Gunfight at ‘The A-E Corral’

image of Stephen Woods
Stephen Woods
Mr S Woods, Director of English

Six times every year, as an English teacher — and, therefore, a white-hat-wearing good-guy — I find myself cast as the villain in a Western film. I push through the swinging saloon doors of the classroom, and the happy chatter stalls. Twenty pairs of eyes fix on me in a small-town silence tainted with a palpable dread. The beribboned townsfolk gasp as they realise I have come among them armed not with the usual arsenal of whiteboard pens, PowerPoint presentations, and lame jokes, but with the scourge of English students everywhere: a sheaf of graded papers.

The overstatement in this tortured spaghetti-analogy is, unfortunately, mild at best. There really are gasps —  ‘he’s got our assignments’ and ‘oh, nos’  — followed by the ubiquitous ‘omigod-omigod-omigods’ when I walk around the room dispensing assessment (in)justice. The return of graded work is fraught with expectations that will be met, exceeded, or disappointed. Sometimes there are squeals of delight, at others tears, and after a few there are urgent missives from parents seeking redress. My contention here is that the anxiety felt by girls and often by their parents over grades, is understandable, but— other than in Year 12 — a possible impediment to genuine learning. Grades have a tenuous connection to learning, and can even be inimical to it. They serve a purpose, but this is tangential to the ‘exceptional scholarship’ and ‘life-wide learning’ our School aims to inculcate.

This may seem heretical coming from a teacher who spends a great deal of time grading, but there is a significant body of research and literature testifying to the problematic relationship between the allocation of grades and learning. To borrow a metaphor I picked up at a conference: the latter is a course of treatment; the former an autopsy result.  Morbid imagery aside, the distinction is clearer if we regard a grade as only one point on a continuum of feedback. In their seminal work, Inside the Black Box, Black and Wiliam (1998) posit that ‘when anyone is trying to learn, feedback about the effort has three elements: recognition of the desired goal, evidence about present position, and some understanding of a way to close the gap between the two.’ Grades may satisfy the second of these criteria, but not the third: a box with a C+ in it does little to show the way to one with a B in it. Black and Wiliam (1998) assert that ‘feedback has been shown to improve learning when it gives specific guidance on strengths and weaknesses.’  Unfortunately for those of us working, studying and parenting in systems where grades are mandated, the research suggests also that the presence of a grade alongside more useful feedback tends to nullify its positive, learning-inducing effects (Lipnevich and Smith, p. 35).

The deleterious effects of a grade sitting alongside much more useful feedback are enacted each handback day. A sizeable proportion of girls look first — and some only — at the grade on their paper. Some turn up just enough of the page to allow them to see the grade in the bottom right corner, then turn it back down with a muted grin (nobody likes a show-off), relieved satisfaction, or tight-lipped, nostril-flaring pique. This is regrettable because — unlike the ’16/20  Good Work’ of days gone by — English criteria sheets are a rich source of the kind of useful feedback that can guide a learner from their present to their desired position. The criteria are laid out in spectrums, which offer a description of their present achievement in each aspect of the task. By looking leftwards from that position, students can see a description of the next step up on this mastery spectrum. As well as these ticked dimension spectrums, girls are provided with written feedback that balances description of their achievement on that task with prescription for improvement in the next one.

The demotivating effect of a disappointing grade is readily understandable, as ‘pupils who encounter difficulties [may] attribute these to a defect in themselves about which they cannot do a great deal’ (Black & Wiliam, 1998). Equally troubling, and perhaps counter-intuitive for many, is the finding repeated in many studies that ‘receiving a satisfactory grade may prevent students from channelling their effort toward further mastery of their work’ (Lipnevich & Smith, p. 36). This finding highlights for me the key difference between the quantitative imperatives of grading and the qualitative quest for mastery.

The power exercised by grades over nascent teenage identities was underlined for me a few years ago when a student remonstrated with me over a disappointing grade. Her argument was based not on the feedback she had received, nor on the requirements of the task itself, but on her stated belief that she was, and I quote, ‘a B student’, and that she was ipso facto incapable of earning the C+ her most recent work had received. Leaving aside the fatalism of this assertion, and the implicit limitation this girl had placed on her own achievement, the notion of grade-consistency in English is illusory. The range of skills, genres, roles, and contexts that students have to write and speak in is so diverse and challenging (as it should be), that the likelihood of a student performing consistently across an entire course is low. The rhetorical skills that deliver a high grade for a persuasive speech are not those called for in an analysis of a print advertisement.

Having realised that it is unlikely that I will be changing the regulatory mandate on twice-yearly A-E reporting anytime soon, I turned to an article by Alfie Kohn (1994), who suggests that ‘while conventional grades persist, teachers and parents ought to do everything in their power to help students forget about them.’  I agree with Kohn’s assertion except for that bit about forgetting. The dismissive passivity of forgetting is not what is required. Instead, teachers and parents must help students to place a grade — good or bad — in perspective, and in a context centred around learning and improving. This is what we try to do in English, and we do it in several ways.

Following the Stalinist model, we run our (compulsory) subject as a Five Year Plan. At mass rallies, the girls are helped to understand that Years 8 to 11 have been designed with the express intention of delivering them to Year 12 — and thence to the tertiary world — with the requisite skills, habits and knowledge to perform their best in English. The message is that, although we report on an A-E scale twice yearly, all of the assessment we do is essentially formative. (Your feedback to the contrary is welcome, but I have never heard of anyone missing a scholarship, tertiary place, job, or party leadership because they scored a D+ on their Year 10 Macbeth essay.) Each year is an opportunity to build by thoughtful risk-taking, by constructive failing, and by tailored feedback, the skills that will serve them well in the summative environment of Senior. Because our English curriculum is reducible to four genres: imagining, persuading, reflecting and analysing, these are the areas to which we return again and again. This iterative approach is informed by the principle that ‘new understandings are not simply swallowed and stored in isolation; they have to be assimilated in relation to pre-existing ideas’ (Black & Wiliam, 1998). When our Year 12 girls set about writing their Persuasive Speeches in August, they will each have a bank of skills, trials, and errors to draw on that stretches back to Year 8.

This year, we have added to the Five Year Plan. To highlight the crucial role of formative assessment feedback, and to provide the girls with a powerful tool for learning, we are rolling out the My Learning database. Every time a girl gets feedback on a task, it will be uploaded to the Moodle LMS as a pdf file. As each girl progresses through the English programme, she will be able to consult the feedback she received on all the previous occasions she did something analytical or persuasive or imaginative or reflective. Our hope is that this repository of work and feedback will allow girls to do the best they can by focusing on steadily adding to and improving their performance in these key areas, long after the transitory effects of As, Bs and Cs have faded.

If our School and its broader community of students, parents, and supporters is to achieve for our girls the laudable goal of fostering life-wide learning, it is incumbent on the more mature and sagacious members of the community to help the girls — who  have so much less experience to draw on — to understand the difference between achieving a grade and learning something. In my long-gone student days, when a corkboard above one’s desk was the nearest thing we had to Facebook, I had pinned a cartoon that I still have (and that I recently learned has spawned a line of merchandise). A postgrad-aged young man sits bolt upright in bed, his eyes wide with a terrible realisation. The caption reads: ‘Rude Awakening # 457: Nobody cares what your GPA was’.

References

Black, P., & Wiliam, D. (1998). Inside the black box: Raising standards through classroom assessment. Phi Delta Kappan, 80(2), 139–149.

Hattie, J., & Timperley, H. (2007). The power of feedback. Review of Educational Research77(1), 81–112.

Kohn, A. (1994). Grading: The issue is not how but why. Educational Leadership52(2), 38–41.

Lipnevich, A., & Smith, J. (2008). Response to assessment feedback: The effects of grades, praise, and source of information. Princeton, NJ: Educational Testing Service.

 

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