Dialogue #2: Accountability and Mastery-Based Grading

These past few weeks have been extremely eye opening, especially after teaching my first lesson. I struggled a lot this week in terms of planning and implementation of lessons. A couple of weeks ago, we talked a lot about teaching students life skills. Mainly, holding students accountable for their actions.

“If you're not teaching them that they need to be aware of their own actions, responsible for them, and trying - they don't have to be succeeding, mind you, but just TRYING - to fix what they're doing wrong, then NOBODY WILL CARE OR HELP THEM. That's the truth” (Low). 

My experience with this age group is that they’re transitioning from child to adolescent; they have yet to realize that their actions have consequences. I have always cut the students some slack because in my mind, they are still learning to be adults, which takes time. I do a lot of handholding and our conversations have made me realize that I’m just enabling them, and that enabling ultimately hinders their development. Because of this, I really wanted to emphasize a strict deadline for assignments while creating lesson plans. I had to set aside my desire to be liked by students and consider what they needed; regardless of whether it was something they wanted. But how do I hold students accountable for basic, life skills such as labeling assignments correctly and turning them in on time without giving them constant failing grades? Should content understanding outweigh the ability to follow directions? Obviously not, but how do you make it count?

It’s fine to be a bit lenient in your first year – it’s hard not to be.  Everyone who commits to the profession, with few exceptions, tends to do so because they’re fond of kids; otherwise, there are few reasons to pursue the career.  I find the mastery-based grading strategy of separating assignments into “practice” and “performance” assignments a useful strategy.  Our school mandates a 70/30 percentage point weight category for practice and performance assignments, and for me, that’s a perfect split for 9^th grade. 

In the few cases where you have a student who grasps concepts quickly and can perform when pushed, but has terrible behavioral issues that impede him from succeeding on assignments that require organizational skills, he will be ABLE to pass.  In the meantime, the 30% of the assignments that he scores badly on due to an inability to organize, unwillingness to work outside the room, or even life situations that prevent success or work at home will allow you to underscore an important point: he COULD be an incredible success, an A+ student, if he only figured out how to handle his business. 

The key is to provide practical steps to success whenever you have the conversation with him.  If the issue is situational, try something like “Okay, so the house is too loud and chaotic for you to work in; what about staying after every day to finish work before you go home?”  If he has work obligations, or must look after younger siblings, and can’t stay, can he come early?  How about working during lunch? 

If it’s merely organizational, help him develop some strategies: “Mr. X, have you written down your assignment?  Write it down in every class, and check it first thing when you get home!  Come by my room before you head home and we’ll check in about every class assignment you have to make sure you don’t forget anything tonight.” 

Motivational issues can be the toughest.  A lot of this can depend on the student’s progress developmentally, which has a lot of confounding environmental factors.  One of the most persuasive, however, for teens, tends to be peer group, which comes back to establishing a classroom culture in which students are not just passively aware of a teacher’s expectations, but ACTIVE participants in enforcing academic and behavioral expectations: 

“Guys, if you’re laughing when X is goofing off, I want you to understand what you’re doing.  He’s performing for YOU – to get your attention.  By giving it to him, you’re encouraging him, and that means he’s even less likely to pay attention to class.  In other words, you’re STABBING HIM IN THE BACK.  Your future DEPENDS on how well you do in school – without actively trying your best in all your classes, your chances – of having a decent job, a house, a family, a future – are slim to none.  You all need to work together to get to where you want to be.  If someone’s goofing off, do the HARD thing – the thing that actually HELPS, and shows you CARE – tell them to quiet down and get focused.”

Classroom culture is, of course, the big picture, and requires a lot of day-to-day enforcement and reinforcement.  Personal motivation matters, too.  I have a reputation as an ogre with the kids, but it means when I pull aside a student who has motivational issues I have a productive angle I can work:

“Hey.  I know you’re not used to thinking of yourself as one of the ‘good kids,’ but I want to be clear about what I see in you.  How’d you do on that last paper?  Did you know that put you in the top 10 scores in the ROOM – not to mention in the top 10% of the 9^th grade class?  The only reason you’re getting a C- right now has nothing to do with your ability – you just don’t handle your day-to-day BUSINESS.  Here’s the thing – right now, you know you’re smart, and your teachers, since this is a small enough school, know it too.”

“But on paper, you’re not – and when it comes to getting into college, that’s all anyone’s going to see – a string of mediocre and lousy grades.  You may NOT be stupid, but you’re making yourself LOOK stupid, and that’s a shame.  The worst part of it is, there are kids in there who are working their butts off to get a grade you manage to pull off without even TRYING, and it’s an insult to them that you’re not doing more with what you’ve got.” 

“Finally, and I have to be honest with you, it’s embarrassing.  If you’re not embarrassed, you SHOULD be – you’re getting a lousy grade for the worst reason there is: pure, stupid, laziness.  The world doesn’t belong to the smart kids – it belongs to the ones who are willing to work, and work harder than anyone else.  You don’t have to be that committed, but at the very least you shouldn’t be letting yourself be so lazy that you don’t cover the basics.” 

“I’ll help you get a handle on this if you’d like – I’ll work with you on some strategies you can use to help yourself succeed.  Nothing complicated, just basic, straightforward stuff: writing down assignments, DOING them before you do other stuff, turning off distractions while you’re working, even coming in to work in my room if you’re having trouble pushing yourself at home.  All I want from you is to TRY – to make an effort so you don’t end up looking like less than you ARE – or less than you COULD BE.”

Phew.  Hope that long speech is helpful; I’ve given these so many times that in many ways they’re pre-programmed, locked and loaded, and ready to fire at any given moment if necessary.  I hope that reading the script might provide some sort of base template to work your own approach out.  The keys are, as I said in our first exchange, identifying the problem directly and honestly, pointing out why it's getting in the way, and giving some direct steps to remedy the issue.  The magic fifth element is motivation - that partly comes from the relationship you build with your students.  

It’s critical to remember that if anything I do seems useful or like a productive strategy, that DOESN’T mean you have to – or even CAN – do it the same way.  Teaching may be a practical craft in addition to an art, but it’s a craft that (to use the cooking metaphor again) includes a vast array of different approaches and techniques.  A tasty meal (capable and academically independent students) can come out of any of thousands of different ingredients arranged in COUNTLESS ways – I have NO DOUBT your natural kindness and organized approach will be excellent tools that lead to some incredible results in your own classroom.  I’ve been struggling, this week, with MY mission as your mentor – I need to help you find YOUR strengths, then encourage you to develop them into the mainstays of your practice.

The flip side students – those who perform assignments on-time, have behavioral skills that are automatic, but have difficulty performing academically – are also served by mastery grading, as long as you use a structure that can benefit them.  Consider Ms. T from our class – even though she struggles with basic essay structure, grammar, and even the ideas and thought-process that underpin a writing assignment, she had the ability to revise based on comments.  That chance – to use her behavioral skills to make up for an inability to perform – let her refine and revise her work until it scored fairly well, rewarding her behavioral skills while at the same time developing and refining her academic ones.

Again, I think the trick to the balance between practice and performance, behavioral and academic success, really comes down to a question of HOW, not WHAT.  It’s not about overall class focus, it’s about how you build the reward for both sets of skills into 1) the grading system, 2) your classroom culture, and 3) your personal interactions with students.  If you’re implementing rewards and consequences for both kinds of success in all three areas, making sure to take into account individual student needs (this one needs to be praised to get motivated to behave; that one needs the occasional performance assignment that allows for multiple revisions to build academic performance), you can make the grades come out balanced for ALL your kids.

Not to say it’s easy – it takes time and will never be perfect.  You will know when you look at your gradebook averages, though, whether you’re doing your job – you’ll immediately see which kids have averages that seem FAR too low or high, and that will provide you with a good sense of next steps.  The key is to keep a close eye on grades and use them to modify your instruction – let’s do some work on that this coming week!