Culture of Inclusiveness; Schools Creating a Climate That Supports Students’ Psychological as Well as Academic Well-Being
July 24, 2017
Deborah Christie, educator since 1981
Students in collaborative learning through Bookbridge Foundation
Ellie, a 6th grader in my class, perseveres through academic tasks despite meeting failure, motivated to keep learning until she gets mastery. She is an active participant in discussion and collaboration activities, arrives early to class, asks for help, and seeks out a variety of resources. She gets B’s and C’s on her report card with the occasional D.
Raegan, Ellie’s peer, gets straight A’s, yet never contributes to discussion, has side conversations during lectures, arrives late to class 30% of the time, and has been defined as an “underachiever,” not working to her potential.
Who is the more “successful” student? If one bases their conclusion on grades, then Raegan earns that status. If the basis is on personal qualities, then it’s clear, Ellie rates higher.
As the summer winds down and students return to school, hundreds of teachers across the nation have spent their summer Sunday nights on a Twitter chat group; Teachers Going Grade-less; discussing the benefits of deemphasizing letter grades, using other means to evaluate students. Providing feedback on students’ character skills and nonacademic traits (soft skills) through progress updates, conferencing, and portfolios is a growing movement.
Social emotional learning, or soft skills, according to Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning (CASEL) is defined as, “the process through which children and adults acquire and effectively apply the knowledge, attitudes, and skills necessary to understand and manage emotions, set and achieve positive goals, feel and show empathy for others, establish and maintain positive relationships, and make responsible decisions.”
When Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) was enacted in December of 2015, the law required state’s accountability systems to broaden their definition of student success to include social emotional development. School districts have been scrambling to comply with the law ever since.
In August, Pajaro Valley Unified School District, (PVUSD) located on the Central Coast of California, will reconvene a Report Card committee to review the template that’s been in effect for two years.
I’ve seen the pendulum swing in curriculum design and implementation, but it’s been pretty consistent in how students have been evaluated. Emphasis on letter grades to evaluate students has been the modus operandi since I started working for PVUSD in 1987.
Roughly 10,000 students have come through my classroom over the course of my career. The range of personalities has been as diverse as the number of stars in the Milky Way. I’ve taught countless underachievers who have demonstrated a poor work ethic and social emotional challenges, yet received high letter grades, given their academic strengths.
Then there’s students like Emily; an emerging English speaker who always turns in her homework, has her materials ready for learning, takes on leadership opportunities, yet her grades are low, given challenges with her “second language” and lack of home support.
I ask again, “What is our criteria for success?”
“Research indicates that soft skills are important for employability consideration,” says Barton Hirsch, Professor of Human Development and Social Policy at Northwestern University. “A focus on soft skills allows schools to reframe how they think about the relationship among education, academic curriculum, and employment.”
California Office to Reform Education (CORE) consists of nine school districts in California serving roughly one million students. In 2014–15 they instituted an accountability system in which 40% of the total weight for school success is assigned to measures of social-emotional outcomes, growth mindset, self efficacy, self-management, and social awareness.
Elementary report cards in Austin, Texas, feature a matrix of “personal-development skills” that show if teachers think a student demonstrates tasks including taking responsibility for own actions and communication/collaboration skills. Social-emotional learning is included in academic instruction.
Some might argue that surveys of social-emotional competencies are relatively new, were not designed for cross-school comparison, and may be particularly vulnerable to reference bias, because students are not always the best judges of their own level of competence, according to The Learning Policy Institute (LPI), an educational research organization.
“These measures are not currently appropriate for accountability systems at the state or federal levels, although they might be used locally,” says LPI. “There is a fear that the absence of quantifiable grades will reduce student motivation.”
While that may be the case, research suggests that social emotional learning and a positive school climate are the foundation for students’ academic and later-life success.
“Multiple longitudinal studies have demonstrated that non-cognitive competencies in children as young as preschool age are important predictors of outcomes in their lives as adults, including high school and college completion, employability, earnings, financial stability, avoidance of criminality, and physical and mental health,” according to Transforming Education, an organization that informs educational policy. “Data show that non-cognitive skills matter as much as or even more than cognitive or academic skills in predicting positive life outcomes.”
“With letter grades, my daughter understands what each letter means and about what percentage she got,” said John Rodriquez, father of one of my 6th grade students. “Letter grades have been around for so long that our family knows what each letter means and what she has to do to get better grades.”
While it is true that letter grades makes it easy for parents to identify the general quality of their children’s classroom efforts, new evidence demonstrates that quantifying a student’s success based solely on academic skills can be harmful.
Ruth Butler, Professor of Educational Psychology, examined 800 meta-studies showing three types of student feedback: scores alone, comments alone, and scores with comments. Her study showed that scores alone made students either complacent or unmotivated depending on how well they did. Scores with comments were just as ineffective in that students focused entirely on the score and ignored the comments. Students who received comments alone demonstrated the most improvement.
Letter grades did not gain widespread popularity until the 1940s. Even as late as 1971, only 67% of primary and secondary schools in the United States used letter grades according to the National Education Association.
By teaching students how to accurately self-assess based on clear criteria, teachers empower them to become “self-regulated learners” able to monitor, regulate, and guide their own learning.
“Soft skills are far too important for the education reform effort associated with them to suffer the fad-like fate of far too many education reforms of the past,” said Russ Whitehurst, a Senior Fellow in the Center on Children and Families in the Economic Studies program at the Brookings Institution.
The Knowledge is Power Program (KIPP) charter network’s “character-growth card” that provides regular feedback to parents on student traits like zest, grit, and curiosity.