The Final Verdict on Being Grade-Less

Thanks to the support of Heather and the 8,000 members of the Teachers Throwing Out Grades Facebook group, I saw this 'grade-less' experiment through to the end. My hope was that students would focus on learning instead of numerical scores.

And I was right.

In my GMC student's evaluations of my course, they all focused on what they had learned and how much they had learned. There was no mention of their grades or my policies.

Did it help that they were invested in the content of the course, on how technology and social media impacts their lives, goals, attentions, and relationships? Yes, I'm fairly certain that it did. But their comments on the course reinforce the idea that my feedback on their writing without judgement is more important than the judgement. I asked them to revise that paper no less than four times.

I asked them to write in response to the readings I assigned. We wrote together in class, every class. We started with free writing, not to be shared or read by others. I gave them focused free writes in class, responding to the readings and videos we watched. I wrote with them as my belief that teachers who write with their students reinforce the importance of informal writing and the idea that we are all in this journey together. From these writings we learned not only about each other and how we each see the world, but we also learned about each other's strengths as writers. This constant writing, sometimes taking up a majority of the class time, was not overbearing to them. In fact, they viewed the writing as valuable to their thinking and to their progress as developing writers. The free writing, which might be viewed as a frivolous activity that wastes precious class time that should be devoted to covering content, was the chance for them to get whatever was occupying their brains before class out of their minds so that they could focus on our content. None of this in class writing was collected or graded, a new concept for many students. I wanted them to equate writing with thinking and I believe that this was conveyed repeatedly throughout the course.

I will continue to be grade-less. I believe in it's power to transform student focus onto their learning, rather than their grades.