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Unit plan - McQuade Syllabus with fake grades

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A New Kind of Classroom: No Grades, No Failing, No Hurry (Published 2017)

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Mastery-based learning allows students to learn at their own pace.

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Unit plan - backwards design with objective blank

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Unit plan - backwards design with objective

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n this guide for new teachers, learn about different types of assessment and how they can be used to provide feedback to learners and inform instruction.

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Work-life balance is a struggle for both beginning and veteran teachers, and grading seems to be one of the biggest barriers to overcome in maintaining this balance. These ideas may help you give effective and efficient feedback on student work across the disciplines.

7 Grading Hacks

1. Divide and conquer: A large stack of essays or lab reports waiting for feedback can be daunting; the simple act of dividing them into manageable chunks makes them more approachable.

Decide how many products can be assessed in one sitting at a relatively fast pace without compromising the quality of feedback. Divide your stack based on either a number (maybe five or 10) or a percentage basis (a fourth or half of a class set). If you're grading physical papers, literally divide them into stacks; if you're working electronically, keep your eyes focused on the top few submissions.

Another approach, for more tedious assignments like tests, is to grade one question at a time. Grading all of the number 1s, then the 2s, etc., will go quickly because you can focus on one response at a time.

2. Take breaks: Maintaining sustained focus for long periods of time can be difficult, so frequent short breaks can actually increase productivity. When a small chunk of grading is complete, choose a reward (think chocolate or maybe a stretch break) and rest your mind.

Our personal strategy is to divide the total number of papers by five and put out one gummy bear for each group-grade papers with a timer on (see next tip), eat a gummy bear, and repeat until finished.

The key is to figure out what works for you and create a routine.

3. Grade with a timer: Setting a timer is a strategy that helps sustain focus and eliminates the temptation to edit or write a lot.

One method is to start a timer with a lap feature at the beginning of the chunk of papers and hit the lap button at the end of each paper. Try to keep an even pace, so if you spend five minutes on the first paper, try to do the same on each subsequent paper. This simulates the feeling of racing against the clock and can keep you focused on pushing forward.

You can instead use a timer as a countdown clock by allowing a reasonable amount of time to grade and provide feedback. Stay on task with the timer and do not allow yourself to spend too much time on any one paper or project.

4. Try Glow and Grow and a highlighter: Teachers need to shift from editing student work to offering meaningful feedback. Marking every single grammar error is not only demoralizing for students but also time-consuming for teachers. One of our biggest shifts has been trying Glow and Grow: one comment praising students for what they've done well (Glow) and one offering a focus for students to work on in revision or keep in mind for the future (Grow).

We also read written work with a highlighter in hand (or use the highlighting tool on the computer) to draw attention to something students have done well. This is a quick way to reinforce solid ideas and good writing and takes little extra time.

5. Have a specific focus: Narrowing feedback to one or two skills per paper can focus students without overwhelming them, and doing so cuts down on grading time for teachers. One week the focus may be on transitions and adding details, while the next week may focus on sentence variety and strong conclusions.

Students can also have a voice in the process and offer direction by either leaving a note requesting feedback on a specific objective or using a tool such as Flipgrid for self-evaluation. Student reflections point teachers directly to issues of concern, thus saving time.

6. Utilize technology: Thanks to today's technology, written commentary-often the most time-consuming method for giving feedback-is not the only option.

Kaizena allows teachers to leave voice comments directly on student documents-the company says voice comments are 75 percent faster for the teacher to give than written ones. Google Docs also supports voice comments, and teachers can easily use Canned Replies for frequently used comments to save time. Voxer is another free app teachers can use to send comments to students.

7. Respect your own personal preferences: For grading done outside the school day, determine if you're best at grading in the morning or at night. You may find yourself in a staring contest with an essay after 9:30 p.m. that could go on for a ridiculous amount of time-just step away from the papers, go to bed, and then wake up 25 minutes earlier than usual in the morning. You may find that you're much more productive when rested.

Changing the setting can be helpful as well. When the weather is nice, some prefer to grade outside; others prefer to go to a coffee shop. Know what time and setting work best for you and plan accordingly.

Grading is a necessary part of a teacher's life, but it doesn't have to own us. Work to take back some time for yourself.

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Work-life balance is a struggle for both beginning and veteran teachers, and grading seems to be one of the biggest barriers to overcome in maintaining this balance. These ideas may help you give effective and efficient feedback on student work across the disciplines. 1.

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Edutopia is a free source of information, inspiration, and practical strategies for learning and teaching in preK-12 education. We are published by the George Lucas Educational Foundation, a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization.

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Under pressure from an unprecedented constellation of forces-from state lawmakers to prestigious private schools and college admissions offices-the ubiquitous one-page high school transcript lined with A-F letter grades may soon be a relic of the past.

In the last decade, at least 15 state legislatures and boards of education have adopted policies incentivizing their public schools to prioritize measures other than grades when assessing students' skills and competencies. And more recently, over 150 of the top private high schools in the U.S., including Phillips Exeter, Choate, and Dalton-storied institutions which have long relied on the status conveyed by student ranking-have pledged to shift to new transcripts that provide more comprehensive, qualitative feedback on students while ruling out any mention of credit hours, GPAs, or A-F grades.

Somewhat independently, schools and lawmakers have come to the same conclusion: The old models of student assessment are out of step with the needs of the 21st-century workplace and society, with their emphasis on hard-to-measure skills such as creativity, problem solving, persistence, and collaboration.

"Competency-based education is a growing movement driven by educators and communities focused on ensuring that students have the knowledge they need to flourish in a global economy," said Susan Patrick, chief executive officer of iNACOL, a nonprofit that runs the website CompetencyWorks. "The future of jobs and the workforce will demand a new set of skills, and students' capacity to solve complex problems for an unknown future will be essential."

For their part, colleges-the final arbiters of high school performance-are signaling a surprising willingness to depart from traditional assessments that have been in place since the early 19th century. From Harvard and Dartmouth to small community colleges, more than 70 U.S. institutions of higher learning have weighed in, signing formal statements asserting that competency-based transcripts will not hurt students in the admissions process.

The emerging alignment of K-12 schools with colleges and legislators builds on a growing consensus among educators who believe that longstanding benchmarks like grades, SATs, AP test scores, and even homework are poor measures of students' skills and can deepen inequities between them. If the momentum holds, a century-old pillar of the school system could crumble entirely, leading to dramatic transitions and potential pitfalls for students and schools alike.

Picking Up Steam

Scott Looney, head of the Hawken School in Cleveland, was frustrated. His school had recently begun offering real-world, full-day courses in subjects like engineering and entrepreneurship, but he was finding it difficult to measure and credit the new types of skills students were learning using A-F grades. Looney started reaching out to private high schools and colleges looking for alternatives.

Though he found that many educators shared his desires for a new assessment system, he came up empty-handed.

"The grading system right now is demoralizing and is designed to produce winners and losers," said Looney. "The purpose of education is not to sort kids-it's to grow kids. Teachers need to coach and mentor, but with grades, teachers turn into judges. I think we can show the unique abilities of kids without stratifying them."

Looney began brainstorming a new type of transcript for the Hawken School, but quickly realized he would need a critical mass of schools to influence college admissions offices to accept it. With the initial support of 28 other independent schools, Looney formed the Mastery Transcript Consortium (MTC) in April 2017. The group has since expanded to 157 schools, including both historic institutions like Phillips Exeter and newer alternative schools like the Khan Lab School.

In joining the MTC, each school commits to phase out its existing GPA- and grade-based transcripts for a digital, interactive format that showcases students' academic and enrichment skills, areas for growth, and samples of work or talents, such as a video of a public speaking competition or a portfolio of artwork.

The purpose of education is not to sort kids-it's to grow kids. Teachers need to coach and mentor, but with grades, teachers turn into judges.

While the transcript is still in its infancy, organizers say it will resemble a website that each school will be able customize by choosing from a menu of skills like critical thinking, creativity, and self-directed learning, along with core content areas such as algebraic reasoning. Instead of earning credit hours and receiving grades, students will take courses to prove they've developed key skills and competencies. Looney insists that the transcripts will be readable by admissions officers in two minutes or less.

The MTC's work is not entirely original, though, and takes its lead from a number of public schools-most notably in New England-that have been rethinking traditional methods of assessing students for more than a decade.

Some are supported by the nonprofit group Great Schools Partnership, which helped influence Maine, Connecticut, Vermont, Rhode Island, and New Hampshire to adopt state board of education policies or legislation in the last decade on proficiency-based assessment systems. Other districts, in Florida, California, and Georgia, have made similar changes more recently, and pilot programs have emerged in Colorado, Idaho, Utah, Illinois, Ohio, and Oregon.

There's also backing from colleges. The Great Schools Partnership was able to garner the support of more than 70 colleges and universities, suggesting that higher ed admissions offices are ready for the change.

"We are accustomed to academic reports from around the world, including those from students who have been privately instructed and even self-taught," said Marlyn McGrath, Harvard University's director of admissions, replying via email about the transcripts. "In cases where we need additional information, we typically ask for it. So we are not concerned that students presenting alternative transcripts will be disadvantaged because of format."

Mastery Versus Seat Time

But the new transcripts are just the tip of the iceberg, according to supporters, part of a larger movement to do away with a system where kids can progress through grades or courses without really understanding material and be promoted for seat time and good behavior. When students move on to harder topics, they continue to accumulate gaps in their knowledge-a setup for failure in the later grades or collegiate years.

Under a competency model, kids can no longer just "get by," said Derek Pierce, principal of Casco Bay High School in Portland, Maine, which has used a proficiency-based transcript since 2005.

The new transcripts "get kids focused on doing their personal best on meeting or exceeding standards rather than getting a better grade than the kid next to them," said Pierce. "There is no longer a 'gentleman's C'."

However, without widespread agreement on the necessary skills and knowledge required for core classes, proving mastery may be just as elusive and arbitrary as the current system. Even MTC member schools won't rely on a shared understanding of what mastery means. Instead, each school will be able to quantify it independently, leaving college admissions officers-according to critics-without a clear basis of comparison.

Our learning structures have to be much more nimble to allow today's learners to navigate through opportunities where they can see themselves as the authors of their own education.

While competency-based education proponents argue that the new transcripts will identify students with skills that academia has traditionally overlooked, others worry about equity for marginalized students, who already struggle in the current system. Some critics have suggested that the new transcripts may be a way for wealthier schools, especially private schools like those in the MTC, to give their students an even greater advantage when competing for limited positions at the best universities.

There are other unanswered questions and challenges to be worked out, too. Will college admissions counselors have enough time, especially at large public colleges, to look meaningfully at dense digital portfolios of student work? Will the new transcripts create too much work and new training for K-12 teachers, as they struggle to measure hard-to-define categories of learning? Perhaps most importantly, will parents buy in?

"There's still plenty of work ahead and some pretty radical changes taking place," explained Mike Martin, director of curriculum and technology at Montpelier Public Schools in Vermont, whose district starting transitioning to a competency-based model in 2013.

Many public and private schools, like Martin's, are still years away from full implementation, and others are grappling with the nuts and bolts of how to implement dramatically new systems for student learning and assessment. Those on the forefront of these changes, though, remain hopeful that the new system will push all students to develop the skills they need to succeed in college and careers.

"Our learning structures have to be much more nimble to allow today's learners to navigate through opportunities where they can see themselves as the authors of their education," said Martin. "Proficiency-based education is about getting every single student up to a certain skill level and ensuring every student can succeed."

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Under pressure from an unprecedented constellation of forces-from state lawmakers to prestigious private schools and college admissions offices-the ubiquitous one-page high school transcript lined with A-F letter grades may soon be a relic of the past.

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Do No-Zero Policies Help or Hurt Students?

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No-zero policies spur serious—and productive—debate among teachers. We look at the big insights on both sides of the argument.

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Formative assessment-discovering what students know while they're still in the process of learning it-can be tricky. Designing just the right assessment can feel high stakes-for teachers, not students-because we're using it to figure out what comes next. Are we ready to move on? Do our students need a different path into the concepts? Or, more likely, which students are ready to move on and which need a different path?

When it comes to figuring out what our students really know, we have to look at more than one kind of information. A single data point-no matter how well designed the quiz, presentation, or problem behind it-isn't enough information to help us plan the next step in our instruction.

Add to that the fact that different learning tasks are best measured in different ways, and we can see why we need a variety of formative assessment tools we can deploy quickly, seamlessly, and in a low-stakes way-all while not creating an unmanageable workload. That's why it's important to keep it simple: Formative assessments generally just need to be checked, not graded, as the point is to get a basic read on the progress of individuals, or the class as a whole.

7 Approaches to Formative Assessment

1. Entry and exit slips: Those marginal minutes at the beginning and end of class can provide some great opportunities to find out what kids remember. Start the class off with a quick question about the previous day's work while students are getting settled-you can ask differentiated questions written out on chart paper or projected on the board, for example.

A quick way to see the big picture if you use paper exit tickets is to sort the papers into three piles: Students got the point; they sort of got it; and they didn't get it. The size of the stacks is your clue about what to do next.

No matter the tool, the key to keeping students engaged in the process of just-walked-in or almost-out-the-door formative assessment is the questions. Ask students to write for one minute on the most meaningful thing they learned. You can try prompts like:

What are three things you learned, two things you're still curious about, and one thing you don't understand?

How would you have done things differently today, if you had the choice?

What I found interesting about this work was...

Right now I'm feeling...

Today was hard because...

Or skip the words completely and have students draw or circle emojis to represent their assessment of their understanding.

2. Low-stakes quizzes and polls: If you want to find out whether your students really know as much as you think they know, polls and quizzes created with Socrative or Quizlet or in-class games and tools like Quizalize, Kahoot, FlipQuiz, Gimkit, Plickers, and Flippity can help you get a better sense of how much they really understand. (Grading quizzes but assigning low point values is a great way to make sure students really try: The quizzes matter, but an individual low score can't kill a student's grade.) Kids in many classes are always logged in to these tools, so formative assessments can be done very quickly. Teachers can see each kid's response, and determine both individually and in aggregate how students are doing.

Because you can design the questions yourself, you determine the level of complexity. Ask questions at the bottom of Bloom's taxonomy and you'll get insight into what facts, vocabulary terms, or processes kids remember. Ask more complicated questions ("What advice do you think Katniss Everdeen would offer Scout Finch if the two of them were talking at the end of chapter 3?"), and you'll get more sophisticated insights.

3. Dipsticks: So-called alternative formative assessments are meant to be as easy and quick as checking the oil in your car, so they're sometimes referred to as dipsticks. These can be things like asking students to:

write a letter explaining a key idea to a friend,

draw a sketch to visually represent new knowledge, or

do a think, pair, share exercise with a partner.

Your own observations of students at work in class can provide valuable data as well, but they can be tricky to keep track of. Taking quick notes on a tablet or smartphone, or using a copy of your roster, is one approach. A focused observation form is more formal and can help you narrow your note-taking focus as you watch students work.

4. Interview assessments: If you want to dig a little deeper into students' understanding of content, try discussion-based assessment methods. Casual chats with students in the classroom can help them feel at ease even as you get a sense of what they know, and you may find that five-minute interview assessments work really well. Five minutes per student would take quite a bit of time, but you don't have to talk to every student about every project or lesson.

You can also shift some of this work to students using a peer-feedback process called TAG feedback (Tell your peer something they did well, Ask a thoughtful question, Give a positive suggestion). When you have students share the feedback they have for a peer, you gain insight into both students' learning.

For more introverted students-or for more private assessments-use Flipgrid, Explain Everything, or Seesaw to have students record their answers to prompts and demonstrate what they can do.

5. Methods that incorporate art: Consider using visual art or photography or videography as an assessment tool. Whether students draw, create a collage, or sculpt, you may find that the assessment helps them synthesize their learning. Or think beyond the visual and have kids act out their understanding of the content. They can create a dance to model cell mitosis or act out stories like Ernest Hemingway's "Hills Like White Elephants" to explore the subtext.

6. Misconceptions and errors: Sometimes it's helpful to see if students understand why something is incorrect or why a concept is hard. Ask students to explain the " muddiest point" in the lesson-the place where things got confusing or particularly difficult or where they still lack clarity. Or do a misconception check: Present students with a common misunderstanding and ask them to apply previous knowledge to correct the mistake, or ask them to decide if a statement contains any mistakes at all, and then discuss their answers.

You can use sticky notes to get a quick insight into what areas your kids think they need to work on. Ask them to pick their own trouble spot from three or four areas where you think the class as a whole needs work, and write those areas in separate columns on a whiteboard. Have you students answer on a sticky note and then put the note in the correct column-you can see the results at a glance.

Several self-assessments let the teacher see what every kid thinks very quickly. For example, you can use colored stacking cups that allow kids to flag that they're all set (green cup), working through some confusion (yellow), or really confused and in need of help (red).

Similar strategies involve using participation cards for discussions (each student has three cards-"I agree," "I disagree," and "I don't know how to respond") and thumbs-up responses (instead of raising a hand, students hold a fist at their belly and put their thumb up when they're ready to contribute). Students can instead use six hand gestures to silently signal that they agree, disagree, have something to add, and more. All of these strategies give teachers an unobtrusive way to see what students are thinking.

No matter which tools you select, make time to do your own reflection to ensure that you're only assessing the content and not getting lost in the assessment fog. If a tool is too complicated, is not reliable or accessible, or takes up a disproportionate amount of time, it's OK to put it aside and try something different.

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7 Smart, Fast Ways to Do Formative Assessment

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Within these methods you'll find close to 40 tools and tricks for finding out what your students know while they're still learning.

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Allowing students a chance to redo tests and assignments can help them keep striving for mastery, if the process is well managed.

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Checklist of Unit Assignments Collection 1 -  9th grade.docx

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Collection Anchor Text Lesson Plan - Quilt of a Country.docx

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90 min Block - Collection Anchor Text Lesson Plan.docx

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Assessment of Mastery standards based.docx

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Rick Wormeli: Redos, Retakes, and Do-Overs, Part One

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Rick Wormeli: Formative and Summative Assessment

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Rick Wormeli - Standards Based Practices - Part 1

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Rick Wormeli - Standards Based Practices - Part 2

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On January 29, 2014, Rick Wormeli brought his passion and enthusiasm to Ankeny Community Schools in Iowa to talk about standards-based grading and reporting. Part two of five.

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Rick Wormeli - Standards Based Practices - Part 3

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On January 29, 2014, Rick Wormeli brought his passion and enthusiasm to Ankeny Community Schools in Iowa to talk about standards-based grading and reporting. Part three of five.

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Rick Wormeli Standards Based Practices Part 4

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On January 29, 2014, Rick Wormeli brought his passion and enthusiasm to Ankeny Community Schools in Iowa to talk about standards-based grading and reporting. Part four of five.

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Rick Wormeli Standards Based Grading Part 5

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On January 29, 2014, Rick Wormeli brought his passion and enthusiasm to Ankeny Community Schools in Iowa to talk about standards-based grading and reporting. Part five of five.

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I am a teacher new to standards-based grading.  Where do I start? (Video B)

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This video was created for the Standards-Based Grading Conference on April 24, 2013 in Cedar Rapids, IA (www.tinyurl.com/sbgconference)

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Standards Based Grading and the Game of School: Craig Messerman at TEDxMCPSTeachers

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AMLE - Association for Middle Level Education

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You've always averaged grades. Your teachers averaged grades when you were in school and it worked fine. It works fine for your students.

Does it? Just as we teach our students, we don't want to fall for Argumentum ad populum: something is true or good just because a lot of people think it's true or good. Let's take a look at the case against averaging grades.

Hiding Behind the Math

Just because something is mathematically easy to calculate doesn't mean it's pedagogically sound. The 100-point scale makes averaging attractive to teachers, and averaging implies credible, mathematical objectivity. However, statistics can be manipulated and manipulative in a variety of ways.

One percentage point is the arbitrary cut-off between getting into or being denied entrance into graduate school. One student gets a 90% and another gets an 89%: the first is an A and the second is a B, yet we can't discern mastery of content to this level of specificity. These students are even in mastery of content, but we declare a difference based only on the single percentage point. The student with 90% gets scholarships and advanced class placements and the student with 89% is left to a lesser path. Something's wrong with this picture.

Early in my career, one of my students had a 93.4% in my class. Ninety-four to 100 was the A range set for that school, so he was 0.6% from achieving an A. The student asked if I would be willing to round the score up to the 94% so he could have straight As in all his classes. I reminded him that it was 93.4, not 93.5, so if I rounded anything, I would round down, not up. I told him that if it was 93.5, I could justify rounding up, but not with a 93.4.

I was hiding behind one-tenth of a percentage point. I should have interviewed the student intensely about what he had learned that grading period and made an executive decision about his grade based on the evidence of learning he presented in that moment. The math felt so safe, however, and I was weak. It wasn't one of my prouder moments.

We can't resort to averaging just because it feels credible by virtue of its mathematics. There's too much at stake.

Falsifying Grade Reports

Consider the teacher who gives Martin two chances to do well on the final exam, then averages the two grades. The first attempt results in an F grade, but after re-learning and a lot of hard work, the second attempt results in an A. We trust the exam to be a highly valid indicator of student proficiency in the subject, and Martin has clearly demonstrated excellent mastery in the subject. When the two grades are averaged, however, the teacher records a C in the grade book-falsely reporting his performance against the standards.

This is strikingly inaccurate when using grading scale endpoints such as A and F, and it creates just as inaccurate "blow-to-grade-integrity" reporting as when we average grades closer to one another on the scale: B with D, B with F, A with C, etc.

Consider a sample with more data: Cheryl gets a 97, 94, 26, 35, and 83 on her tests, which correspond to an A, A, F, F, and a B on the school grading scale. When the numbers are averaged, however, everything is given equal weight, and the score is 67, which is a D. This is an incorrect report of her performance against individual standards.

Thankfully, many schools are moving toward disaggregation in which students receive separate grades for individual standards. This will cut down dramatically on the distortions caused by aggregate grades that combine everything into one small symbol and will help eliminate teacher concerns about students who "game" the system when their teachers re-declare zeroes as 50s on the 100-point scale. These students try to do just enough- skipping some assessments, scoring well on others-to pass mathematically. In classrooms where teachers do not average grades, students can't do this.

No more mind games; students have to learn the material.

Countering the Charge

"Average," "above average," and "below average" are norm references, but in today's successful classrooms, we claim to be standards- (outcomes-) based. This means that assessments and grading are evidentiary, criterion-referenced. A teacher declares Toby is above average, but we're not interested in that because it provides testimony of Toby's proficiencies only in relation to others' performance, which may be high or low, depending on the group. Instead, we want to know if Toby can write an expository essay, stretch correctly before running a long distance, classify cephalopods, and interpret graphs accurately. We don't need to know how well he's doing in relation to classmates nearly so much as how he's doing in relation to his own progress and to societal standards declared for this grade level and subject.

We can't make specific instructional decisions, provide descriptive feedback, or document progress without being criterion-referenced. Declarations of average-ness muddle our thinking and create a false sense of reporting against standards. We need grade reports to be accurate. Distorting Averaging's Intention

One of the reasons we developed averaging in statistics was to limit the influence of any one sample error on experimental design. Let's see how that works in the classroom.

Consider a student taking a test on a particular topic and in a particular format. The student ate breakfast, or he did not. He slept well, or he did not. His parents are divorcing, or they are not. He has a girlfriend, or he does not. He studied for this test, or he did not. He is competing in a high-stakes drama/music/sports competition later this afternoon, or he is not. Whatever the combination, all these factors conspire to create this student's specific performance on this test on this day at this time of day.

Three weeks later, we give students another test about new material in our unit. Have students changed during three week? Yes, hormonally, if nothing else. Add that the second test is on a different topic and perhaps in a different format. On the first test date, the student ate well, but didn't study. He slept well, but his parents are arguing each night. The drama/music/sports performance came and went and he did well in it. He didn't have a girlfriend. For the second test, however, he has a girlfriend, and he studied. He didn't sleep well, however, nor did he eat breakfast, and his parents have stopped arguing which has calmed things down at home.

The second test situation is dramatically altered. The integrity of maintaining consistent experimental design is violated. We can no longer justify averaging the score of the first test with the score of the second test just to limit the influence of any one sample error.

The Electronic Gradebook

The only reason our electronic gradebooks average grades is because someone declared it a policy-not because it was the educationally wise thing to do-so the district uses the technology that supports that decision. Why don't we choose our grading philosophy first, then find the technology to support it rather than sacrificing good grading practices because we can't figure out a way to make the technology work?

How do we do what's right when we are asked by administrators or a school board to do something that we know is educationally wrong? This is a tough situation, but I suggest we do the ethical thing in the microcosm of our own classrooms, then translate that into the language of the school or district so we can keep our jobs.

We can experiment in our own classes by reporting a subset of students' grades with and without averaging them just to see how they align with standardized testing. Sometimes running the numbers/grades ourselves helps us see with greater clarity than just hearing about ideas second-hand.

We can read articles on grading and averaging, participate in online conversations on the topic, and start conversations with faculty members. We can also volunteer to be on the committee to revise the gradebook format.

We're working with real individuals, not statistics. Our students have deeply felt hopes and worries and wonderfully bright futures. They deserve thoughtful teachers who transcend conventional practices and recognize the ethical breach in knowingly falsifying grades. Let's live up to that charge and liberate the next generation from the oppression of averaging.
Previously published in Middle Ground magazine, October 2012

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You’ve always averaged grades. Your teachers averaged grades when you were in school and it worked fine. It works fine for your students. Does it? Just as we teach our students, we don’t want to fall for Argumentum ad populum: something is true or good just because a lot of people think it’s true or good.