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In this episode, I’m talking about a grading mindset shift toward a more equitable system, inspired by my conversations and coaching with school and district teams who want to pursue this.
I’m also drawing on concepts from a phenomenal book, Place-Based Learning: Connecting Inquiry, Community, and Culture by Micki Evans, Charity Marcella Moran, and Erin Sanchez. It’s shaped my understanding of common challenges in equitable grading shifts and what to do next. Why? The traditional grading system often fails to foster genuine motivation and growth among students. There’s a built-in idea that grades will be a motivating factor, rather than relying on the intrinsic motivation that’s in each student to learn. In their book, Evans, Moran, and Sanchez highlight the importance of self-assessment and self-reflection for students, arguing that when you know what you’re aiming for, you can keep working towards that goal. This approach focuses on providing specific, qualitative feedback that nurtures intrinsic motivation, much like adult learning experiences where feedback is more about progress and less about arbitrary grades. What? There are so many ways to build self-reflection into your classroom practices. The goal is to give specific, qualitative feedback to students so they know if they’re on the right track or where they may need to shift and pivot. Here are some steps educators can take: Step 1: Shift your mindset Consider how adults are often motivated by specific feedback rather than grades, and apply this insight to students. This is an important mindset shift that gets over the fear that students may not be motivated without grades. Step 2: Implement peer feedback and self-reflection strategies To help students self-reflect on their work, try new strategies that empower them by offering opportunities to gather specific feedback. For example:
Step 3: Normalize fear and failure Create a classroom culture that embraces failure as a learning tool. We want to break down the idea that there’s a right or wrong answer and school is all about being “right.” Instead, normalize “failure” and show students it’s okay to make mistakes and grow from them. One practice you can try is to have students write their failures (and how they’ve grown) on post-it notes on a board, taking time to acknowledge and celebrate them as learning opportunities. Step 4: Co-create with your students If your curriculum is not motivating and not interesting, this is all just a good idea but won’t shift things. You want to involve students in co-constructing their learning experiences. Allow them to take part in designing the curriculum and daily discussions, focusing on topics, social issues, and community matters that they care about and impact them. This type of purpose-driven inquiry empowers students and increases their investment in their education and community. Step 5: Communicate the shift to families To support the transition to equitable grading, provide families with clear communication about the benefits and rationale behind this shift. Use my freebie below to help with this! Final Tip: Remember, the key to all this is fostering an environment where students are motivated by their goals and supported through specific, meaningful feedback. Your first step may be simply incorporating a student reflection protocol into your classroom. To help you implement this, I’m sharing a draft letter to family members about shifting to equitable grading. It can be a big change and it’s important to communicate it well to students and families so they understand its importance. You can access that letter here. And, if you’re looking for more details on the ideas in this blog post, listen to episode 196 of the Time for Teachership podcast. If you’re unable to listen or you prefer to read the full episode, you can find the transcript below. Quotes:
TRANSCRIPT 0:00:03 - Lindsay Lyons Welcome to another episode of the Time for Teachership podcast. This is episode 196. Today I want to talk about a grading mindset shift and this is inspired by my conversations with school and district teams who are shifting to more of an equitable grading system. This year, and also in conjunction with all of my coaching work with these teams, I have been reading a phenomenal book and soon on the podcast. Very soon you will get to actually listen to and learn with these three authors, mickey Evans, charity Marcella Moran and Aaron Sanchez, who have written Place-Based Learning, connecting Inquiry, community and Culture. I'll link to that book in the notes on the blog post as well, but it is amazing and it is so very much informed my understanding of this kind of common challenge in equitable grading shifts that I have encountered and making sense of kind of what to do next and what are those mindset shifts. So let's dive in to this concept. So when we are thinking about equitable grading, often we encounter or play with the idea of the kind of idealized version of grading would be going gradeless. Right, if grades just weren't a thing that we had to do, it would be so great because students could just learn and we could give them feedback and they would just love learning and all the things right. That comes up when we have this fantasy kind of named and then we say, oh, but here's. The reality is that we have a fear learners are only motivated by grades and so without the grades there is no kind of motivation internally that students are going to want to learn and actually read the feedback and all the things. So here is kind of one piece of this and I recognize that I'm excluding a lot of other pieces and dynamics, but the one I really want to get right down to is that you, as an adult human being who is listening to this podcast or reading the transcript of this podcast at this moment, is that you are not purely motivated by grades, right. You live in a world now beyond, unless you're in grad school and many grad schools don't even do grades, right. You live in a world now beyond unless you're in grad school, and many grad schools don't even do grades, right. You're not just doing things for a grade, and even if you are in grad school and have grades there, I would argue that you're not just there for the grade, right. So think of adult pursuits and I like to use art here, because I think those are often easier to divorce from, kind of the academic sphere, of course. Think of whatever it is that is interesting to you and you are excited to learn about. But think about painting, knitting, learning to play an instrument, like some sort of pursuit that you have invested time to learn right and you are making progress in right. What are you motivated by? I'm going to guess you are motivated by very specific feedback. So, for example, if I'm learning to paint, I don't want my teacher or my art tutor or whatever to tell me oh, this is an A painting, this is a C painting. That's not helpful information Because, first of all, what does that even mean? And, second of all, that doesn't help me get better. I don't have a better sense of my artistic ability or where I need to go. Next, if an art tutor said to me you know what your shading needs, work here and here's how to do it better. Watch me do this right or try this technique, that is helpful. I have a focused area of feedback. I'm working just on my shading. I'm not thinking about color or balance on the page or whatever else. I'm not an art teacher, as you could probably tell. But right. There's all these other components that I'm not focused on. I'm focused on one thing. I get very specific feedback. Here's what element of my shading needs work, and I have either a model, kind of think aloud whatever instruction, a path forward for how to do it better, right? So I have narrowed specific feedback. It is qualitative, it's about this specific thing. It's not an A or a B globally, and here is how to do it better. Here's my next step. I mean, people pay for access to coaching outside of the realm of academics, right. People pay for guitar lessons, for dancing lessons. As a parent, I am like eager to pay money to someone to help me be better as a parent, right, parenting coaches are a big thing. So I think about all of these adult pursuits that we have, right, where specific feedback, specific focused feedback with a next step attached, is really what motivates us and not that external grade. Now, again, I know there's other components that I'm kind of ignoring for the purpose of this one episode, but stay with me here. When we are thinking about our classroom culture or even our broader school culture, I think pedagogy really is going to help you support this shift and an intentional kind of thought about what pedagogies we have in place and what we can expand or do more of or do differently. That's going to help support this idea and this intrinsic motivation that we know is in students. Right, it's in all of us as adults and we're going to try to bring it out more because, of course, we're kind of contending with the fact that school is often about grades. Parents often want their kids and caretakers often want their kids to have really good grades, right. So so, trying to acknowledge that and stay focused on this piece, we want to invite as much student reflection as possible as possible. So, in their book, evans, moran and Sanchez say you are able to formatively self assess because you know what you are aiming for right, and they're talking about you, right, like adult learners who are motivated to learn some form of art or something. Right, whatever you're pursuing, you know what you want to accomplish. And so, because you know what you're aiming for, you're able to say, hey, I'm not there yet, I'm going to formatively self-assess, but if you know the end goal, then you can determine if you're there yet and where along that path you are right. Some sample strategies that they suggest in their book these are new to me, so I'm going to highlight these. Of course, there are so many self-reflection strategies I've talked about many on the podcast before but here are some cool ones that I'm excited about. They suggest a whole class tuning protocol. So this would be where one student is going to share their work, a presentation, a piece of written text, and then all of the students in the class are going to give feedback. So this could take the format of a like wonder, where students are writing on sticky notes something they like, something they wonder. This could be a fishbowl format, where students in the inner circle are kind of giving feedback to the student who is presenting and the students on the outside could kind of tap in when they're ready to share feedback, or they could take notes. I mean, there's a lot of different ways you could do this Gallery walk. I love this idea where the likes and wonders are kind of written on a back of a sticky note, so it's not visible to everyone, and then the teacher when they go to a gym class or whatever, in the previews, before the students actually collect it, the teacher is going to just check them all and, of course, take any out. I'd never even thought about this. Take any out that are not productive and, of course, teach students along the way. You know I've noticed some of these were not productive. Here's the better way to give feedback right. Of course, you can do many lessons on how to provide good feedback, but then what's super cool is when the student receives all the sticky notes about their work, all the feedback, they're going to sort it into categories, so they're still doing their own reflection. One category is I never thought of this, one category is I'll consider this, and one category is kind of I'm on the right track, like this really aligns where I thought I had to go next and so I know that I'm on the right track. And then a third option for student reflection is ongoing journaling. So this is, as the authors share, kind of a place to see potential for changes without becoming defensive, which I love, because it's hard to receive critical feedback right as adults as well as young people. So one option that they shared is not like kind of this arduous maybe it's arduous, maybe it's not, not this physical written journal where we have to collect things and just have them do what they call invisible journals or air writing, right, so they're just thinking the thing and they're kind of like writing the letters in space with their hands. Super cool, or maybe they're writing, but they do what the authors call a pre flexion they anticipate what their peers might say before they actually get the peer feedback. So, again, they're ready, they're prepared for it. They've already kind of made that analysis themselves and now it feels like it lands a little easier, it's a little easier to take in and act on and not be defensive about. Again, thinking of that category from the gallery walks option of I'm on the right track, it's aligning, I already knew that and it's affirming Right, it feels good. The authors also know that High Tech, high, has a bunch of questions to prompt students metacognition or reflection and they kind of share these four categories. So I've adapted from this. But kind of, what did you learn about yourself at the end of a project? Or kind of, as you go through a project or a unit, what did you learn about yourself? What do you want people to notice about your work? Learn about yourself, what do you want people to notice about your work? So kind of the internal right yourself, your work, your academic skill right. What processes did you go through? So again, that learning process is important, and what would you change or revise to your actual product, to the thing that you created? So I love that idea of kind of both the balance of the internal, the final product, the processes you went through, and like what you would do different next time or what you would change or revise. I think those categories are really cool and then you can play with what's the best for your students, to kind of use for specific questions if you want to get more specific than that I also have been thinking very much about. There's another teacher who I am constantly inspired by, who is always working hard to have his students have better discussions. Gabe Weaver shout out to you you are awesome, and one of the things that we were talking about with him is he's noticing, actually, that the students who are not in kind of the advanced or honors classes are more willing to be risk takers. The advanced or honors classes are more averse to failure, like they don't want to get a wrong answer, and so in student led conversations they are worried about, you know, throwing out something that their peers wouldn't like or that the teacher wouldn't approve of. I don't know, but it is a really interesting thing that I think, to the older students get, the more they find again there's a right answer, there's a wrong answer, and school is about getting the right one. And so I think it's really important that we normalize and reduce fear of failure. Right, we normalize that failure. So one of the things that I think is super cool is that Stanford has the Stanford Resilience Project, where they actually video people in the Stanford community get up and talk about how I have failed, I have done this thing, I have failed in this big way and here's what I learned from it, here's how I have grown. So just to kind of celebrate and lean into this idea of failure, you could watch some of those videos. You could have students make their own videos. You could do something like I think one of Gabe's ideas was kind of like a failure board at the back of the room and kind of having students write down how they have failed and you know, of course, how they're growing from that failure and maybe why it was like a good failure or a good risk to take on the back wall and really celebrating those post-it notes as you accumulate them I think could be really cool. Now the other thing is in addition to the class culture and the general pedagogy of kind of risk-taking and student reflection and all these things is that your instruction, your curriculum is going to support the shift as well. Because motivation is key. And if you're not motivated, like it's just not an interesting concept that you're learning about or not an interesting project that you're engaged with, it's going to be really hard. And I know there are, you know, for us high school teachers, you know we have like a hundred plus students who are engaging with our curriculum, like it's not going to be a perfect fit for everyone. So we do want to design with that lens of co-creation with our students, so students can tap into the thing that's really cool and exciting for them, and inquiry is a big part of that. Of course that's a whole bunch of other podcast episodes, but I do want to name here that in their book Evans, moran and Sanchez talk about Ron Berger's work and Berger Rugen and Woodfin talk about. They quote them actually in their book and they say motivation is in fact the most important result of student engaged assessment. Unless students find reason and inspiration to care about learning and have hope that they can improve, excellence and high achievement will remain the domain of a select group, and so what's really cool here is this is all in their chapter on revision and revision being equitable. And so when we give students feedback, when they get peer feedback, when they self-reflect and they revise as a result of that, it actually makes your classroom more equitable and that's what we're here for in this podcast and I know you all care about that. When we have students who come in getting the quote, unquote right answers and being on track with all, they're going to continue being on track with all the skills and getting the A and not taking risks right, and that's sad for them. Right, because we want them to take risks, we want them to grow to their capacity and not just kind of maintain. But then we also want the students who come in who do not have their grade level skills present at the moment right, they have been underserved by larger societal forces, by our schooling. That is often inequitable, and we want those students to be super engaged, to care about learning, to, in their words, have hope that they can improve so that they do improve. Right, they get that feedback, they apply that feedback, they're excited about the thing and they're going to grow leaps and bounds because that motivation is intact, and so when we think about what is going to make students excited, I love this book that I'm going to come back to by Ebbets, moran and Sanchez, because it is about place-based learning. It is about being in community, in where they live. They specifically have a section in the book on purpose-driven inquiry, and I want to talk about purpose-driven inquiry here because I think it really summarizes the key pieces of curriculum design and implementation that I have always loved and found most motivating to my students. I've talked before on the podcast of how I was given in my second year of teaching. Oh my gosh, there's so much I would change about my second year of teaching, but my second year of teaching I was given an opportunity to teach students an elective class, and I was given specifically the task of designing an elective class that would serve all of the students who were basically failing in their other classes, and so I was eager to do that because these are the students that I absolutely adore, and so many of them were my students with IEP. And so I was eager to do that because these are like the students that I absolutely adore, and so many of them were my students with IEPs. I was a special education teacher and I also had a few general education students who had like attendance struggles and different things, but got to design a kind of intersectional feminism course and my goodness, those students rocked it Like they did stuff that when I've taught at the college level like my college students struggled to do, it was like on par with college level work. And these are ninth through 12th graders who have historically been failing their traditional classes and you know why? It's because we were learning in a way where they got to co-construct the product. They got to co-construct the day-to-day discussions. They got to bring their brilliance and their ideas. They got to talk about things that were relevant to them. And so what the authors talk about here around purpose-driven inquiry is that when we have students ask questions or we have, you know teachers, sometimes as teachers we are getting nervous about you know the why are we learning? Learning this question or how is this relevant to my life question, like those questions don't even come up and if they do, they're super easy to answer when we design with purpose driven inquiry in mind, so let me define that for you. So Evans, moran and Sanchez define this as purpose driven inquiry is student driven, goes beyond research alone and includes interviewing, consulting experts, conducting surveys, undertaking field studies and collecting data, distinguishing between ideas and innovations that will have a positive social, ecological and political effect and those that won't. In the last point of that quote, they reference Pister and colleagues from a publication in 2023. And so I just I love so much about this. I love the idea. It reminds me a lot of YPAR or Youth Participatory Action Research. In the going beyond the research of like reading other texts and theories. It's beyond the theorizing to the local community. Right, we're interviewing, we are consulting experts in our community which, of course, also also are going to feel connected to our school, because now community members are like, oh, this is cool, kids are doing this, family members are brought into the conversation, students ultimately engage in kind of an action project at the end where we're bettering our community based on what the students and the community members think is the best way forward. And all of that is based in evidence, qualitative and quantitative, of the vast array of evidence they have at their disposal. When students are talking about social issues, they are passionate, they care, they are very much invested because this affects their day-to-day lives and, again, that co-construction of what we're focusing on and what we're doing about it is just the best motivator I have ever seen for students and, you know, for me as well as a teacher and as a learner. The other piece of this quote that I love at the end, where they talk about, right, there are some ideas that are cool but they don't actually have positive impacts on, like, society, the ecology, politics and the local kind of way we have access to power, and then there are those that do, and I've always gravitated towards the latter right. I've always gravitated towards the thing that's going to positively impact our community socially, ecologically and politically, and this quote just kind of summarizes it all up and gives it a name purpose-driven inquiry. And so this is the thing that I want us to design with. I want, of course, us to have a reflective culture where students are engaging consistently in peer and self-reflection. I want us to normalize failure and lean into it and notice that this is how we grow. But I also want us to have students that are motivated, so that it's not a struggle to kind of buy their motivation or acquire their motivation. We're just designing with a co-creation lens and we're designing around social issues leading to community engagement, interviewing, skills, interaction that leads to action. That's going to better the community because that's going to get you the motivation without the struggle right. Students are going to be more invested from the get-go if that's the curriculum. So all of this to say is that, if you are worried that learners are only motivated by grades, there's a few things we can do right. We can try developing a unit based on purpose-driven inquiry, and there's a lot we can do to support you in this, of course, reach out to me. We're going to have an episode on place-based learning and the projects you can design from those authors of this brilliant book I've cited so much in today's episode. There are other episodes on this podcast. Go back into the backlog and check those out around designing, around purpose, and the other thing you want to do is, if that feels like too large of a shift, I encourage you to start with a student reflection protocol. Use one from the episode today, use one you already use and just use it more often. Kind of release a little bit of that feedback from you yourself and invite students to give themselves and their peers some feedback and just see what that does to the dynamic of the class. For today's freebie, to support you in all of this, I am going to link to you a draft letter to family members about shifting to equitable grading. This can feel like a very big step, and part of the fear that I've seen a lot of teachers and teacher teams have at various schools that I've worked with this year is like how do we communicate this well to students and families in a way where they're not gonna be like what on earth are you doing and I don't understand this and what? That is all very understandable, and I have a template letter that will help you get started, so feel free to use it, to edit it and personalize it and then use it, and so all of that's going to be available at our blog post for today's episode lindsaybethlyonscom slash blog, slash 196. I'm so excited for you to put all of this into action. Let me know how it goes. Best of luck until next time.
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AuthorLindsay Lyons (she/her) is an educational justice coach who works with teachers and school leaders to inspire educational innovation for racial and gender justice, design curricula grounded in student voice, and build capacity for shared leadership. Lindsay taught in NYC public schools, holds a PhD in Leadership and Change, and is the founder of the educational blog and podcast, Time for Teachership. Archives
March 2025
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