The Ungraded Classroom: Where Meaning Replaces Measurement

Well, welcome, Arthur. Thank you so much for joining me today.

You’re so welcome. Thanks for inviting me, Susan.

Absolutely. So for those who may not be familiar, although I’m not sure how they’re not familiar because we’ve had a, this has been a lot of buzz about this. Could you start just by telling us a little bit about yourself and your journey into education and rethinking traditional grading?

Yeah, I mean, I’ve had quite the journey. I I started out in alternative education. And I think one of the things that I noticed immediately, and I’m glad this came to me early in my career, is that grades are not always reflective of whether or not students understand the material. A lot of times it’s reflective of something else. And so there was, I think in a lot of my students’ lives, there was a lot of turbulence a lot of navigating through many challenges that didn’t have a lot to do with school at all. And so whether or not they were able to succeed on the assessments that I was giving them really was more of a reflection of what was going on in their lives.

And so I think having that realization, I believe we’re going to be talking a little bit about standards-based grading. I got introduced to standards-based grading around that time and the work of Ken O’Connor in particular.

And just seeing all the ways that grades can actually do sort of injustice to what students know and also just sort of motivating them, you know, because it is a mode of communication and it has consequences on whether or not students are going to have that motivation to persevere. so that really opened my eyes in a lot of ways that up to that point, which was really only about two years before I encountered some of thinking. You know, I’d been grading a lot of things other than whether or not students knew or understood or were able to do the things that I was asking them to do. So after that, I mean, I think, you know, that that definitely a light bulb came on at that point.

I think as time went on, I transitioned to primarily mathematics. Our alternative school shut down. I ended up going to the mainstream school and our grade book, you know, kind of needed to look a little bit more traditional at that point. And so I put, I offloaded a lot of that kind of like self-assessment, tracking of one’s progress with regard to certain objectives on the student, which I totally still think is an amazingly great idea. Whenever you can put that off on students and get them reflecting on their understanding is great because we shouldn’t monopolize that.

I then transitioned back into my major which was English and for any of you who English teachers, no offense to any of the other subject areas, but we have the most to assess. You want them writing a lot. It’s like the Malcolm Gladwell, 10,000 hours. You just want them writing a lot. That’s how you become a good writer. And it just kind of pushed me to the breaking point. And standards-based grading actually made things worse. Because if you know anything about standards-based grading, it’s about multiple opportunities.

And you’re not just getting into that grade book one time, you’re getting into that grade book multiple times and potentially changing grades to reflect the new level of understanding. And I may not have been totally expert at standards-based grading. I will admit that. But I got to a point where it was just like, don’t want to put a grade on everything. I just don’t want to put a grade on everything. And it was quite simply for that somewhat selfish reason.

I think what I came to find out is that it wasn’t really good for the students either. It wasn’t good for me and it wasn’t good for the students. And there are a lot of reasons that I kind of came to understand over time. But I think initially it was just like, can’t keep being a teacher if I’m going to have to keep this up.

Yeah. So you went on to found the Grow Beyond Grades. And I love this site. You share such good insights over here. And there’s a huge global movement that’s about grading less. I think there’s also, there’s some nuance there that you bring into your site that’s not just about grading less. It’s also about maybe not grading at all and looking at grades a different way. Talk a little bit about your philosophy of grading now. Now that you’ve had so many different perspectives and you’ve founded this movement, what does this mean to grow beyond grades?

Well, in the the 2000 teens, I did a fair amount of blogging and I think initially I was blogging about standards based grading and then, you know, and not getting a lot of readers necessarily. I wrote this piece called Teachers Going Gradeless and it just exploded. Like everyone was wanting to hear this and wasn’t even necessarily, you know, like I wasn’t the first person to ever think about this, but something about that piece really struck a nerve with people. So we created a book or a group by the same name, teachers going grade-less. And I think implicit in that name is the idea that so much happens outside of grades that grades just doesn’t do a good job of reflecting or accommodating or encouraging.

I think as time went on, one of the ways to track the changing of my thinking was the fact that as I started to not like that name, teachers going gradeless, like why is it that we are, what is it that we stand for? mean, so it’s not that we’re just against grades. What is it that we want in lieu of a graded

Mill you.

That had always been I think the core of my thinking which was when it comes to writing for example, I don’t want to just focus on that thin sliver of measurables that you can actually identify about writing. I want to open it up to a much larger conversation. Another thing that I think a lot of people talk about in standards-based grading is that very clear learning trajectory.

I don’t know if I necessarily want a strict, narrow learning trajectory. I want more. And so I was kind of beginning to kind chafe within this idea of grade less, you know, just like less. And now we have ungrading, you know, it’s like, it’s always like the negative of something when in fact, it’s like, we want more grades is the thing that wants some that wants it to be less grades is the thing that wants to narrow what teaching and learning is.

it’s always trying to narrow it, narrow our vision as to what counts. And so that’s when I started moving this idea of grow beyond grades. And it’s not like it was disconnected from what we were talking about before. In fact, I mean, I think you find many of the same kind of sentiments being expressed in that era of our site. But I think it just clarifies more that I think most educators understand that there’s so much more that we want to do with our students and grades just does not accommodate what it is that we’re that we were intending to do.

Yeah, now you keep talking about standards-based grading and I’m a veteran of standards-based grading as well, but for those educators who might be listening and are not familiar with standards-based grading, I do know that there are some still out there. Can you give just a brief overview of what that means compared to traditional grading and then give us some pluses and minuses to that? What are some strengths and limitations and how can we grow beyond?

Yeah, I mean, so I think that there are some wonderful strengths and I think that in a lot of ways, standards based grading really revolutionized what it is that we do in school. I mean, it was just idiosyncratic. People are like assigning points for turning in whatever, bringing tissues to class or, you know, there’s all these kinds of things. it’s so what standards based grading did was let’s let’s actually identify those clear learning goals. Let’s make sure that we’re set grading out anything that would fall under the category of behavior or anything else that’s not academic and let’s focus entirely on academic performance. Also as part of that, there’s, mean, just like close on the heels of those ideas is the idea of retakes and revisions. Because one of the kind of behaviors that kind of insinuates its way into the grade is that did you learn it fast, you know and that can’t find its way into the grade either. And so you want to find ways of allowing students to learn the material at the pace that they learn it within reason, of course, you know, it can’t take three years to complete 10th grade or whatever, but I think we can accommodate quite a bit of the pacing in terms of students acquisition of the skills and knowledge that they need.

So that’s a huge strength. And I think that K-12 at least, know, ungrading is a little bit more like higher ed. If you look at the people who of like pioneer that, although I’m in a book called Ungrading, ungrading is really comes out of like contract based grading. Peter Albaugh, Daniel Witts, and some of the people at the higher level talking about portfolios and just like contracts that get kind of worked out.

out at the beginning of a grading term. Most of us grade list people are coming out of standards based grading. So we’re K-12, we have that in our background.

I think the thing that many of us found is that students still chase the four. So we’re frequently using, we went away from the 100 point scale, which is totally mathematically indefensible. So that’s great. But I mean, students are still chasing that four instead of engaging deeply. And they’re freaking out about it if they got a 3.3 or 3.5 or whatever else. And it’s just like guys, especially of a standards-based grading, you should not be getting a four in September. You should actually be scoring sort of lower if anything and then we build to that point where you’re able to demonstrate that at an exemplary level.

But regardless, it’s like the feedback gets overshadowed by that score. And I think one of the biggest things that we tend to use, or at least that I tended to use in my time as a standards-based grader was rubrics and come to find out that, you know, there’s these studies. Lots of people have studied this. think probably the one who’s most well-known is Ruth Butler, studied this three types of feedback. So scores alone, comments alone, scores combined with comments and you would think that scores combined with comments would be the richest form of feedback. You you get the best of both worlds. Turns out of the three types of feedback, only one actually reliably causes students to improve, and it’s feedback alone. And that scores alone don’t produce improvement and actually scores and comments don’t produce improvement. And that has been shown time and time again. And Ruth Butler has some ideas about that. She coins this idea of ego involved feedback versus task involved feedback. The numbers always involve the ego. And so it shuts down that ability to really be able to process.

What is that fee? How can I improve? I see this, I did a lot of work with Michigan State University College of Education with my interns. I mean, we had this stupid instrument that we had to use with them where it was a four point scale. And these people, and I think they came of age kind of during the standards based era, younger than me.

And then like I’m, putting the score on it and it’s just becomes like a, just a hugely contentious issue. And it’s like, seriously guys, there is no way you’re going to be an exemplary teacher right now. I’m not even exemplary in all these areas. There is absolutely no way you’re going to be distinguished.

And that needs to be okay. And for some reason, it’s just not no matter how much you talk about it. It’s just not and it never will be.

Yeah, so that leads me to my follow-up and kind of what’s pinging in my head is as I’m listening to you and learning so much, I mean, I have a junior in high school right now. is, everything is all about that 4.0, 4.0, 4.0, right? And if it’s anything less than that, that’s not acceptable for her. what you’re saying is totally resonating with me. So what I’m curious about is how do we,

get around this, if that’s never gonna go away, right? If that’s who we are and wired as humans, how do we then promote a healthier, and more all-encompassing feedback model for our students that also incorporates assessment? Because the reality is we do need to measure where our students are falling. So what are some ways, are your thoughts about that first of all and then what are some ways, some practical ways that we can start to implement?

Yeah, I mean, there is an aspect, I have to say there is an aspect that you got to just pull the bandaid off. I mean, if you leave grades in there in any in any capacity, you’re going to the center of gravity is just going to go to those graded assignments, you know, so I mean, it’s just going to it’s going to take whatever those assignments that you’re choosing not to grade and it’s going to make them. Worthless.

And it’s good. And then you’re going to have like all this intensity that’s going to be devoted on whatever assignments are left. And so, you know, I do think there’s some need for being, you know, as wise as serpent and gentle as doves in this, where you you really do have to know your community and you need to be able to communicate them with them what you’re doing.

I did just pull the band-aid off and all other people who I think had traveled that path before me also said the same thing. You really do need to in August or September get that letter ready and tell everyone that you’re going to go grade-less this year. know, I mean it’s just we’re not going to have a grade until you know the marking period. We’re going to have a conference at that point.

So I do really think that it’s situated. It depends on your environment and I know that doesn’t always feel satisfying in terms of an answer to your question. I think in part the reason that doesn’t feel satisfying is that I think the whole standards-based era, which was also part of the kind of like high stakes testing era, was kind of happening around the same time that all those both of those things came to be really demanded kind of a standardized approach. And so I think ungrading or grade-less comes on the scene and it’s saying, well there isn’t necessarily one way to do this. You are going to have, I mean it’s all about dialogue first of all, so we’re inviting students in that dialogue about, of assessment.

Interestingly, it’s also about dialogue with your larger community as to what it is that they’re going to be comfortable with and what is going to be meaningful to them. I think with me, I had a fair number of professionals that I thought would maybe take issue with what I was doing. I think in the community that I served at the time.

I think someone that I leaned on kind of heavily at that time in terms of some of the rationale behind it was Daniel Pink with his idea, someone who’s sort of in that business world who’s like, guys, this is messed up. This not only…

This not only doesn’t help the kind of creative entrepreneurial collaborative work that we need to be doing in the 21st century, it actually actively damages it.

to the point where you are going to have, you know, I mean he has these wonderful little studies that he takes where it’s like, you know, if you give a person a reward or promise a person a reward for doing one of these creative kind of tasks quickly, they do worse than people who were not promised a reward. Now you can get them to stack boxes really quick, but that’s not what’s being, that’s not what the, world demands anymore. So I found that I got a lot of mileage out of that tack. And I think that everyone needs to take that tack. And I think we’ve been, I think that muscle may have atrophied that you need to be in dialogue with your community because we’ve always just been like, this is what we’re doing and roll it out to everyone. And that’s how it’s going to be. That’s.

I still feel like that’s not entirely a satisfying answer to your question.

I understand, like I get it because everything about this is a little uncomfortable if we’re quite honest right because let’s be real all of us have a grade book that we’re supposed to turn in right so how does this in practical terms how do we how do we do that how do we give those grades if we’re not if we’re going grade-less

Yeah. And the theory behind it, the one that makes me, allows me to sleep at night is, is, from Sergio Vanni. don’t know if you ever read any of his stuff, but he’s kind of educational philosopher. and his idea of building in canvas, it’s something that happened in world war two where apparently the allies hadn’t masked their tanks yet. So they put a bunch of these inflatable canvas tanks on the, on the front lines. And then like the spy planes went over and they were like, my gosh, they have so many tanks.

The idea that he kind of takes from that is this idea that you need to reflect a certain amount of competence to that outside audience who doesn’t care what the heck it is you’re interested in doing. So my grade book, and it was a traditional grade book actually at first. I didn’t have a standards-based grade book. I did kind of standards-based a little bit in a traditional grade book for a while can’t have a grade book where people go in and be like, what the heck is happening here? I need to have a grade book that actually looks a little bit like a grade book. What I would do to buy myself some time in order to be able to do what counts for learning in the classroom is I would have them choose a preliminary grade that I would put as the final grade and it’s just hanging out there. Then I would no count every single thing that got put in the grade book and it would be a one or a zero. I mean it was binary. had an unusually zero meant that it hadn’t been turned in. Over time, I mean if they had too many zeros because they weren’t turning anything in,

I might change that final letter grade to an I, which is kind of an old school technique from standards-based grading days, is, you know, that’s a pretty good reflection of what’s happening. It’s not that you’re doing poorly. It’s that it’s incomplete. And I did a lot of communication around that.

On top of that, had a portfolio platform that I was using, so I was using Seesaw.

And the cool thing is that as Skyward is what we were using for our gradebook became so information poor, aside from whether or not you’re doing the assignment, I was able to of like coax people over to the portfolio. And the portfolio is so cool. Like you get to see the stuff that’s happening in the classroom. And so I bought some time to be able to have this like persuasive conversation about how cool it is what’s happening over here where students are posting artifacts and evidence that they’re learning and they’re reflecting on that and actually they can comment on one another’s work as well and actually I invited caregivers and parents to comment on things if they wanted to. They didn’t take me up on that very often. But you know that’s that’s kind of like this rich world that is emerging now.

I think one of the biggest push backs that we have is that colleges can’t process all this narrative stuff. How are you going to turn in a transcript that has all that? Well, as of a year ago, we now have AI and probably can process all of that. There are some ethical concerns associated with that.

We don’t just need numbers anymore. And that information has never really been enough to decide whether or not a student is gonna be a good fit for wherever it is they’re heading and vice versa.

Yeah. Yeah. Well, and I think to your point, we’re moving away from compliance where it’s not a compliance-based world anymore. And so having a system in place that requires compliance is kind of silly if at the very minimum, at the worst, as you pointed out and Dan Pink shares that, you know, it’s doing harm. So being able to adjust the model, I think is, is so important, it’s going to require, I think, a lot of folks to rethink our systems and rethink what that means and where we’re spending our time. I think what’s most interesting about your work, Arthur, is that it’s not just about the grades. It’s about the whole system and where we’re spending our time, where we’re spending our focus, how we’re teaching content. It all comes into play when it comes to what we’re looking at in terms of student learning, true student learning and feedback. So before we head out, I think I learned so much by stories. So I would love for you to share if there’s one story that shares a great experience that you’ve had of the real impact of kind of going grade-less. Can you share a story with us?

Absolutely. Yeah, for sure. You know, I mean, I can think of so many different stories. I think about actually another big influence of my thinking on this being around my own children and seeing them be homeschooled by my wife and in part, know, we really just wanted them to be, we had some of our kids were really kind of advanced, guess, advanced and really be able to kind of power through things, didn’t want them to experience this sort of like… median pace, you know, that everyone kind of gets forced on everyone. And then I think also we had students, had children who, a child in particular, who had, you know, something going on with reading where that, that like took a while, I think, for, for them to get to point where they were able to kind of like read with fluency and confidence. And I think like, there was no grades happening. mean, was like that, that we just would be like, we’re going to hang with you until you learn it. And I think so that personal example really, I think began to kind of bleed into my work as a teacher in schools of just like, why, why not? Why not? Why can’t we have that somehow reflected here? What are these sort of arbitrary, you know, kind of markers that we expect kids to get to at a certain time. I mean, as I looked more into dyslexia is really kind of the reason that was behind one of my children’s struggles is that.

Like a lot of this sort of thing kind of gets worked out in and of itself. it may be something that only kind of gets worked out like around age 12 or age 13 or something like that. And I think just seeing that so close to home really inspired me to think differently about, you know, kind of the education that we force on our students. So that’s kind of a really personal example. I’m currently in Vermont where proficiency-based grading, which is basically, you know, as far as I can tell, I’m in for standards-based grading, is the law of the land. And, you know, one of the things that we’ve all have been doing kind of alongside of that is what we call the personalized learning plan. It has a portfolio associated with it.

And I have had just such a great time being able to see students self-reporting and self-assessing what are those most meaningful things that they’re doing in their lives. And I know that prior to us having this, I didn’t have a whole lot of sense of what those things were. I knew what they were doing in all the required classes. But when my seniors graduate, and I had three of them in my advisory graduate are graduating this year. Just to be able to see what are those things that are sticking some of them happen to be in the academic area some of them happen to be in an area outside of school. I’m in such a better position to actually connect them up with opportunities as an advisor and to encourage them and to recognize them. You know, I think the thing is, that with with giving a kid, you know, a rubric score or whatever it is in terms of assessment, that’s not recognizing them. That’s that’s that’s some kind of transaction. It’s it’s acknowledging something.

But I think there’s this thing called recognizing someone. And that’s what I’ve had the opportunity to experience with these portfolios. What is it that’s important to you? What is the learning that you’re doing?

And if I can recognize that, then and only then am I in a position to have a dialogue with you about what might be next, what are some of those opportunities that are out there that I actually might know more about and that I might be able to connect you up with. I think prior to really bringing that online here at our school, I didn’t have a very good sense. And I’m an administrator now, so.

I find that very, very valuable to have that kind self-reported aspect.

Yeah, well, and at the end of the day, you are seeing them as humans and with all the flaws and the challenges and the successes that come with it. So I think I’ve learned so much from you just in this short period of time. I would love to know how can our audience stay connected with you and continue to learn from you.

Yeah, we are at growbeyondgrades.org. Blue sky and LinkedIn are kind the only places that I go anymore, RIP Twitter.

We do have podcasts. They’re not done a lot, you know, like very frequently right now, but we’ll have some episodes coming out soon. We do have a newsletter that also doesn’t come out all that frequently, especially during the school year. But right now we’re working on a book, actually. We’re trying to put together some, we’re bringing together some of our contributors asking them to either revisit some of the pieces that they’ve worked on in the past or write entirely new ones. So we’re super excited about that and are looking forward to, we’ll be putting out some more information about that. There’s also a contest that’s going on if you, if there are any teachers out there who have students who have any experience, you know, learning with grades or without grades, we would love to hear from them. So there are some prizes and also they might be considered for inclusion in that book. So yeah.

Fantastic. Well, we will link to all of that in the show notes to make sure that everybody stays in touch and has access to all of the good stuff that you share. Arthur, thank you so much for your time today and for sharing with us this, I think, revolutionary. I’m going to use the word revolutionary. I think it’s a good term for what you were doing here with grades and moving us forward in the 21st century. So thank you.

You are so welcome. Thanks for having me, Susan.