““…The traditional view is of a teacher as gatekeeper, sorting out students, not letting them to a diploma without the proper amount of effort to make it through the gate.
This does 2 things which are undesirable. First, it sets up teachers to be in an adversarial position against students, which often sets students up to feel that they have to be opposed to learning as well as the teacher. And second, it makes failure a terrible, terrible thing. I would argue that failure actually is a critical ingredient in learning (as Edison would attest).
The gardener approach flips that around, where the teacher is on the same side as the student, helping them attain measurable standards of learning, and letting students gauge their growth themselves. The student drives the data collection and assessment, looking at their learning against those standards and determining 1) how much further they have to go, and 2) how they are going to get there. The teacher encourages and facilitates learning.
The way to be a gardener instead of a gatekeeper is to ditch grading, which is teacher-centric, arbitrary, and set up for comparisons against other students for the purpose of ranking (and rejecting). In its place is to use standards-based reporting, where the standard of learning is objective and measurable, and students are not comparing themselves against anyone else but the standard….”
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MeTA musings: It’s not ALL about standards-based reporting…
About a month ago I had this talk with my AP Physics kids. I started by saying that if I had my way I would get rid of grades altogether because they work against real learning. This quote is great, but the whole post is worth reading.
“ Here lies a new reality in challenging system-wide change towards a more “standards-based” reporting method in our schools today: traditional grading schemes promote a “compliance” mentality and parents seem to be happy with it because they feel like they have more control. “Un-schooling” both students and parents is a natural first step, but what does this look like? As one of only two teachers in my building currently embracing standards-based reporting, I see a steep hill ahead. ”
“ Grades tend to reduce students’ interest in the learning itself. ”
A great article that’s worth revisiting every six months.
