I’m guilty. Guilty
of failing students.
Oh yeah, I’ve said it many times in my teaching career, “You
earned those grades. I didn’t give them
to you.” At the time, I thought I was
right. Students did the work, I checked
the work, and assigned the grade accordingly, but I didn’t give the student a grade. In my mind, they earned the grade. Whether it was a good grade or a bad grade,
the student earned it by the quality and timeliness of the work s/he turned in.
In recent years as I have reconsidered teaching and
grading practices, I have come to realize how flawed my position I was.
I chose my grading scale.
For the most part, I used the 100% scale, which is how most of my own
school work was graded and how most of my colleagues graded. At some point, I began to use a point system,
assigning points to each assignment according to the value or weight I believed
it to be worth. Each class and each term
differed in the number of assignments and points available. I controlled this; my students did not. Their job was “to do the work.” In terms when there were many grades
available, a low grade affected a student’s average less than when there were
fewer assignments.
Like many teachers, I believed in the worth of my
assignments and in the veracity of the grades entered into my gradebook. Some earned high marks; others posted low
scores. All were an accurate picture of
a student’s performance in my class each quarter.
Hmmm. Really? What a terribly supremacist view of teaching
and grading practices! Arrogance, no
less.
Thankfully, I’ve evolved from that flawed perception to
realize that teaching and grading is not a one-size-fits-all operation.
Perhaps my grading practices were satisfactory for those
who earned passing grades, though I recognize that there is significant room
for improvement with every aspect of my grading. But looking at some student
data this week has drawn my focus to the failures.
Failing a student is relatively easy and far more common
than I once realized. Just give assignments,
take up and score the ones students turn in, and assign zeroes for those whose
papers aren’t in the stack. When the
work is of poor quality, assign poor grades. You can even ask the student multiple
times to turn in the missing assignment.
Then teach the next lesson and repeat the assignment cycle.
I have failed many of my students.
I failed to recognize their individual needs.
I failed to differentiate my teaching so each one could learn
the material most effectively.
I failed to offer an alternative assessment method to
allow each one to demonstrate the depth and breadth of his/her learning.
Instead, I grouped them all together, taught them the
same lesson at the same time in the same way, assigned them the same assessment
at the same time, and expected that each individual would achieve his maximum potential.
After all, there’s only one way to teach and to assess, and that is my way, the
teacher’s way. I trust you hear the sarcasm in my voice in that last statement. Yikes!
Therein lies the problem – we trust our own selves too
much! So much so that we assign zeroes
to those who don’t turn in the work and we assign low grades to poor work. And then blame the students for not studying
the notes we gave them, or for being unmotivated to do schoolwork, or for ….
Sadly, failure becomes a cycle, a downward spiral, often unrecoverable.
Failure damages a child’s reputation with other teachers
& administrators.
Failure damages a child’s relationship with his/her
family.
Failure damages a child’s social status with classmates
and friends.
Failure damages a child’s self-concept.
Yet, we teachers don’t just allow failure, we sometimes
cause it and perpetuate it.
OUCH! That’s a
strong statement and one that is difficult for a teacher to swallow.
I, along with many teachers, deeply care about students and
try repeatedly, often unsuccessfully, sometimes successfully, to change the
course of a students’ performance. I
also know that sometimes we give up the fight, for our efforts seem fruitless
or the year comes to an end and the student moves on.
I generally believe that students who come to my class
desire to succeed. They may not express
that desire in the same ways as some of their high-achieving classmates do, but
deep inside they want to please their teachers and to succeed in school.
Some students fear failure. A common mindset these students adopt is that
it is easier to look lazy by not doing the work than it is to look dumb by
doing the work incorrectly.
Some students lack relationships. Connecting with students individually opens
the door to better understand their behaviors.
What makes this student tick?
What interests does s/he have that I can link to our coursework to stimulate
his motivation to learn? How does this student react to feedback?
Of course, there are many things we can to do build
better relationships with our students, to get inside their hearts and minds to
better understand their motivation (or lack of), to increase their academic
skills, to teach better and to assess better.
For now, we need to take a critical look at how we assess
our students. Are we using a
one-size-fits-all, my way or the highway, assessment protocol? How valid and reliable are our assessments?
Are our gradebooks truly reflective of students’ performance and mastery of the
content in our courses? What are we
doing when students fail? Have we
answered the question of WHY is this student failing with a response deeper
than “he doesn’t care” or “he won’t do the work”?
If the answer doesn’t involve working individually with
the student to determine the root cause of failure, establishing a plan of
action to remedy the failure, following through, or reassessing & revising the
plan until the student has learned, we have failed the student. If we do not design instruction and assessment
in multiple ways to meet the varying needs of each student in our class, we will
fail our students. That’s our
failure. Not the student’s.
As we approach a new school year, let’s endeavor to fail
no more.
