Hot Take on Assessment

Short version: Grades are Dumb and they really ruin learning.

I decided to record a little video (click the image above to watch) to help me organize some thoughts around a few experiences I've been having this school year, as I figure out how to navigate these uncharted waters.

There are layers of privilege in the environment in which I currently get to teach. I've spent all of my career otherwise being bound by a system of inputting a certain amount of grades by a particular date and then having to place students accordingly. I've also never taught French in an environment where the L1 was Spanish, which I'm learning lends to a very different set of cognates and structural similarities that you could lean on for comprehension. It's also an after-school club, which means I have way fewer students who just simply do not want to be there (there are definitely still a few! But nowhere near as many).

There are a hundred more distinctions that are really shaping my experience here. But what I'm seeing as a result of all of those things, is that so much more organic learning is able to happen specifically because the barrier that is grading has been removed.

The fact that I don't have to grade students has allowed me to lean entirely into learning for the sake of learning. I can focus on activities that I know will keep these students engaged in the long game that is language acquisition and learning. In the past, the fact that grades were on the table (and Department Chairs reprimanding me for grading too leniently, or the school requiring a certain amount of grades input by a particular deadline), necessarily turned things into a transaction where there were winners and losers.

The overwhelming majority of US American students wind up believing that they are the losers in this scenario because they can't memorize the gender of nouns on a quiz, when I can tell you, as I currently live in Colombia and have to navigate real life daily in a new language, NOBODY CARES!

I've made a thousand "mistakes" speaking Spanish out here in these streets, and sometimes folks will get a chuckle out of it. But literally never once has someone shut down an exchange (whether it be just greeting each other in passing, or me having to take my son to the emergency room to get stitches and explaining the situation to doctors and nurses) because I couldn't make the adjectives and nouns agree in gender and number on the fly. And!!! The extent to which I now have acquired certain "accuracies" is almost entirely thanks to having had the space to make the mistake, then hearing someone reframe it, and now I know.

AND!!!!!

Zero people have given me feedback in the form of a score from 0 to 100. Real feedback is just clarification of meaning. Full stop. And in a classroom where I don't have pressure to submit grades, I get to focus on real, meaningful feedback without the threat of taking something away from them.

So, my wondering is about how much language classes, and the idea of assessment within those classes, ACTUALLY serve as more than a social sorting program that privileges a certain type of learner... In my case now, I had the freedom to just choose an activity that I felt would reflect back to me the extent to which my students have been progressing. And I did it out of curiosity and to get some feedback as to whether what I'm doing is effective, whether I can move on, etc.. It gave me a snapshot as to who is progressing at whatever pace, and it gave me an opportunity to give holistic feedback that would encourage further growth.

Anyway, I have plenty of follow-up thoughts on all of this, and I'm sure I'll be sharing them soon. Hopefully, this helps somebody (in leadership 👀) just reimagine and envision something different for ourselves and our learners!

Happy Friday, la famille,

bt