAIN BREAK
Just as it is critical to engage certain regions of the brain to learn, it's equally important to give them a break. Students will return to the content refreshed and ready to learn.

Gives the hippocampus (long term memory) a necessary break

Increases long term memory and engagement

Random Break Select a Break

Note: Low Impact

Duration: variable

CHAIR YOGA
Tons of peer-reviewed research shows that exercise and learning go hand-in-hand. Similar to a Brain Break, chair yoga gives students a chance to recharge.

Releases tension from the spine

Increases muscle tone and flexibility

Releases tightness in the lower back

Provides relaxation

Random Break Select a Break

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Note: Always with enthusiasm! Our brains aren't always primed to learn the moment we walk into a classroom. These activities help students get in the right mindset. Prepares the brain for learning Activates both sides of the brain using cross-lateral movements, spatial awareness, and balance Improves visual tracking Random Break Select a Break Note: Class Interaction Time!

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
"When children misbehave, teachers don't automatically think, 'Oh, Johnnie's superior longitudinal fasciculus is not fully formed, but I know what to do to help grow that structure.'"

Cognitive Learning Neuroscientist

Dr. Kieran O'Mahony is the founder of the Institute for Connecting Neuroscience with Teaching and Learning (iCNtl), a Seattle-based nonprofit that provides professional development for K-12 teachers with a view to improving learning outcomes. As a learning scientist with a focus on cognitive neuroscience, Dr. O'Mahony carried out systems research at the University of Washington College of Education LIFE Center (Learning in Informal and Formal Environments), the first NSF-funded Science of Learning Center that studied the social aspects of how children learn.

A learning scientist with a focus on cognitive neuroscience at the University of Washington College of Education LIFE Center (Learning in Informal and Formal Environments), Kieran's work is essentially that of translation-- by connecting neuroscience with teaching and learning. As new knowledge unfolds at the bio-molecular level in brain labs, and as research results emerge from FMRI and other scanning devices, he sees his team's work as implementing important findings into teaching and learning platforms in classrooms, workplaces, and homes. This work explores settings and processes that are aligned with pedagogical, brain-enabled methodologies, which he believes are instrumental in fostering deep understanding, prolonged engagement, and collaborative outcomes that foster human development in a fast-paced and challenging new century.

The challenge is to align what we know (along with emergent findings) in neuroscience with learning pedagogies, tools, and settings that include personalized learning as well as current LMS and other delivery mechanisms. In his lab, scientists explore enriched experiences that can change learning trajectories and outcomes for individuals in environments that embody challenging resources for social mediation, mentoring, reverse-mentoring, and assorted implementations in real-world scenarios. Other research interests involve socio-cultural perspectives on cognition, learning, graphical and visuo-spatial representation, and use of technology in formal and informal learning environments. He explores diffusion of innovations systemically across multiple learning environments and stakeholder communities. In particular, he is interested in instructor/learner interaction in various settings, including multi-dimensional design-based implementation research (DBIR) in workplaces and academic institutions. In particular, his work investigates impacts of co-constructed methodologies in settings that are a mix of informal sites as well as traditional (but evolved) classrooms.

Kieran was born in Ireland, taught in all levels of school (Elementary, Middle, High and University), emigrated to the United States in the early 80's where he pursued higher degrees. He worked in the confluence of software and learning systems in companies like Microsoft, Borland, Wall Data, GTE, and the Boeing Company. A solid grounding in mainframes introduced him to the complexities and power of computing for learning systems and artificial intelligence. Today, he creates software systems for learning environments that include k-12, workplace (Industrial) and theoretical (Academic Institutions). Kieran lives happily in Seattle with his four children (two Irish and two American). He is an experienced high-altitude climber, loves to sail in the Puget Sound, and study/read in the many coffee shops in a great city.

Read The Book

After reading Brain-centric Design, you'll understand what learning is on a fundamental level. In doing so, you'll discover what we call the "shortcut to learning" and how to incorporate it into your teaching environment. You'll learn how to develop critical skills in your learners like growth mindsets and adaptive expertise. What's more, your learners will enjoy the process and leave feeling good about the experience.
ORDER NOW
Experience The Book

"In 1981, I found myself back in academia...again. I had just ended a 10-year career teaching science and social studies at an inner city all-boys high school. I left because I was desperately seeking solutions to large philosophical questions that seemed to evolve into daily crises in my classrooms. In the faculty room, we spoke in forward-looking platitudes and used phrases like "equality of educational opportunity." But I could see quite plainly that neither "equality" nor "opportunity" was associated with the education we were doling out. I felt like I was part of a stratification engine that unintentionally and unknowingly did bad things to young people every day. After a horrible event at school, I arrived in Seattle wondering, How could a 13-year-old become so dissatisfied with life at school and home that the only choice left was suicide? It took me the best part of 40 years to locate the solution. The journey that contributed to this book involved many dead ends for me, as well as unfortunate and time-consuming false starts and frustrating educational misadventures in academia. However, eventually, it led me to the cognitive learning model in this course, and to Rich Carr."
EXPERIENCE Brain-Centric Design

Submit a question or comment

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
"When children misbehave, teachers don't automatically think, 'Oh, Johnnie's superior longitudinal fasciculus is not fully formed, but I know what to do to help grow that structure.'" Dr. Kieran O'Mahony is the founder of the Institute for Connecting Neuroscience with Teaching and Learning (iCNtl), a Seattle-based nonprofit that provides professional development for K-12 teachers with a view to improving learning outcomes.

# data[].attributes.body
"Being Rachetdemic" with Chris Emdin

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Chris Emdin wants education to transform lives, but until we fully accept students as themselves in teaching and learning that it will stay the same.

"We are part of a system that's constructed itself based on the notion that not everybody deserves it. And it's because of that, because of this facing of history, because of the need for a radically new future that I propose a new approach to teaching and learning that is about being ratchetdemic, which is about welcoming the aspects of young folks' lives or particular populations' experiences that don't fit in academia," he says.

Emdin, an associate professor at Teachers College, is reimagining what teaching and learning looks like when we allow authenticity to happen across the board. In this episode of the EdCast, Emdin discusses what it means to be rachetdemic and embrace the whole student identity.

TRANSCRIPT:

Jill Anderson: I'm Jill Anderson. This is the Harvard EdCast. Christopher Emdin is revolutionizing education with a simple idea, to make schools truly welcoming for all students, no matter their race, class, gender, or orientation. He believes that public education was never designed for many of these students. Christopher is a professor from Teachers College, who has long focused on issues of race, culture, and inequality in education. He's now introducing a new educational model to help students and teachers celebrate ratchet identity in the classroom. Through this work, he's reimagining what teaching and learning would look like if we could break free of the system that constrains it, and instead be ratchetdemic. I couldn't wait to hear more about this new philosophical approach to education.

Christopher Emdin: The existing approach to teaching and learning, or to education, is so stuck in an era where black and brown children were not supposed to be educated, where issues of race, class, and diversity were not part of the conversation in how we prepared young folks to be able to do well in the world or to be trained, where public education, although described as for everyone, it plays out in ways where it wasn't for the newest immigrants. It wasn't for those who were socioeconomically deprived. There's a larger narrative about upward mobility in education, except for if you were part of that class it was not ever supposed to make it from beyond that. And although we don't say it out loud, although we don't name it, we are still stuck in those age old notions about what the purpose of education is. And although we say that we want transformation of lives through education, we are part of a system that's constructed itself based on the notion that not everybody deserves it. And it's because of that, because of this facing of history, because of the need for a radically new future that I propose a new approach to teaching and learning that is about being ratchetdemic, which is about welcoming the aspects of young folks' lives or particular populations' experiences that don't fit in academia, that don't fit in education. The raw, the expressive, the authentic, the powerful but not welcome. I'm calling for a radical reimagining of what welcoming looks like in teaching and learning, and I think that requires opening up the floodgates to allow folks to just show up as themselves.

Jill Anderson: Can anyone become a ratchetdemic?

Christopher Emdin: Absolutely. The fascinating thing about education is that everyone's not themselves.

Jill Anderson: Right.

Christopher Emdin: We are talking about black and brown children in urban America. We are talking about LGBTQ populations, but we're also talking about teachers, and principals, and school district personnel. We all show up to this thing called education based on an idea of what we think our role should be. So teachers go through graduate schools of education that teach them how to be a teacher and don't teach them how to be themselves. School leaders go to become principals or district personnel based on what school leadership should look like, based on what I read in that John Maxwell book. Young folks come to school and they are being expected to perform attention or intelligence. And so my argument is that everyone shows up to school being something they are not, and because of that, schooling becomes a sort of like fabrication. This inauthentic place where we are all trying on an identity that may not necessarily fit. And to be ratchetdemic is to say, look, this is who I am. I am a science geek who loves Star Wars and loves hip hop and loves jazz. And I'm a rapper, and I'm a professor, and I'm a scholar, and I'm a thinker, and I'm a scientist. And I can be all those things at once. And once I feel like I'm welcome as all of myselves, I can model for young folks that they can show up as themselves, and then we can start this beautiful thing called teaching and learning.

Jill Anderson: What does it mean to embody a ratchetdemic identity in schools?

Christopher Emdin: To be ratchetdemic is to have no part in starving the authentic self, while still maintaining high academic standards and high academic rigor. It's to exist in a space where we don't decide between binaries the society has constructed around what it looks like to be smart. To be ratchetdemic is to be free. And when I say free is to be free in expression, is to be free in thought, but also to be free in the pursuit of knowledge through whatever pathway makes sense for someone. So a ratchetdemic person doesn't walk into a classroom and say, how does being smart look like? How does being smart dress like? How should I raise my hand? Or how do I need to be complicit for the sake of making somebody else comfortable? It begins with saying, what do I need to be comfortable enough to learn, and then, how do I not lower academic expectations, lower rigor, lower standards, lower benchmarks, but recognize that the path to reaching those things looks drastically different in the way that it's been presented.

Jill Anderson: Anyone who's gone to school can relate to that feeling of, you go to school and you stay in your lane and you're quiet and you do what you're supposed to do, and then there is kids who maybe diverge from that. And I related to that as a kid who was just quiet, stayed in my lane, did what I was supposed to do, and it made start thinking a little bit about, "Gee, what could I have experienced if things were different? What would education have looked like?"

Christopher Emdin: Education has become preparedness for complicity at the expense of us pursuing our truest intellectual goals. And that's what I want to erase. I want to erase this notion that teaching and learning has to look and sound and feel a certain way. And I also want to play out the idea that ratchetness takes many forms. Yes, I chose the word ratchetdemic because it's a merging of being ratchet and academic. I was intentional about utilizing a colloquial slang word and merging that with being academic. I understand that for some folks to be ratchet is to be loud or to be abrasive, but there are variations in ratchet.

To me ratchetness is about authenticity. I write in my work about golf ratchet. One can be suburban ratchet. One can be urban ratchet. One can be hip hop ratchet. One can be quiet and ratchet, believe it or not. Whereas like I'm just soaking in information and then I'm expressing myself through words or thoughts and ideas and ways that don't look like they are very visible, but it's about this idea of creating spaces for authenticity, where one's true and core identity is allowed to be welcome in the classroom space and leveraged in the pursuit of learning.

Jill Anderson: So something that American schooling has been so challenged by is, and we hear about this a lot, there's no one size fits all. There's no same learner, but in reality there's very little room for individual in curriculum. So how do we flip that and get to a place where we can appreciate and empower individual students for who they are?

Christopher Emdin: I just want to highlight, A, the hypocrisy in that. Multiple forms of learning but you have schools looking exact same way. It's the height of hypocrisy. But I also want to highlight the misperception that for you to be able to have a school that meets the needs for diverse populations, it requires a certain form of standardization. I just think it's a false notion that we've attached ourselves to that isn't real. We can standardize the methods for allowing folks to express their multiple selves but we can't standardize the expectations or the benchmarks that we expect everyone to meet around who they are persona wise, right? And so for me it's really about deconstructing false binaries. And it's about creating space for us to feel comfortable in the interstitial spaces, where things are murky and things are not quite clear, because it doesn't mean that learning can't happen.

For example, a ratchetdemic classroom is one that may look differently during first period and fifth period in the same school. That the academic expectations can remain the same but the teacher has developed a certain nimbleness. I like to use the word freestylability because I'm a hip hop head. In hip hop culture, the best MCs know how to freestyle. The best rappers know how to be able to utilize what they've learned and what they've planned and still be able sort of dance in the beauty of the moment to make sure that all who are the audience can feel connected.

That's what I want teachers to aspire to. To be nimble, to be able to freestyle. To be able to write the most strict and structured and well designed lesson plan that says, "At minute two I'm doing on this, at minute three I'm doing this," and then when you get in the classroom be willing to let that lesson plan go, because the reality is that you plan well so that when you teach you can move without planning. And so that's the essence of being ratchetdemic. It's about the welcoming of not just discomfort, but the necessary unsteadiness that is good teaching. To be comfortable with that is to be ratchetdemic as an educator.

Jill Anderson: What have you heard from educators about this?

Christopher Emdin: What oftentimes happens is that people misconstrue my approach to mean we don't plan, or to mean we have no structure. We just go in there in a classroom and make things up, and that's very far from the truth. In fact I'm a firm believer in planning. It's the strength of my planning that allows me to be able to let my plan go. If I had no plan at all I could not freestyle, I could not be ratchet, I could not be ratchetdemic and expressive. Even for this talk, I had to make sure I went back and went over my notes in order to keep things I wanted to get across. Jill is so brilliant and smart. She might ask you this question or that question. I sort of kind of prepared myself for that, but then now I'm here with you, I'm not thinking about those questions anymore, I'm sitting in the moment because I've been prepared.

And so, teachers, I always say, I'm not saying, "Just wing it," I'm saying, "Be so well prepared that you can wing it." And it's not even winging it, it's be so well prepared that you can bend yourself to the particular needs of the students because you've allowed them to feel comfortable in being able to give their full and authentic selves, and you are now equipped to be able to pull from that authentic self in what you do in the classroom, in how you teach.

Jill Anderson: And how do we push back and try new things in a classroom acknowledging that there's risk, acknowledging that it might not work out? What do we do there?

Christopher Emdin: One of my favorite quotes is by biologist and Buddhist, Francisco Varela. The quote is, "Ethics is closer to wisdom than cognition." And the reason why I love that quote is because we are in an era where in response to a call for anti-racism, and cultural relevance, and abolitionist teaching, or reality pedagogy, whatever the things you want to name, in response to all the things that are coming down the pipe to educators, they are ingesting it and saying, "Oh my gosh. I have to do these things."

So it's like, how do I create the best anti-racist lesson? How do I create a... It's so cognitive that it's not wisdom. It's not a response to being bathed in the beauty of the philosophies that are about doing right by young people, it's more about being responsive to the educational trend. And educators they are being sort of mentally and emotionally incarcerated by this pursuit of wokeness as though wokeness is a cognitive ideal rather than a state of being in consciousness, which is just being a weight to the larger dynamics in the world that may harm young people.

So my approach is this, just because you read that anti-racist book does not mean that you have to start doing slavery lessons in classrooms tomorrow because just reading that book doesn't mean that you're equipped or prepared to understand the complexities of that phenomenon. And it's about taking the time to sit with the work. I read that book. I was inspired. I want to read another book and be inspired in another way. I want to delve down even more. I want to, most importantly, understand who I am and why I'm responding so viscerally to hearing about this thing in this way. Why am I responding that way? Before you take on the work of someone else that is supposed to be doing the work of... Look, you can't be culturally relevant if you haven't been culturally relevant to yourself. You can't be anti-racist till you understand the racist practices and the white supremacist ideologies that are a piece of your consciousness, even in your pursuit of goodness in the world.

And I think we don't give folks the grace to do the self-work because we say, we are in this point in time, respond, and then folks go out there and screw it up because they're not ready to do that work yet. So it's about self-work. It's about bathing in the beauty of the moment in time you're in for yourself before you start constructing lessons on something you're not keenly aware of yet. It's about not playing woke Olympics, where it's like, "You're culturally relevant. I'll up you, and I'll be anti-racist and culturally relevant." We are in this moment in time where we are so preoccupied with linguistic allegiances to freedom language that we've not committed ourselves emotionally and psychologically. Our souls aren't quite ready to deal with the deep work, and we have to do the deep work first before we start responding to what's going on in the world.

Jill Anderson: And educators are a part of that, I'm going to call it a sanitized, very white, deeply entrenched system. You talk about them doing the work on themselves. Do you think that teacher ed programs really tap into that?

Christopher Emdin: They are not. That's why my work in teacher education persists and why I'm so fervently in pursuit of reimagining, not just K-12 education, but how teachers are prepared to teach. That one class in urban and multicultural education is not going to prepare you to go out there and understand what it means when young folks from these spaces are in your classroom and responding in real time to phenomena in their lives. And they are responding viscerally and angrily to you and you're like, "Well, I took the urban class. I need to care about the black and brown kids." That's not going to help you when you don't understand how their life is playing out and what that looks like.

And so for me, in my teacher preparation work, and how I work with teachers, we not only do self-work, for them to write about their stories and their histories. When was the first time that you encountered a black person? When was the first relationship that you had with urban America? Was it through a rap video, or was it through something that your grandma said, or was it through... I want them to write about that, and I want them to play that out, and I want them to understand how they've breathed in these larger structures as it relates to schooling and whiteness that they have to be able to make sense of. I want them to understand that they've not yet arrived. And no one arrives at... In the words of Maxine Greene, "I am who I am not yet." I don't arrive at being an effective educator in contemporary America, I am on a persistent journey.

That also requires us to understand how we create space for mistakes. That if somebody's enacting a practice that is intentionally dehumanizing for other people, then they need to be held accountable. However, if someone is in the pursuit of doing the right work and has a gaffe, there must be space for second chances. That we cannot inherit this idea of cancellation and erasure that comes from larger Americana in this time and apply that to the process of teaching and learning, that is about asking questions and is about making mistakes. And teachers need to be able to make mistakes just like young folks need to be able to make mistakes. And we have to understand what the intention is behind the mistakes that are made.

And then most importantly, I need us to understand that teaching is hard. We are oftentimes so dismissive of the art and science of teaching and learning. You have to understand psychology, and sociology, performance. You have to have voice control. You have to have a command of your body. You have to know how to be able to sort of describe ideas with metaphor and analogy and story. You have to know how you pace around the classroom, the way you walk, how you talk. You have to ensure that you're bringing your authentic self but also not too much where you erase the kids' authentic selves. You have to be able to model how to make mistakes but also work with young folks to overcome mistakes. And I think we've lost all that nuance.

I work now with Lincoln Center for the Performance Arts, and one of my chief strategies or work with them is to help society, the world, understand that teaching is a performance art. There's no space in schools of education to teach teachers how to perform. That's essential to being effective as an educator. And so I think that we've lost sight of all the complex dimensions of teaching and learning in this pursuit of standardizing what it means to be a good teacher, and we must return back to a place of nuance. We must return back to a place of developing a more complex and robust ratchetdemic identity.

Jill Anderson: I don't know where to go from there. That's so well said. But I do want to talk a little bit about an example that you discuss in your work, which is this decision a school made to stop a rap-based program that you developed. And it was stopped because it was deemed as being too loud, too disruptive. It was replaced with, I think, test-based preparation. And one of the interesting things to come out of that was, the students who spent a few weeks participating in the rap-based program performed better on the test. So what does it mean to reassess what has academic value and what doesn't?

Christopher Emdin: This is a huge question, and it's one that I'm still grappling with so I don't know if I have the right answer.

Jill Anderson: There's no right answer.

Christopher Emdin: There is no right answer. I will say this though, I am less concerned, and folks will probably be upset at me about this, and they'll critique me about this, and they'll write you, and they'll send me angry emails and it's fine, I'm less concerned about the assessments right now. The assessments are biased. They are problematic. There are things that are wrong with them. It is what it is. I am more concerned about the approaches to instruction employed to get young folks to be successful on the established assessments.

I can get a young person to do well on an exam, in physics, in chemistry, in whatever else it is, whatever the test, even with the problems in the test, if I let them enjoy the subject and the process that is required to be successful in the assessment. So the issue is the test, yes, but I'm less concerned about the test, I'm more concerned about the test prep. I'm less concerned about the assessment, I'm more concerned about how you think a young person will be successful on the assessment by boring them to death and making them not like the subject or the exam.

I can get a young person to be successful on an exam that is problematic if I make them believe that they got something to prove to the exam makers. Like, "Listen, them suckers wrote this test. This test is trash, it's biased against you, but guess what? We're going to make sure we let them cats know that despite the problems in the test, we're going to do what we need to do to show them that we can do it. Are you all with me or not?" And now I've created this sort of burning in the soul of a young person to even through the labor of being successful and that process will put in that work to prove the test makers wrong.

That works better than, kids come in. Here's the test prep. Question one through four. Check out what's wrong. I'd rather spend the time on convincing them on the need to overcome the obstacle that is the exam and to prove the test makers wrong than bore them to death and then have them be unsuccessful in the exam.

And so I want educators to critique the assessments. That work needs to happen. But when you're in the classroom every day, critiquing the assessments ain't going to fix the fact that it's the benchmark and our young folks got to be successful on them. And again, people might not like what I say but it is what it is. My whole thing is, we're going to turn up on these tests, but we're going to have fun doing it, we're going to share life doing it, we're going to have joy doing it, we're going to prove them suckers wrong while we do it. The energy in the class is going to be so lit, so beautiful, so magical that they are going to be so turned on to learning that it doesn't matter what the assessment is anymore. So it's like, I'm not going to bore you to death for you to fail a test.

Look, let me just keep it a buck with you. And what I mean by this is I'm going to be... Keep it a buck, i.e., just be completely a 100% and honest with you. These kids are not going to do well on an assessment anyway with the way you've been doing it, you might as well have some fun then. We are in some places where the test scores can't get any lower. You're going to celebrate a one-point increase, a two-point increase, a one-point decrease. I mean, at this point, we might as well see what it looks like when we have fun learning. Because learning for me is about passion, joy, and commitment, and if those things are absent, there is no learning.

Jill Anderson: It's safe to say that there is a lot of joy missing from learning today.

Christopher Emdin: I just want smiles, Jill.

Jill Anderson: So what can students and parents do to claim their right to learn and find joy in that?

Christopher Emdin: The first thing I would say is this, remind your child that they are a learner. Remind your child... We sometimes gloss over this. In my work I talk about the employment of the rights of the body that pulls from Buddhist tradition and how essential they are for contemporary schooling. Like affirmation is such a significant piece of good teaching. When I call those kids mathematical magicians, I call them science geniuses. My program is called Science Genius for a reason. I had kids rapping about science content but I didn't call them science rappers, I called them science geniuses, because once they believe that they are genius then they walk into their genius. So for parents, for teachers, the first step is in the pedagogy of affirmation, the pedagogy of restitution. Giving back to young folks all the belief in self that they've been robbed of by going through contemporary schooling. It's the first step.

The second piece is to model the fun of learning. A kid is not going to like reading if they don't see people in their lives reading. Not reading for the test but reading for pleasure or reading for joy. So teaching is closer to modeling than it is to telling. So we want to create a space where we are modeling for young folks the sort of attributes of a good learner and we are having fun in the process.

Another thing I would say is, I really believe in environment. We could talk all day long about good pedagogy, and joy, and passion, but you cannot activate joy and passion in a lifeless structure. What do your classrooms look like? What do your classrooms smell like? What's on the walls? What's in the building? Again, I want to just return us back to the essence of teaching and learning that is about invoking joy by ensuring that both the educator, the building, and the student walk into a place that activates joy and passion. So for parents and teachers, I'm like, reimagine what the classroom looks like as well.

I just did a project called the Collider Classroom that was about imagining what a post-pandemic classroom could look like, with huge screens on a wall and green space in the classroom. And people were like, "What does this have to do with learning? How are the kids going to pass..." Has everything to do with learning, stupid. If the kids don't feel welcome in the environment, they are not going to learn.

I'm about a returning back to the essence and then creating an environment where folks can be ratchetdemic, where they feel comfortable as they are, or feel motivated to sort of reach high standards and benchmarks and pursuits by any means necessary. By reimagining teaching, by reimagining what learning looks like, reimagining the environment, reimagining the structure of schools, reimagining the nature of relationships, reimagining what's welcome in classrooms.

And then teaching teachers to learn how to welcome things that they are not comfortable with. Like if my pants hang a little low, by the way, I'm still ready to learn. If I'm really concerned about what I look like and my outfit and my Jordans, by the way, I'm still ready to learn. All these things that we think equate to a non-preparedness for learning, that actually have nothing at all to doing with if I'm ready, because if my soul is ready to learn, it don't matter what I look like or sound like or dress like, I'm there to learn from you, and so model what that looks like for me.

Jill Anderson: Oh, Christopher, this is just lots of wonderful things to think about and consider. I thank you so much for taking the time to talk with me.

Christopher Emdin: It's a pleasure to share some words and thoughts and ideas. I want to apologize for my unbridled enthusiasm. Can I end with this?

Jill Anderson: Sure.

Christopher Emdin: Because I don't want to end this podcast with a doom and gloom and education is broken. I want us all who are listening to understand that we are in this moment where there's a space for radical new possibilities. That the things that we need to do to transform education actually doesn't cost us that much. It's about a decision to create a new type of teaching and learning, and if we do that, the future is bright and the possibilities are endless.

Jill Anderson: Christopher Emdin is an associate professor of Science and Education at Teachers College at Columbia University. He's also the associate director of the Institute for Urban and Minority Education, and the director of the Program and Science Education. His latest book is Ratchetdemic: Reimagining Academic Success.

I'm Jill Anderson. This is the Harvard EdCast produced by the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Thanks for listening.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Harvard EdCast: Embracing the Whole Student, Being Ratchetdemic

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Chris Emdin wants education to transform lives, but until we fully accept students as themselves in teaching and learning that it will stay the same. "We are part of a system that's constructed itself based on the notion that not everybody deserves it.

# data[].attributes.body
Harvard EdCast with Feldman (author of "Grading for Equity")

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
When Joe Feldman, Ed.M.'93, author of Grading for Equity, looked closer at grading practices in schools across the country, he realized many practices are outdated, inconsistent, and inequitable. Today he helps educators develop strategies that tackle inconsistent grading practices. In this episode of the Harvard EdCast, Feldman discussed how shifting grading practices can change the landscape of schools and potentially the future for students.

TRANSCRIPT

Jill Anderson: I'm Jill Anderson. This is the Harvard EdCast. Joe Feldman believes how teachers grade students today is often outdated, inconsistent and inequitable. He's a former educator who's been examining grading practices, and believes there's better ways to do it. He's been working with schools to develop strategies that reimagine how we grade students. Some of these strategies go beyond common practices like using extra credit, to really assessing how well a student is mastering the content. When I spoke with Joe, I asked him why grading hasn't changed very much?

Joe Feldman: Most teachers have never really had an opportunity to think very critically about grading. It's not part of our credentialing work, it's not part of our professional development often. Even when we're given some new curriculum or new instructional strategies, grading is really pushed outside the conversation. Most people think it exists almost outside teaching, and that it's just this sort of calculation, this sort of bean counting, but it's actually interwoven into every pedagogical decision that teachers make, because whenever they make a choice about an activity, or some work, or some assessment, they have to decide whether or not to grade it. And if so, with what weight? With what consequences? All kinds of things like that.

We really are using an inherited grading structures and practices that date back to the industrial revolution, when we had different ideas about what schools were for, and what learning should look like, and what we believed about kids, and which kids we believe those things, and which kids we sort of dismissed.

Because there hasn't been a lot of good research and attention to grading, we've just been replicating how we were taught. You know, we'd say, well, it seems like a good idea to drop the lowest grade if kids have done all their homework. That seems like a reasonable thing to do. And we just are all kind of winging it, or doing it based on what our mentor teacher did, or our department may have shared an idea, but we just haven't had the opportunity to critically examine it. I hope that the work that I'm doing gives teachers and schools a license, and vocabulary, and a space to start to really interrogate the grading practices that we use.

Jill Anderson: I mean, I was struck by how inconsistent grading can be across the same school. Why do you think that inconsistency is so problematic?

Joe Feldman: If you look at it from the viewpoint of the student, so in a typical day in middle school or high school, students are seeing five, six, even more teachers each day. Every teacher is usually doing their own approaches to grading, and many of them become idiosyncratic. Although every teacher has deep beliefs that they're trying to imbue in their grading, and send certain messages and values to students, and trying to build a certain kind of learning community, every teacher is doing it differently. From the student, it adds to my cognitive load. I not only have to understand the content and try and perform at high levels of the content, but now I also have to navigate a grading structure that may not be totally transparent, and may be different for every teacher, and particularly for students who are historically underserved and have less education background, and fewer resources and sort of understanding of how to navigate those really foreign systems to a lot of our students, it places those additional burdens on them, which we shouldn't do.

Jill Anderson: Talk to me a little bit about this idea of inequity and grading.

Joe Feldman: When I first started doing this work, I had been a teacher for years, and a principal of a couple of different high schools, and worked as a district administrator in New York city, and in Northern California as a director of curriculum and instruction, supervised principals and coach teachers. Through all of that work, grading had always nagged at me because there was no way to address these inconsistencies. I began interviewing more teachers and principals, and everyone was frustrated with grading. As I did more research, I found that the traditional practices that we use actually perpetuate disparities that have been going on for years by race, income, education, background, language. The frustrating part I think, is that so many of us go into education to try and disrupt and counteract these cycles of disparities over generations, and do great work and thinking about culturally responsive pedagogy and diverse curriculum, and really trying to listen to our students, and yet we are using practices that undermine those things and actually work against all of the great equity work that we've been doing.

Jill Anderson: Can you tell me some of the strategies that you propose for changing grading in schools?

Joe Feldman: I'll start with talking about a common practice that perpetuates inequities and what to do instead. One example is the traditional idea that we average a student's performance over time. And actually grade book software does this by default. If you imagine students do some homework, and then they do a quiz or two, and then there's some summit of assessment or test at the end of some unit.

The way that we traditionally grade those things is that we assign point values for all those things, and students score a certain number of them out of a certain number of possible. Then we add up all those numbers and divide the number earned by the number possible. What that is doing is it's averaging all of the performances together into a single grade.

The problem with that, is that for the student who does well from the very beginning and gets A's on everything, their performance is fine, their average is an A, but for the student who struggles at the beginning and gets very low grades, D's and C's and even F's as they are in the process of learning, and even on early quizzes when they demonstrate mastery on the test and let's say they get an A on the test, because they have those earlier grades that ostensibly were for assignments and assessments that were on the path to learning, that they were supposed to learn from, and that they weren't even supposed to have learned everything yet, when we include those early scores, it pulls down the final grades, so it actually misrepresents the level of mastery that a student has ultimately demonstrated.

The reason why that's so inequitable, is that for the student who, before coming to class, attended summer workshops or had parents who gave them a much richer educational environment because they had the time, and the education, and the money, or the students who had a great teacher the year before, they're going to come in at the beginning of that unit and do much better, and the student who hasn't had those resources and privileges is going to start lower. When you average a student's performance over time, you are actually perpetuating those disparities that occurred before that student came into your class. The alternative then, is that you wouldn't include earlier performances. You would only include in the grade how a student did at the end of their learning, not to include the mistakes they made in the process.

Jill Anderson: Do you see that as the biggest change a school or teachers could make in the process of grading?

Joe Feldman: It's only one of, like a dozen. That's just one example, and that really is just about how you calculate the grade. What's hard about that for teachers to get their head around, is that that's all they've ever known is, I put the numbers into my software, and the software does the calculation, and then poof, out comes a number. What I try and get teachers to recognize and own, is that if they allow the software to do that, that is an affirmative decision that they're making, that averaging a student's performance is the most accurate and equitable way to describe that student, and it's not. Just helping them recognize that they have a choice in how grades are calculated, is a huge step toward really empowering teachers and giving them a greater sense of ownership and responsibility over how they grade. But there are many other practices.

Jill Anderson: Right. Some of the things I was reading about, doing away with extra credit, making homework not something that counts toward the final grade, and really reevaluating how teachers look at class participation, all these sort of extras that usually play into a student's grade. Can you talk a little bit more about some of those items, because that's big, to do away with some of that stuff, or look at it completely differently?

Joe Feldman: Yeah, and I think what you sense, is that this can be very disorienting to teachers and cause a lot of disequilibrium, because it is helping them see that the practices that they believed were right may actually be hurting students and giving inaccurate information. This is often very difficult and exciting work for teachers.

One category is to not include a student's behavior in their grade. In many classrooms, teachers use grades as a classroom management strategy, and as a way to incentivize students to do behaviors that the teachers believe will support learning. An example is, in middle school we want to teach students that they need to bring their materials every day. What we will do is we will give them five points, up to five points each day if they bring their notebook, their pen, their calculator, et cetera. Teachers do this, because they believe that those kinds of skills are really important for students to be academically successful. The teachers are absolutely right that those skills are critical.

The problem is that when you include student behaviors in the grade, you start to misrepresent and warp the accuracy. An example is a student every day brings their notebook and pen and they get five points every day, but they do poorly on the quiz or the test. What happens is, is even though they may have gotten a C or a D on the test, because they brought the materials every day, or because they've raised their hand and asked a question every day, or because they are respectful, or turn things in on time, they're getting all these points that are then lifting that C test grade to a B or even an A minus.

The big problem with that, well, there are several, one of which is that you're miscommunicating to the student where they are. You're telling the student that they're at a B level in your content, and they're actually at a C. So they don't think there's a problem, the counselors don't think there's a problem, the parents don't think it's a problem, and the student goes to the next grade level and gets crushed by the content, because they have no idea that they weren't prepared for the rigor of that class because they kept getting the message that they were getting B's.

A second big problem with including behavior in the grade for things like participation, is that often the way that teachers interpret student behaviors are through a culturally specific lens. Like whose norms are the teachers applying when they are grading students on their participation? We have to recognize that students learn in a variety of ways, many of which are not the ways that we learn. Just because a student isn't taking notes doesn't mean that they're not learning. And conversely, just because a student is taking notes doesn't mean they're learning. What we are doing is that we are grading a student on acting as if they are learning. They are going through the motions of learning, whether or not they actually learned or not, and we're rewarding or punishing them. The only way to know whether a student has actually learned is to assess them, not to examine and try and subjectively evaluate a behavior. That's sort of one category.

The other is around homework. First of all, I want to clarify, it's not that homework is optional. Homework should still be required and expected, but it's just we wouldn't include the student's performance in their grade. The way I like to think about equitable grading is that we want it to have three pillars. The first is that the grades are accurately describing a student's academic performance. The second is that the grade is bias resistance, so it counteracts institutional biases and protects grades from being infected by our implicit biases, so institutional and implicit biases. Thirdly, we want it to be motivational, to build student's intrinsic motivation, not extrinsic.

All right, so I'm going to walk through homework, and talk about why our traditional use of incorporating a student's performance on homework and their grade violate each of these. The first is around accuracy, so we don't know who did the student's homework, frankly. Many students particularly, well actually across all spectrums, they copy, as part of the partnerships I have with schools when we do this work is I interview students, and I have never had a student tell me that they have not copied homework. It happens and when I ask them why, they say, well, if I don't know how to do something, I need help, or I forget and I need help. The bottom line is if I don't do this, I won't get the points. Students are copying other people's homework. When we include a student's performance on homework in the grade, we may be including other students, or tutors, or parents performance in a grade. We just never know. So it challenges the accuracy.

It also does what I mentioned before. Many teachers will say, well, I don't want to grade the homework for accuracy. I'll grade it for completion. Just if the kid tried, I don't care if they got answers wrong. Then what you're doing is the same thing I mentioned earlier, which is if a student doesn't know the answers on the homework but they try every day and they don't know it on the test, then all those completed homework assignments that gave them five points for each one is going to inflate the test grade. So you're going to again, warp the accuracy.

Okay, so bias resistance. Well, we know that homework is often a filter for privilege, that students who have resources at home, whether they be internet access, or caregivers who have a college education or who have time to help them, settings that have a quiet space to do work, students who don't have other responsibilities like taking care of siblings or having jobs, those students are more likely to complete homework compared to the students who don't have those resources. When we include a student's performance on homework in the grade, we are rewarding students who have those resources and punishing those who don't.

The third part is around motivation, the third pillar is motivation. The reason we assign homework in the first place is because students need practice. If they do this practice, they will then be able to perform on the test, and we actually want them to make mistakes on homework, because if there's any place that you should make mistakes in your learning, you should do it when you're practicing like on homework. If we say to students, you should make mistakes on homework, that's where you should make them, and we include their performance on that homework in the grade we're telling them make a lot of mistakes and we're going to punish you for it, which is totally confusing and undermines our messaging.

We also have to recognize that students understand the relationship between practice for no points or no reward, and then being able to perform later for the reward. If I go out and shoot free throws for two hours because I'm practicing, I know that I'm not getting any points for that, it's that I do those practices so that when I get to the game I can make the points. Students understand it on video games, I go to these sandbox areas and I'm just playing and practicing and making a lot of mistakes and I'm not getting any points, but I do it so that when I go and fight the boss monster, I can beat the boss monster, right? They understand means and ends of practice perform. Every student in performing arts get to too.

But we in our traditional thinking about grading have detached the purpose of homework from its outcome. So we say don't do homework for you, do it for me, because I'm the teacher, I'm going to give you points for doing it, and then later you'll be able to do well on the test. Instead we can reconnect the relationship and say, the reason you do homework is not for me, you do it for you, because when you do the practice, you do better on the performance.

Teachers initially are very worried about this and say, oh, I don't give students points for homework, they won't do it. Sometimes that happens, and there's an initial dip, but then teachers start spending time helping students see the relationship between the homework and the tests. They will give them a quiz, and if students don't do well on it, they will say, well, let's look at which homework you did and, oh, I'm going to put up a little chart on the board that shows that of the students who did the three homework preceding the quiz, their average grade was a B plus or A minus, and the students who didn't do it, their average grade was a D. What do you think is going on students? Then they can even say to students, let's look at the quiz and look for where there were examples in the homework that showed up on the quiz, right. Helping students recognize the connection between the two.

What teachers find is that students then do their homework for no points, because students have internalized the relationship between the homework and the test, and teachers are shocked that students do homework and they cannot believe that they had for years and years been essentially managing students' behaviors and rewarding them little chits for doing what they asked. And frankly, it's a much more empowering and 21st century skill to recognize when I need to practice something, and only do the amount of homework that I need so that I'm ready for when the test comes, because after all in post secondary education and in the professional world, nobody is giving you any value for the work you do outside of class. It's all up to you to decide how much you need.

Jill Anderson: I mean, you hit on something about teachers struggle with these changes a lot. Why do you think grading is such a sensitive topic for teachers?

Joe Feldman: It's funny. When I was a principal, grading was the most difficult conversation to have with a teacher. Administrators I talked to all over, whether they be at the elementary, middle, or high school, or district level, they're all frustrated with how grading is addressed, and the inconsistency and the problems that that generates. But it's so difficult for them to broach the subject. I think what it's about is that especially today, there are so many demands placed on teachers, and expectations and mandates from multiple layers, right? The school districts, state, federal and all kinds of roles they have to serve. I think grading is really the last island of autonomy that teachers have. That it is the one place where they can bring their full professional judgment and expertise in a formalized way, and in a way that perseveres and stays with students. I mean, it is the sort of the kind of core of their power, for many teachers their identity.

When people start to push against that, it can be very hard for teachers to hear it, and teachers justifiably get very defensive oftentimes. You know, when a principal comes up and says to a teacher, I'd like to talk to you about grading, the teacher's reaction is not, oh, let's have a good intellectual discussion. It's what teacher called you? Or what parent called you? Or what grade do you want me to change? Or that kind of thing. The way that I encourage principals, school leaders, and district leaders to do this work, is to create areas for teachers to explore the practices on their own. Not to come in and say to teachers, hey, you know what? Starting next year we're not going to include homework in the grade anymore. It's too jarring, too much of a power play for the school leader. Instead, there have to be ways that teachers can explore and better understand these practices themselves because when they start trying them, they find great results.

Jill Anderson: This is isn't a case of, go in as a principal and say, we're going to do it differently next year. This is ease into type of change.

Joe Feldman: Well, and I think it really should be teacher driven. Some teachers will start to look at these ideas and examine their practices and run a hundred miles an hour, and other teachers will be much slower to it, for all kinds of reasons. I think that the job of a school leader is to create those spaces, and that energy, and that tailwind, to say that this is a big enough issue for us. If we are committed to equity as we are in our school, this is perhaps one of the last frontiers that we have to tackle if we're really serious about this.

When that happens, I think teachers start to get some energy, and buy in, and start to see the relationship, and are motivated to push for changes in their practice. What we've seen when we partner with schools, and usually we go through a series of workshops over the course of the year, and teachers get a lot of chances to try lots of things, but at the end there is this body of evidence that is in a school context or a district context, where teachers have found that with our students, when we use these practices, we get better results. The idea is that there starts to be this groundswell and consensus around, yes, we have enough evidence now, that we need to not average performance over time or other practices.

Jill Anderson: Is one of the results of this, the evidence that you see about students beginning to not be obsessed with the grade?

Joe Feldman: You're right. Many students, most are very concerned with their grade. Parents and caregivers put a lot of pressure on a lot of students around the grade, and it holds a lot of currency and social status for some groups. Grades are one of the primary elements in some of the major decisions that we make about students, including college admissions, scholarships, financial aid, whether they get certain opportunities in school, whether they're athletically eligible, even in some States the insurance rates are based on the grades that students get, and work permit eligibility, and so even family income can be implicated by grades that students get. There is a lot of pressure to get grades.

What this work does is it helps students understand and get more ownership over their own grade. And it's not about amassing as many points as possible. It's not just trying to just do whatever you're asked to do, and if you jump through all the right hoops, by whatever means possible to get as many points as possible, you'll get the higher grade. The grade is really based on what you know, not all the stuff you do.

When teachers start using these practices, the ones we've talked about, and some others, students start to A, relax more in class. They don't have to perform perfectly every day and do every activity, because every activity is counted and do every homework perfectly. And teachers talk about how the rooms feel less stressful.

It also helps students, one of the things we haven't talked to them, which is how teachers can then be more transparent with their expectations. Instead of saying if you want an A, you have to get 80 points out of the 94 on the test. They say in order to show an A on this particular standard or this skill, it looks like this, and a B looks like this in a C level looks like this. Which then makes it very clear to students and explicit, of what do I have to know and be able to do to earn a particular B or A? What level of mastery must I demonstrate?

Students will then start to use, instead of the language of points, which is what we've taught them since fourth grade and fifth grade, is that school is about amassing points. Instead of saying, I'm two points away from an A, they will say, if I can just apply negative exponents to the quadratic formula, I'll be able to get the A, which is music to teacher's ears, right. They want students to talk about their learning in the language of the subject. When we stop using a lot of these traditional practices, we make it so that students feel like the grade is something that's so clear to them, and the path to getting the grade they want is right in front of them. There's a great quote that is, "a student could hit any target that it's clear to them and doesn't move." What equitable grading is, is setting these targets so that they're clear and don't move.

Jill Anderson: What has the response been from parents, and some of the schools where you've been working to help implement these strategies?

Joe Feldman: Teachers are nervous that parents won't like these ideas, because after all, parents have grown up in the traditional system too and they know the rules of the game. When you suggest, particularly for higher income and higher educated, and more active parents, when you say you're going to start changing the rules of the game for their children, teachers are nervous that the parents will get very upset. Initially parents are skeptical, like I figured out the rules there's a lot at stake here and so don't change the rules.

Teachers have found when they start to have these conversations, and part of the work I do with schools also, is to have parent presentations or caregiver presentations, is that they love these ideas, because they know that their kids are overly stressed, and they know that kids who struggle get demotivated very early because their grade becomes un-salvageable, because all the early grades count because we're averaging performance over time or we're collecting the performance over time. They love that homework now is not included in the grade, because it gives the student more responsibility. I mean they think these ideas are wonderful.

When I first started this work, I actually wasn't sure it would work. I hired an external evaluator very early to look at the grades that teachers were assigning before and after using these practices. What we've found consistently across schools, whether they be middle schools, or high schools, or schools that serve lots of low income kids, and kids of color, or suburban predominantly white students and high income, is that the percent of A's that teachers give decreases because there's not so much inflation going on around doing all the homework and everything. Interestingly, the decrease in A's occurs most dramatically for white children and higher income children. The A rate of kids of color and low income actually increases a little bit. And conversely, the DNF rate goes down, and it goes down most dramatically for kids of color and low income kids and kids with special needs.

What that illuminates is that the traditional system is weighted against historically underserved and more vulnerable populations. When parents first get lower grades, they get really nervous because, oh my child has been an A forever, and now they got a B in your class, and the teacher's response is, well I'm being honest with you, your child may have actually been at the B level before, but because they were doing all the stuff, and all the extra credit, it was miscommunicating to you what their level of mastery is, and I believe that they still can get an A, but now it's much clear to them of what they have to know and do.

Jill Anderson: What do you say to people who are just against this and say, my kid needs to learn to be adaptable, needs that life skill of figuring out what's going to make one teacher happy over another one, that this will help them as an adult with bosses, all people are different. What do you say to that?

Joe Feldman: I think when parents, and even some teachers say that kids need to be able to shift gears for lots of different people, and the differences among teachers is really important, and we don't want teachers to be all in lockstep. I think that sort of pushes the argument way past where I'm going, and I don't think that every teacher needs to be in lockstep, and in fact teachers doing all kinds of different things, and students are having to shift gears all the time because every teacher has different ways that they have learning in their class, and different ways that they are assessing, and different codes of conduct about how we behave in our class. I'm just saying we don't need to add the additional cognitive load of students having to figure out grading systems as well, particularly when the import of grades is so high on student outcomes and students self image. I mean that's how I would respond to that.

I also think, that when I work with teachers, they tell me, ones that have taught for five or 10 years, or 15 or 20, that learning these things and trying them out and seeing the positive results, creates a whole wave of very powerful emotions for them, from excitement and optimism, to sadness, and shame, and guilt because they think about all the students who they've served before that where they've used practices that may have not been to their benefit and may have actually harmed them and prevented them from being as successful or misleading them. My response to that is that that is totally normal to feel that way, and that's okay.

We as teachers I think, have to forgive ourselves and give ourselves the license, to when we learn new information, to now be okay with being smarter than we were yesterday and trying these new practices, because we will actually see that adolescents aren't what we thought they were. We thought that they were lazy and couldn't be motivated unless we gave them points. Now we find that actually they're not like that. They can see the relationship between doing homework and doing well on assessments, and they then do their homework without points. Teachers talk about how it sort of reconnects them to why they went into teaching in the first place. They didn't go into teaching so that they could be bean counters and manage every student behavior with assigning or subtracting points. They went into teaching because they want to empower students over their learning, and help students see the path to success that each one of them can have.

Jill Anderson: Joe Feldman is the author of Grading for Equity, what it is, why it matters, and how it can transform schools and classrooms. He is also the CEO of Crescendo Education Group, which helps schools improve grading and assessment practices. I'm Jill Anderson. This is the Harvard EdCast produced by the Harvard graduate school of education. Thanks for listening and please subscribe.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
When Joe Feldman, Ed.M.'93, author of Grading for Equity , looked closer at grading practices in schools across the country, he realized many practices are outdated, inconsistent, and inequitable. Today he helps educators develop strategies that tackle inconsistent grading practices.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Teach with Newsela: Appsmashing with Pear Deck

# data[].attributes.body
Tyler Rablin

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Slowly but surely, I started to identify some crucial mindset shifts that I had to make if I really wanted assessments to be meaningful.

Assessments as Evidence of Learning

The assessment doesn't matter; the learning it reveals does. That was hard for me to grapple with. The key is in remembering that a single assessment is just part of a larger ecosystem of information that can be used to determine student progress. This helped me broaden my understanding of assessment. A conversation with a student? That's evidence! Listening in on some group work? Evidence!

How did I make the shift? It came down to asking two questions: What do I want my students to learn? And what are the ways that they can show me that they have learned it? An approach to assessment that uses a variety of techniques gives you a more complete picture of student learning than you would get from an isolated snapshot.

Multiple Attempts, Not Redoing Tasks

When students have multiple attempts to provide evidence of learning, we can start questioning the practice of having students redo tasks. There are absolutely times when students need to understand the value of creating a high-quality product through revisions, but doing something again for the sake of points is just painful.

Instead of making a student redo something, what if we asked, "How else can you show me you know it?" That takes the emphasis off the task and puts it back on the student and their learning.

How did I make the shift? Recognize that not all of the multitudes of standards deserve equal time and focus. This matters because you can't offer multiple attempts at a million standards. Limit multiple attempts to what is essential. Think deep, not wide, so that you can gather multiple pieces of evidence for a single concept or skill.

The Grade Book Can Be a Communication Log

I can remember the moment -walking down the hallway at the end of my first year of teaching to submit my final grades-when I thought, "What does this thing mean to anyone?" I knew who was good at quizzes, who turned things in, and honestly who hated my class, but that was about it. I had to ask, "What is my grade book communicating, and why?"

How did I make the shift? Step one is to identify the information you want to communicate. Think about what information would be helpful for all stakeholders, and then think about how you can clearly communicate that. From there, create space in your grade book for each of those individual elements. Make your grade book clear, make it meaningful, and make it accurate.

Using Comments to Point Students Toward Further Learning

When I started teaching, most of the feedback students got was a simple identification of an error, whether that was through a comment or a score. Slowly, I learned that my job wasn't to identify the mistakes; my job was to identify the trends, analyze them to determine the learning need, and then point students in the right direction.

How did I make the shift? Honestly, this one came down to finding new ways to leave feedback. A short, written comment often didn't do what I needed in terms of helping the student focus on the learning-too often my comments focused them on the mistakes. By leaving video feedback, using text expanders, leveraging one-on-one conferences, and making use of feedback portfolios, I was able to provide feedback that was more than just the sum of the mistakes.

I know these shifts seem small, but without them, our assessment practices will stay rooted in methods that don't align with how kids learn best. For too long, grading and assessment have been a threat for students as they go through the school system, kicking them into a fight, flight, or freeze response because the assessment process has not felt safe, positive, or helpful to them.

The problem was that grades were out of their control, a process they didn't feel part of. I still give grades, but with the changes I've made students know they are part of the process-they have a say in it and ownership over the results.

These shifts in thinking aren't everything, but I can tell you that they have changed the atmosphere in my classroom. My kids don't run from assessment anymore-they aren't afraid of it. They understand it, and they understand that it has value for them, not just for me.

That matters.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
How to Make Sure Grades Are Meaningful and Useful to Students

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Slowly but surely, I started to identify some crucial mindset shifts that I had to make if I really wanted assessments to be meaningful. The assessment doesn't matter; the learning it reveals does. That was hard for me to grapple with.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Restorative Practices: Restorative Practices Isn't About Changing Students' Behavior

# data[].attributes.headline
link to strategies for behavioral supports

# data[].attributes.subject
link to strategies for behavioral supports

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
PBIS World | A Complete Tier 1 Through Tier 3 Positive Behavior Interventions & Supports System

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
PBIS World is in no way affiliated, associated, or connected with any other website, entity, organization, or federal, state, local, or other government agency, department, program, policy, organization, or initiative.